The Gluten-Free Diet Analysis

We are what we eat. What we give our bodies determines how healthy we will be, and this is the reason why there are always ongoing studies on what the best diets to follow are. A popular debatable topic that arose in the recent years is whether gluten-free diets are healthier, especially for the brain, for the general population. It became an even more debatable subject in 2013 when Dr. David Perlmutter, an American physician, published a controversial book, Grain Brain, trying to shift the attention towards that issue; his book is one of these must-cite books whenever this issue is brought up. Gluten is a protein mainly found in wheat, barley, and rye (but actually not in rice, quinoa, corn, buckwheat, or millet) (“Gluten-free diet,”) and

One way to show how far these people are being misled is by examining the supports they base their arguments on. Many gluten-free diet supporters are most likely to use one specific source to support their arguments, Dr. Perlmutter’s best-selling book, Grain Brain. The actual reason for its popularity is that Perlmutter appealed to people as an authority, being the only American who is both a board-certified neurologist and a fellow of the American College of Nutrition. Most of the general population of people, who probably do not have much background information about gluten or mental diseases, are most likely to accept the supports someone with these credentials would provide. Fortunately, many other scientists, health professionals, and neurologists had various critiques to his argument and his rhetoric, which can be described as misleading. Many of these criticisms are mentioned in the article “This Is Your Brain on Gluten” by James Hamblin, MD, a senior editor that writes the health column at The Atlantic. First, Dr. Perlmutter proposes the Paleo diet that comes from the Paleolithic era, which is the early phase of the Stone Age (“Paleolithic”). According to his claims, it contains 75 percent fats and 20 percent protein and five percent carbohydrates, claiming that fat, not carbohydrates, has been the preferred fuel, the source of calories, for humans for over two million years, and adds that it was the reason for humans’ mental clarity during the Paleolithic era. One critique to this was pointed out by Dr. David Katz, the founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center. He argues that no sort of food in the Paleolithic Era could possibly contain 75 percent fat unless people of the time ate only the brains of the animals. Additionally, the average lifetime of a human in the Paleolithic era did not exceed 50 years; therefore, it is not