The "Morality" of Gluten

The gluten-free diet is becoming increasingly popular, not only for those with with celiac disease or other obvious health problems, but even for those simply trying to optimize energy and longevity. I will comment in my next post on some of the reasons why such a diet might actually be healthy, but first I want to look at possible ideological motivations behind the diet.

Wheat, barley, and rye are the grains of Western Civilization, and there is no better way to ally oneself with the noble savages of the pre-civilized (or even modern) world than to reject the material basis of one's own society. No doubt there is also satisfaction in the diet's abstemiousness, which people tend to enjoy from time to time even though there are relatively few opportunities for it in our post-Christian culture.

Anti-civilization sentiments are often bundled in non-systematic ways and emerge subtly (or not so subtly) in movies like Avatar or Dances With Wolves, modern religions like Wicca and environmentalism, and "health food". The motive for rejecting gluten may not be explicitly ideological, yet still bound up in a system of mental binaries that ties it with the wrong set of associations. Such binary systems are essential to human thought and often conceal unexpected assumptions about the world.

Good - Bad
Moral - Immoral
Peaceful - Violent
Native - Imperialist
Victim - Oppressor
Aboriginal Culture - Western Culture
Pagan - Christian
Freedom - Slavery
Communitarian - Capitalist
Family Farms (or even Gathering) - Corporate (or Feudal) Agriculture
Raw - Cooked/Pasteurized
Unmilled - Milled
Whole - Refined
Wild Game - Cows, Chickens, and Pigs
Raw Fruits/Vegetables - Bread
Healthy - Unhealthy
Natural - Artificial

Not everyone will share the same set of binaries, but the dietary code among educated, left-leaning white people is obvious and very similar to a set of religious strictures. These dietary practices include restrictions like vegetarianism, veganism, raw foodism, and "whole" foodism, semi-ascetic practices like food combining and calorie counting, and purity standards such as organic fruits and vegetables, free-range meats, and various "fair trade" products. These eating practices not only establish one as moral, but also have advantage of distinguishing one as part of the educated class. The typical moral rejection of McDonald's has a lot to do with it being where poor people like to eat. The right dietary restrictions can allow one to be both morally correct and high status at the same time.

Gluten-free eating is only making its entrance onto this scene, but I predict it will become more and more popular. It is anti-civilization, difficult, and unlikely to become popular with the lower classes.

Of course, there ARE non-ideological reasons for avoiding gluten and many people have improved their health by avoiding it--although they may be mistaken that it is the gluten itself that is causing their health problems. I'll look at this topic in my next post.

ADDENDUM: I was thinking about the natural/artificial dichotomy, and it occurred to me that the Latin root of the word "artificial" means something like "to my make by art/skill". Of course, etymology is not always the best way to understand a word's present meaning, but it does seem striking that art and skill should be consider bad, and I can hardly imagine a more derogatory term than "artificial".

If nature is held to be benevolent and morally good, then it must be wrong for mankind to alter it with technology. No matter how many of such modifications are genuine improvements to human life, this assumption requires that "artificial" remain by default evil and "natural" by default good.

Stone Soup

Sometimes the stories we hear as children return to us with a new significance. I heard the story of Stone Soup (or Rock Soup) when I was young, but it wasn't until I was in my 20s that it occurred to me what a profound allegory it contained. For those who have never heard the story, it goes something like this:

A village is on the brink of famine, when a Charismatic Stranger appears and begins boiling a pot of water with a stone in it. When asked what he is doing, he explains that he is making an amazing new dish called stone soup that he would love to share--except that it could still use a few potatoes. It just so happens that one villager still has some potatoes and he offers them to the stranger, who then notes that the soup could probably use a few onions, too. This continues until all the villagers have contributed an ingredient to the soup and, instead of going hungry, enjoy a sumptuous feast together. They all praise the stranger and his amazing stone soup.

So in the end the villagers cooperate, share their surplus, and survive the famine--but only because of the stranger's lie. This lie, the stone, has become the unifying myth which binds the community together. Or rather, it is not the lie itself, but the universal belief in the lie. The idea of a socially useful lie was probably first discussed in Plato's Republic, but the lies themselves are as old as humanity. It is impossible to conceive of a society without a stone lying somewhere in the depths of the pot.

Yet the trouble with a useful lie is that it is still a lie. We have never heard what happens to the village after the original pot of soup is finished and the stranger has gone on his way. Doubtless the villagers begin a new pot--but if they truly believe in the stone, then gradually they may begin to omit all those unnecessary extra flavors, choosing instead to eat just the stone's own broth.

And who will they blame when they discover that their soup is no longer good? Will they look for another stone or another stranger, who may remind them of all those "extra" ingredients that they had been forgetting?

In writing this, I have purposefully avoided attaching any specific correlations to the allegory. Yet a thoughtful reader will see his own and doubtlessly many that I myself had not considered. I believe that the idea of the useful lie is of such wide application that we will find examples of it in every human activity.














The original reason I decided to discuss this theme is because of its significance to the modern health and nutrition movement. I would say that most theories about nutrition are actually recipes for stone soup--useful, but not for the reasons that are claimed. Among these stones is the rejection of the diet of civilization and, in particular, the gluten-free diet, which has had miraculous effects on many people's health, but not necessarily because of the restriction of gluten itself.

So why is gluten-free soup becoming so popular? Why is this soup so effective at achieving its goals, even for those without true gluten sensitivity? I'll get there in the next post.

The Diet of Civilization is Starch-Based

Without exception, every major civilization in the history of the world has lived on a starch-based diet. The Chinese and the Japanese ate rice, the Mesoamericans ate corn, the Incans ate potatoes, and the empires of Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome all lived on barley and wheat. Even hunter-gatherer groups often consume a majority of their calories from tubers, roots, and other starchy vegetables. Only marginal civilizations have survived without a starch--and probably not by choice.

Low-carbers and paleo-dieters often make reference to two of these marginal groups in order to prove that starches are not necessary for robust health. The Inuit of North America traditionally have lived on a diet of whale blubber and fish, while a group of African herdsmen known as the Masai live exclusively on milk, meat, and blood. If nothing else, the existence of these two groups does prove that when forced to live under harsh conditions, human beings can survive without carbohydrates.

So starches are unnecessary, just like meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables, nuts, and anything else people regularly eat. Human beings are wonderfully designed omnivores, capable of living and even thriving on an unbelievable diversity of food. But we are not concerned about what people can survive on, but what we would choose to eat in optimal circumstances. And civilized people, both rich and poor, have always favored starch as the centerpiece of their diets--and they have flourished on it.

With this mass of historical evidence against them, paleodieters still claim that their starch-free diets are favored by human evolution and lead to optimal health. While some of their claims are based on scientific research, others seem almost mystical. Indeed, the difficulty of their extreme position often reduces them to absurdities, such as when they talk about the lean, muscular, and healthful physiques of the Masai. You be the judge. Do these people look well-nourished?


































Almost the only source for the paleodieters health claims about the Inuit and Masai is the work of Weston Price, an American dentist who traveled the world investigating the diets of traditional societies and comparing these diets to the people's dental health. While the Inuit and Masai did have excellent dental health, so did a number of other groups that Price investigated, including purely vegetarian groups. To conclude from this data that a starch-free diet is optimal requires VERY selective reading. In fact, anyone who has actually read Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, will know that the good dentist is a zealous advocate of whole grains and never once recommends the Inuit or Masai diet to people living in more productive climates. It's a bad sign when your guru doesn't even agree with you.

The historical evidence is incontrovertible. There have been very few groups who have lived on starch-free diets, while the mass of human civilization, with all its dynamism and creativity, has flourished on starch, and very often on just one starch supplemented by meat and vegetables. The ancient Greek word opson means roughly, "food that you eat with bread" and refers to pretty much everything else. Bread is the staple, the basis of nutrition, and in fact we can live in robust health for long periods on bread alone.

So what explains the popular trend to demonize starches, particularly wheat, which has been the basis of all Western civilization? For that topic we will have to wait until the next post.

Introduction to Civilized Nutrition

This blog will be dedicated to my own personal, idiosyncratic, and often mercurial quest for better health through nutrition. I plan to post regularly on my thoughts on healthy living, as well as on my experiences with my diet and exercise program. Caveat lector ("may the reader beware"), I avoid dogmatism in my views and regularly update my opinions based on new information and experiences. This is not a blog for people looking for a guru to answer all their questions, but for people interested in reading about one man's thoughts and experiences seeking better health.

I have decided to call my dietary principles Civilized Nutrition as a reaction against the increasingly popular paleolithic diet, which models itself on the diets of hunter-gatherers from both the stone age and today. Although proponents of the paleolithic diet disagree on what exactly these hunter-gatherers ate and what people should eat now, there is a general agreement among them that the domestication of cereals has been a catastrophe for human health. In other words, they reject as an unambiguous dietary evil what has been the basis of human civilization for the past ten thousand years.

A few years back I agreed with them, but not any more. Not only does the absolute rejection of grain require a selective reading of nutritional studies, but it makes no sense from a historical perspective. Massive, dynamic civilizations were founded on agriculture, and with these civilizations came enormous intellectual initiative, creativity, and productive power. If I am going to model my eating patterns after my ancestors, I would rather choose Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great than Ug the wife-clubbing troglodyte.

Fortunately, there is plenty of scientific evidence to defend Civilized Nutrition, as I hope to demonstrate in future posts.