Adventures with Tom

My wife and I took a three month road trip around the west in a green 1985 Westfalia in the fall of 2011.

Our westy in the Tetons

On the Oregon coast we rolled into a campground and the campground check-in lady said ‘oh you must be with the group!” to which we said, no, we’re traveling solo, but we’re curious about this group…  so she pointed us to a corner of the campground, where there was westy after westy after westy – it was fabulous!  They welcomed us with open arms and great enthusiasm, and we joined them for a potluck about 15 minutes after we got there, Lisa whipping up something delicious to share.  All the food was on a table, and as usual you could spoon out what you wanted.  Excepting one pot, which a fellow insisted on  spooning for you.  Upon inquiring why, he said he was very gluten intolerant and couldn’t risk his pot being contaminated by gluten contact.  I had heard about gluten being bad for you in The Paleo Solution and in the Four Hour Workweek blog.  I had half-heartedly tried it, or quarter-heartedly is more accurate.  Getting chatting with this fellow, he claimed it cured his sleep apnea, depression, and acid reflux!!  He had lived into his late forties until discovering this and it has radically changed his life for the better.  I have acid reflux and sleep apnea, plus eosiniphilic esophagitis.  Would you believe ALL three of these are ‘cured’ when I am not eating gluten?  No drugs, no nothing.  Just a proper diet and all those maladies go away for me.  So simple, and yet so hard – it’s not all that easy.  I have a good buddy who’s a gastroenterologist, and several years ago I was harassing him about prescribing so much medicine and why he didn’t just have people change their lifestyles, eliminating gluten or sugar or losing weight or adding more vegetables or exercise, whatever he thought could help them.  He said “nobody wants to change, Tom.  They all just want to take a little pill and get better, so that’s what I do for them.”  Crazy but it’s true, I believe him.  Changing habits as ingrained over a lifetime like eating is difficult, very difficult.  Taking a Prilosec is far easier…  Now wearing a CPAP sleep machine I wonder – was too big a hassle for me I know that, I couldn’t handle it and have tried a number of sleep apnea aids.  Very happy those days are behind me.

Now on my whole theory and on why I think skipping gluten makes sense from a logic standpoint.  Think of gluten as an irritant – it causes swelling and a bad reaction in my body.  Hence my airways swelling up and collapsing at night as I sleep, causing the apnea.  The acid reflux is my stomach freaking out versus the gluten.  And lastly the eosiniphilic esophagitis – that’s not really well understood at this point but they believe it’s an allergic reaction… which again fits neatly into my little hypothesis.  Which really isn’t my hypothesis but I’ll claim it on these three items I have direct experience with ‘curing’.

Seriously give it a shot, even if you aren’t ill at all – I bet you’ll feel better, and maybe even lose some weight!  Even a week of being gluten-free and you’ll notice a difference I’ll bet.  Apparently all people are ‘allergic’ to gluten – my biggest take-away from the Paleo Solution was that irritating your gut is the way wheat defends itself from predators, similar to how a cactus defends itself, but done inside your body instead of out.  All the details and science are in the blog and book mentioned above.