GRAIN BRAIN - slowing/preventing Alzheimer by eliminating grains? Perlmutter, MD

[sengsational]

I think (hope) I will be blessed with no sensitivity as well. Going truly gluten free is a RPITA, so I spent $375 to possibly avoid the GF experiment on myself. I had planned 3 months, then add gluten back, and see if there's any noticable change. But if the big panel comes back clean on all antibodies, I'll just not worry about it, and avoid the hassle of going GF.

 

[outdoorgirl02]

Glad to hear that you are feeling great with going grain-free.

May I ask if you now eat mostly vegetables, limited amounts of high-quality proteins and fats?



Are you planning to remain grain free? I find it really hard to give up rice. I still eat rice 3 to 5 times a week.

I am mostly paleo so I eat high quality meat, vegetables, eggs, and fruit. I am also sensitive to nuts (headaches) so I have to avoid those as well. I have recently reintroduced rice successfully which is super helpful. I am planning to continue eating rice a few times a week as long as I can keep my energy levels up. I don't plan on adding back other grains or sugar.

 

[splitwdw]

Are you planning to remain grain free? I find it really hard to give up rice. I still eat rice 3 to 5 times a week.

Gluten Free Food List for a Healthy Brain - Start A Gluten Free Diet

Look at the "non gluten grains" you can eat in moderation. Rice is on the list. I think it's in the book too.

 

[RAE]

Obviously people have been eating grains for several millennia.

Actually, humans have only consumed cereal grains for about the last 10,000 years or less, representing 0.4% of our evolutionary history. Dr. Loren Cordain provides more details:
______________________________________________________________

The so-called "Agricultural Revolution" (primarily the domestication of animals, cereal grains, and legumes) occurred first in the Near East about 10,000 years ago and spread to northern Europe by about 5,000 years ago [Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1993]. The industrial revolution occurred roughly 200 years ago, and the technological revolution which brought us packaged, processed foods is primarily a development that has occurred in the past 100 years and has seen enormous growth in the last 50 years.
To gauge how little geologic or evolutionary time humans have been exposed to foods wrought by the agricultural revolution, let's do a little paper experiment. Take a stack of computer paper (the kind in which each page is connected to one another) and count out 212 eleven-inch (28-cm) pages. Then unravel the stack of paper and lay it out end to end--it will form a continuous 194-foot (59-meter) strip. Now, let's assume that 1 inch (2.54 cm) equals 1,000 years in our 194-foot strip of computer paper; thus, the first part of the first page represents the emergence of our genus 2.33 MYA and the last part of the last page represents the present day.
Now, take a slow walk down all 194 feet of the computer paper, and carefully look at each of the individual eleven-inch sections. When you get to the very last eleven-inch section (the 212th section), this represents approximately the beginning of agriculture in the Mideast 10,000 years ago; therefore, during the preceding 211 sheets humanity's foods were derived from wild plants and animals. This little experiment will allow you to fully grasp how recent in the human evolutionary experience are cereal grains.


Humans may have indeed eaten these foods for "millennia," but millennia (even 10 millennia) in the overall timeframe of human existence represents 0.4%. Because the estimated amount of genetic change (0.005%) which has occurred in the human genome over this time period is negligible, the genetic makeup of modern man has remained essentially unchanged from that of pre-agricultural man [Eaton et al. 1985].
_____________________________________________________________


If Cordain is correct, and I have no reason to doubt his information, consuming grains (at least large quantities of grains) is probably not a great idea (if you are trying to maintain optimum health).

 

[haha]

Actually, humans have only consumed cereal grains for about the last 10,000 years or less, representing 0.4% of our evolutionary history. Dr. Loren Cordain provides more details:
______________________________________________________________

The so-called "Agricultural Revolution" (primarily the domestication of animals, cereal grains, and legumes) occurred first in the Near East about 10,000 years ago and spread to northern Europe by about 5,000 years ago [Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1993].

Isn't this a pretty good example of several millennia?


Ha

 

[RAE]

Isn't this a pretty good example of several millennia?


Ha

Yes. My point was that even 10,000 years represents a very, very small portion of human evolutionary history. As Cordain points out, the human genome has only changed by .005% over the same time period.

 

[ERhoosier]

Yes. My point was that even 10,000 years represents a very, very small portion of human evolutionary history. As Cordain points out, the human genome has only changed by .005% over the same time period.

More recent evidence shows that the human genome is not quite that stable and is continuing to evolve over the last few thousand years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html?_r=0

IMHO- Modern medicine may be accelerating population genomic change. Many with genetically-linked diseases which were uniformly fatal in childhood are now living into adulthood and having children. Even some conditions we might view as only bothersome today would have been huge problems a few millennia ago. The incidence of near-sightedness, which has a significant genetic propensity, is increasing worldwide over just a few generations.
Eye - Epidemiology of myopia
I've worn glasses since childhood and can easily see (pun intended) that my chances of surviving and reproducing 10k yrs ago as a hunter-gatherer would have been quite slim

 

[sengsational]

Obviously people have been eating grains for several millennia...

One more comment about this...the wheat humans ate for most of the 10,000 years had six genes. So the instructions for producing proteins was limited by that. Modern wheat has something like 24 genes, and that has only shown up in the last hundreds of years. Bottom line...most of the time humans were eating wheat, it was not what we find in the center isles of the grocery store today...that stuff has a whole lot more going on than the original wheat.

 

[M Paquette]

One more comment about this...the wheat humans ate for most of the 10,000 years had six genes. So the instructions for producing proteins was limited by that. Modern wheat has something like 24 genes, and that has only shown up in the last hundreds of years.

Um. Actually, modern hexaploid wheat has an estimated estimated 164,000 to 334,000 genes, from 16,000,000,000 base pairs. As a hexaploid cell, wheat cells contain six copies of each of its seven chromosomes, for 42 chromosomes total. I don't think it was fully sequenced until just a couple years ago.

The earliest einkorn wheat was diploid. Emmer and durum wheats are derived from wild emmer, a tetraploid plant that was a cross between two diploid wild grasses, one of which was a goatgrass. Oh, and emmer came along long before us monkeyboys started banging the genomes together. The modern tetraploid wheats are crosses between emmer or durum wheat and Tausch's goatgrass, which adds it's genome to make modern wheat.

So, yaay goatgrass! You're baking with it.


(More info in "Plant Evolution and the Origin of Crop Species", James F. Hancock, 2004)

 

[ERD50]

Originally Posted by sengsational View Post
One more comment about this...the wheat humans ate for most of the 10,000 years had six genes. So the instructions for producing proteins was limited by that. Modern wheat has something like 24 genes, and that has only shown up in the last hundreds of years.

Um. Actually, modern hexaploid wheat has an estimated estimated 164,000 to 334,000 genes, from 16,000,000,000 base pairs. As a hexaploid cell, wheat cells contain six copies of each of its seven chromosomes, for 42 chromosomes total. .....

So, yaay goatgrass! You're baking with it.


(More info in "Plant Evolution and the Origin of Crop Species", James F. Hancock, 2004)

OK, it seems a bit 'out there' to say that wheat went from 6 genes to 24 genes in a few hundred years, but I'm not following the response .., can this be broken down into something closer to layman's language?

-ERD50

 

[JoeWras]

OK, I just discovered something. I know computers, but I don't know squat about genetics. When Steeleyman was talking about MySQL and Postgres, I was on it! Bu this hexaploid, tetraploid, whatever stuff is WAY over my head.

I have no idea what you guys are talking about.

 

[M Paquette]

OK, it seems a bit 'out there' to say that wheat went from 6 genes to 24 genes in a few hundred years, but I'm not following the response .., can this be broken down into something closer to layman's language?

-ERD50

It's a thing called polyploidy, related to the number of sets of chromosomes in a cell. Us humans have mostly 'diploid' cells, which have two sets of our chromosomes in them. Gamete cells (egg and sperm) have one set of chromosomes, and when they combine, form a new cell with two sets of chromosomes in them.

It's possible to have the 'ploidy' increase in a genetic, or germ line. This is one way evolutionary change can occur. In the case of wheat, two diploid grasses were genetically 'crossed' and wound up with four sets of chromosomes in each cell, two from each diploid 'parent' strain. With four sets of chromosomes, the cell is considered to be tetraploid. This happens naturally, and produced emmer wheat. (Durum wheat was bred from emmer, and also has tetraploid cells.)

The modern spelt and bread wheats were hybridized in farmer's fields with a related plant, Tausch's goatgrass. The goatgrass has diploid cells with two sets of chromosomes, which combined with the four sets in the durum or emmer wheat to result in a hybrid with six sets of chromosomes, or hexaploid cells.

The polyploid cells have the genetic machinery from both parent strains present, and actively guiding the construction of all sorts of interesting molecules. This is what gives the plants traits from all their parent strains.

Polyploidy occurs naturally. It's not a result of scientists, mad or otherwise, tinkering with genomes. The tetraploid emmer wheat likely originated while we were still trying to figure out how to bang the rocks together.

We humans even have polyploid cells within our body. Some glial tissues in the brain have been found to include tetraploid and octoploid cells. Salivary glands are chock full of polyploid cells. Adult human myocardium is around 60% tetraploid cells. There's some speculation that this occurs as cell growth is arrested in the middle of the cellular replication cycle.

Executive summary: Biology is weird.

 

[sengsational]

Ack! I must to you paquette!

I blew the number 42 not 24, and I said genes instead of chromosome

The point was it has had the crap hybridized out of it, so we ain't in Kansas any more, Toto!

 

[ERD50]

Ack! I must to you paquette!

I blew the number 42 not 24, and I said genes instead of chromosome

The point was it has had the crap hybridized out of it, so we ain't in Kansas any more, Toto!

OK, but most of our domestic crops and animals have 'had the crap hybridized out of' them. But does that mean that the way we digest them is significantly different?

Our modern homes bear almost no resemblance to whatever shelter our ancestors had 10,000 years ago. Yet, there probably isn't a whole lot of difference in our response to hypothermia. Our primate relatives are probably close to as vulnerable as we are to cold temperatures.

-ERD50

 

[6miths]

Um. Actually, modern hexaploid wheat has an estimated estimated 164,000 to 334,000 genes, from 16,000,000,000 base pairs. As a hexaploid cell, wheat cells contain six copies of each of its seven chromosomes, for 42 chromosomes total. I don't think it was fully sequenced until just a couple years ago.

The earliest einkorn wheat was diploid. Emmer and durum wheats are derived from wild emmer, a tetraploid plant that was a cross between two diploid wild grasses, one of which was a goatgrass. Oh, and emmer came along long before us monkeyboys started banging the genomes together. The modern tetraploid wheats are crosses between emmer or durum wheat and Tausch's goatgrass, which adds it's genome to make modern wheat.

So, yaay goatgrass! You're baking with it.


(More info in "Plant Evolution and the Origin of Crop Species", James F. Hancock, 2004)

Cool. Thank you.

 

[sengsational]

OK, but most of our domestic crops and animals have 'had the crap hybridized out of' them. But does that mean that the way we digest them is significantly different?

I'm obviously no expert...I can't spell most of this stuff (LOL!), but I have been lead to believe that a) a good fraction of a plant's genetic instructions are used to define how proteins are folded, b) modern wheat has a super large fraction of relatively 'new' genetic instructions, and c) many humans have issues with digestion of the proteins in modern wheat. I'm not sure how many other highly hybridized plants have as wide a variety of proteins as wheat does, but if the answer to that question is "a lot" or "most", and we are not sensitive to those, well, then that blows my arguement.

One molecule that we didn't "grow-up" with is hydrogenated oil. Our bodies don't know how to manage that stuff, since it's synthetic. I'm not saying the extra protiens in modern wheat are synthetic, but we didn't grow-up with them. Maybe they're harmless (well, harmless to most non-gluten sensitive people except for the insuline spikes of varying degrees). Maybe a fish gene in a tomato is harmless. Maybe not. So I don't know if the way we digest these things is significantly different. That's a hard question.

 

[M Paquette]

I'm obviously no expert...I can't spell most of this stuff (LOL!), but I have been lead to believe that a) a good fraction of a plant's genetic instructions are used to define how proteins are folded, b) modern wheat has a super large fraction of relatively 'new' genetic instructions, and c) many humans have issues with digestion of the proteins in modern wheat. I'm not sure how many other highly hybridized plants have as wide a variety of proteins as wheat does, but if the answer to that question is "a lot" or "most", and we are not sensitive to those, well, then that blows my arguement.

The complex, 'long' proteins break down quickly in the dilute hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and trypsin in our digestive tract, a process called hydrolysis. They all turn into the base amino acids that can make it across the membranes of the intestines into the bloodstream. The exact time it takes to break them down varies with the type of protein and a bunch of other conditions.

While these long chains of amino acids that make up proteins are being digested, there are intermediate products, shorter chains that have been cut by hydrolysis but not yet reduced all the way to amino acids. These are called polypeptides or peptides. It turns out that there are specific peptides, nine amino acids long, produced from breakdown of wheat proteins, that expose antigenic sites that were buried in the wheat proteins before hydrolysis.

In some people, these specific polypeptides can trigger an antigenic, or immune response. That's a food allergy. Gluten is one of many proteins that can produce polypeptides that can trigger an immune response in some people.

It's actually the short peptide chains that cause the trouble. If they make it into the bloodstream, helped through the intestinal membranes by drugs like aspirin or by exercise, they can trigger immune responses elsewhere in the body of allergic persons, such as hives!

(I'm not a doctor. Contents of this post are meant for educational and discussion purpose only and should not, in any case, be substituted for a medical consultation. The information posted or linked to this site should not be used to diagnose or treat a health problem. Your doctor is the only one who can best assess your health situation and give you a medical advice.)

 

[sengsational]

Thanks for that really amazingly clear explanation of what's going on. More than I knew, for sure. I think I'll substitute it for a medical consultation, lol!

Those little buggers (polypeptides) sure are a diverse bunch, at least when you look at the number of antigens that they can cause one to generate:
Wheat IgG, Wheat IgA, Wheat Germ Agglutinin IgG, Wheat Germ Agglutinin IgA, Native + Deamidated Alpha-Gliadin-33-mer IgG, Native + Deamidated Alpha-Gliadin-33-mer IgA, Alpha-Gliadin-17-mer IgG, Alpha-Gliadin-17-mer IgA, Gamma-Gliadin-15-mer IgG, Gamma-Gliadin-15-mer IgA, Omega-Gliadin-17-mer IgG, Omega-Gliadin-17-mer IgA, Glutenin-21-mer IgG, Glutenin-21-mer IgA, Gluteomorphin+Prodynorphin IgG, Gluteomorphin+Prodynorphin IgA, Gliadin-Transglutaminase IgG, Gliadin-Transglutaminase IgA, Transglutaminase-2 IgG, Transglutaminase-2 IgA, Transglutaminase-3 IgG, Transglutaminase-3 IgA, Transglutaminase-6 IgG, Transglutaminase-6 IgA.

 

[haha]

Thanks for that really amazingly clear explanation of what's going on. More than I knew, for sure. I think I'll substitute it for a medical consultation, lol!

Those little buggers (polypeptides) sure are a diverse bunch, at least when you look at the number of antigens that they can cause one to generate:
.

They are the antigens. What is generated in the immune system are the antibodies.

Ha

 

[sengsational]

They are the antigens. What is generated in the immune system are the antibodies.

Ha

Thanks. Biology isn't my strong suit. I'm not even very good at finding a good doctor who understands it.

 

[M Paquette]

My interest in this came from my seafood allergy. There are proteins in seafood that break down to peptides that trigger a pretty unpleasant reaction. A few researchers are actually investigating the mechanism in detail, with the hope of identifying the genetic trigger.

 

[Ally]

I never know what to think about these studies since my mom had Alzheimer's and my dad was very clear headed until he died at 94 from cancer. My mom ate much healthier than my dad. My mom was more physically active than my dad. My mom read more, socialized more, and worried less than my dad. My dad ate more red meat, bread and sugar and had diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart issues from time to time, while my mom's only disease was the Azheimer's. No one in her family had it that we know about. I certainly want to avoid Alzheimer's, but whenever I see studies or diets like these, I wonder why it was my mom and not my dad who got it.

 

[samclem]

but whenever I see studies or diets like these, I wonder why it was my mom and not my dad who got it.

We're learning a lot more about AD, and especially about the individual genetics that contribute to it. Family history is a very imprecise guide as to the actual genes an individual has onboard, and how they will be expressed over time. But, from what I've read, it seems probable that many people with AD were highly likely to get it from the day they were conceived, and nutrition and other environmental factors may play a fairly small role.

I highly recommend an article on AD in the Mar 2015 eddition of Discover magazine (I think it is still on newstands). It has a lot of easy-to-understand info on the latest very interesting research in understanding how AD develops and promising ways we may be able to treat it. I know we've seen promises before, but I'm optimistic.

About causative factors, from that piece:

Alzheimer’s disease can tear through generations of families. In the early-onset form, it claims victims in the prime of their lives, in their 40s and early 50s. It envelops them in a fog of confusion and ultimately erodes relationships and memories. Scientists have spent much of the past three decades hunting down genes linked to this inherited form of the disease. In the past three years, they’ve uncovered more than a dozen of them.
. . .
The newly unmasked genes play a role in three distinctively different bodily functions, including systems that control inflammation and cholesterol and the regulation of how brain cells clean up toxic proteins. These discoveries build upon previous findings about genes linked to Alzheimer’s, such as the APOE-4 gene, which is a powerful marker for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease; about 40 percent of those diagnosed have this DNA variant. In fall 2013, this international consortium identified 11 more genes that increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, bringing the total number of genes associated with the more common late-onset form of the disease to 21. This expanded collection helps paint a clearer picture of the factors that ratchet up risks. It also offers unprecedented glimpses of the biological pathways that drive the disorder.

Obviously, there's much more in the article, a good read.

 

[Retire2013]

A little over a year ago, DH and I did a test to see if we had any gluten sensitivity. I do believe that some people (apart from those with celiac disease) have sensitivity to gluten. And, I could see how people might not just know this.

So, we went gluten free for a month to see what happened. During that month we did not eat gluten at all. For the first 2 weeks I went grain free entirely (DH didn't). After that, I did eat some limited grains that had no gluten (corn tortillas, brown rice). We looked at the gluten-free section in the store and decided that the majority of it was gluten-free junk food. No, I don't need to eat gluten-free cookies.

I don't personally eat a lot of bread. The other day I had a tuna sandwich and that was the first bread I had had in weeks. DH, on the other hand, likes bread and eats it every day. So, we looked at some of the gluten-free breads such as those made with rice flour. We elected not to get that either.

In our case, we found absolutely no difference between how we felt before and how we felt after being without gluten for 30 days. It was an interesting experiment and we both concluded that gluten doesn't happen to bother us.

Thank you for sharing!

Retire 2013

 

[Ally]

We're learning a lot more about AD, and especially about the individual genetics that contribute to it. Family history is a very imprecise guide as to the actual genes an individual has onboard, and how they will be expressed over time. But, from what I've read, it seems probable that many people with AD were highly likely to get it from the day they were conceived, and nutrition and other environmental factors may play a fairly small role.

I highly recommend an article on AD in the Mar 2015 eddition of Discover magazine (I think it is still on newstands). It has a lot of easy-to-understand info on the latest very interesting research in understanding how AD develops and promising ways we may be able to treat it. I know we've seen promises before, but I'm optimistic.

About causative factors, from that piece:
Obviously, there's much more in the article, a good read.

Thanks! I am going to look for that article. My mom didn't shown signs of Alzheimer's until she was about 78, and she was diagnosed at 80 and lived to 88. Thankfully, it wasn't the early onset type.



Sent from my iPad using Early Retirement Forum