Celiac Disease
by David
B. South
April 14, 2005 (updated December 15, 2008)
 David B. South, President of the Monolithic Dome Institute |
“Celiac Sprue” is the most insidious, undiagnosed medical problem in the United States. It is an inherited gene that comes out of northern Europe. Even though it effects large numbers of people in the United States most are undiagnosed. In Readers Digest a few months back listed it as the most undiagnosed medical problem in the United States. (It is estimated that 1 in every 70 Americans have Celiac Disease, and of those, only 1 in 70 are properly diagnosed.)
It hides. Some people that have the gene will last their entire life without any flare ups from it. Others will suddenly start having troubles. When they start having troubles it throws all kinds of problems. Anyone that just has all kinds of medical problems and can't get them diagnosed, can't figure out what it is; needs to look up Celiac on the web and read about. Literally it can cover everything from headaches to ingrown toe nails. Probably the most pronounced problem is people don't grow to full stature and they have stomach troubles. Invariably if it is not found the person with an active Celiac condition will end up with intestinal cancer.
What is Celiac? It is also called Celiac Sprue. I am not a medical man so I am not even going to pretend to give you all of the stuff. It is a a gene that allows the celia -- the little hair like food gatherers in the small intestine to be inflamed and rubbed off. Hence the name Celiac because it has primarily to do with the celia in the stomach and the intestine. It goes on from there causing people to have diabetes, emphysema, seizures, and on and on. Again, if you want the full description just search the web for Celiac and if you have it you will see yourself there. Up until a few years ago there was not a definitive test.
Celiac is rampant through my family. My mother died of it, her mother died of it undiagnosed. My mother was diagnosed. I look back on it now and wonder how in the world the doctor was able to diagnose it. It just seems impossible with the limited knowledge about it in the United States that he would have found it. It created emphysema in my mother. She died of emphysema before the intestinal cancer got her. Her mother died of the intestinal cancer and her mother, my mother's, mother's mother in her journals writes her problems and they were definitely Celiac, just no one knew about it.
My daughters have asked me to write this out because it is a different way of looking at some of the health problems that we face. That is the only reason I am doing it and it is only offered as an idea for people that might help.
Celiac brings on diabetes.
About twelve years ago I needed an insurance policy to cover a loan I was getting for my manufacturing facility. I called an insurance agent and told him I wanted some insurance. He sent a medical examiner out to my place to give me a quick physical --typical for those buying medical insurance. Much to my surprise I was turned down. I called them and asked why was I turned down? The answer was the medical people found something wrong. What did they find wrong? Well you need to talk to your doctor. I told them I wanted to see the results of the test. So they sent me the result of the test. I looked at the results of the test and everything was in the normal range except blood glucose. The glucose was off to the side of the page and there was a notation of 1760 -- indicating a glucose level of 1760. I didn't understand what that meant. So I called my friendly pharmacist and asked him what a glucose reading of 1760 meant. He said it means you are in a coma. I said no I am not I am doing just fine. He said well, normally anyone with that high of a reading would be in a coma. So I asked him what I could do about it. He said if you fast before you take the test it will drop. So I called another insurance company, fasted for 24 hours, they sent a guy out, he ran the test, and they turned me down. They sent me the results, my glucose was 365. Wow, what a mess, I needed that insurance.
I didn't want to list that I was a diabetic because I had not been officially diagnosed but I knew if I listed that I was a diabetic that might either stop my chances or make it harder. So, I called yet another insurance company, fasted for two days, they sent another man out to do the tests. By then I am getting really hungry. They took the insurance at a slightly higher rate because I was older and I had a couple of things that were not quite in range. I suspect the glucose.
Shortly after I got my clearance for a insurance policy I saw my local doctor and had him do a check. He told me I was about sixty pounds over weight and I in fact had diabetes, he gave me some Glucatrol and Glucaphage to take and suggested if I would lose the weight, eat better, I could probably bring it under control. I didn't know where to turn. I went into a health food store two days later and picked up a little paper back book called Sugar Blues. When I finished reading it I was convinced the most insidious “food” material made is sugar. It is pure poison. I was taught by my elders that you could kill a dog with sugar, you could kill a horse with sugar.
If you think about it a little bit, people are not a whole lot different than animals, so why do we eat so much sugar? It is because it is so addictive. As I read through “Sugar Blues” I came to realize how addictive sugar is and how much trouble that I was in. If I really wanted to be healthy I had to get rid of the sugar, so I just quit eating sugar that day. No more sugar. I know that sugar is found in other substances such as apples and pears, peaches, fruit. I know that sugar is in apple juice, orange juice. So I decided to eliminate all of the refined sugar, corn syrup, and high fructose corn syrup -- just flat get rid of it. By doing such I figured I would be able to get rid of my addiction to the sugar and that would help me lose weight. And I started to lose weight.
A little bit later it suddenly dawned on me that I might have Celiac. Du, my mother died of it. I had children with it. So I started studying about it. At the time there was no definitive test but an endoscope exam and I did not want one of those. I thought, I already got off the sugar why don't I get off the wheat? It was not a very big stretch to just get off the wheat. Now, you find that wheat is in almost everything as is sugar. So to someone that has Celiac you have two things that are addictive. If you are allergic to it you will find yourself addictive to it. So, I got off of both, the wheat and the sugar. When I say wheat, it is the gluten in wheat, and barley and some other foods that give the Celiac the problem. By getting off of them at the same time you immediately quit craving breads, that are full of both, rolls, cookies, chocolate, ice cream and very quickly you find that you no longer really crave them. That doesn't say that every now and then you look at a chocolate bar and you say man, that sure looks good or you look at an ice cream sundae and say boy that would sure be good. The reality is on a deeper level you no longer want them.
People ask me all the time, “what can you live on, if you can't have sugar or gluten how can you survive. Let me tell you, you still have to work at it to loose weight even when you pull both of those out of your diet. I have never been a real fan of a lot of meat, I like some meat, I like some fish, I like some chicken. I happen to like soups, so I have quite a few soups. With the soups, I have some tortilla chips, tortilla chips don't have any gluten in them, they taste good, a few with a bowl of soup, you can hold your weight, you can loose weight. A fried egg with a small serving of hash browns works well. I can tell you that there is plenty of food to eat with out getting after the addictive ones that are there to destroy your health.
I finally got off forty pounds and the doctor could take me off the diabetic medicine. But at one of my physicals he noticed I was getting rust in the legs. Rust is a term they call it, it is where blood pools in your legs and turns your legs brown. My understanding is the iron breaking down out of the red blood cells that create literally rust. That wasn't a very wonderful thing to see and I had seen some of my friends that had diabetics that had black legs, just horrible jet black as they went in to their later stages – the legs turn black. One of the gals that worked for me also told me that she had been a therapist and the legs is where diabetics goes first and the pooling of the blood in the legs is what causes the trouble. So, I decided that I would do something about it.
Thinking back to my scouting days, I remembered that if you stand at attention for quite a while you can pass out. One of the reasons is because about forty percent of your blood pumping is done by the muscles especially the muscles in the legs. You stand at attention, those muscles are not working so they are not pumping the blood and that is why people faint at parades. So, if that is the case, then I need something that will make those leg muscles work. Now, certainly, walking makes your leg muscles work, but they don't really make them squeeze. Most of your walking is done with your upper leg. Certainly the lower leg keeps you standing upright but you don't have the squeeze in the calves of your legs. So, I went to Walmart and bought a seventeen dollar mini trampoline. Just a little guy, put it together, put it in my bedroom and resolved that every night before I went to bed I would watch the news and jump for six minutes. So, every night I jump for six minutes. After a few months of I added a pair of two pound wrist weights to exercise on my arms.
The next time I went back to the doctor (about 8 months) to have my checkup he looked at my legs and said, “where did the rust go?” I said “well, I exercised it out.” He says, “that is usually not possible how did you do it?” I explained to him my line of thinking and use of the mini tramp. His comment was, I have other diabetics that are going to buy mini tramps. No doubt all at that it helped.
I also found that I was having what my daughter calls neuropathology, if I walked fast or I walked up stairs I had pain all over my body. I hated that. So, I did a little research and found out that is probably because I led such a sedentary life, I get up; walk to the office which is a couple of 100 yards; sit on a chair all day; walk back to the house; sit on a chair for supper; then go to bed. So, deciding that I would do something about that I set up a regimen where I woke up at four forty five AM, went into the spare bedroom where I had a stationary bike that had a counter on it, rode the bike for four miles every morning, take my shower, get dressed, go to work.
With in a very short time I was able to walk as fast as I wanted, travel up the stair ways, do the rest of the things that I wanted to do. So my current regimen is four miles every morning on the bike, six minutes every night on the mini tramp. Will it work for every one, I don't know, I can't imagine it hurting anyone, the other thing is just drop the sugar and the gluten.
I am going to talk a little bit about philosophy. As I watch people, see what they are doing, I have come to the conclusion that the most dangerous instrument on this planet is a spoon. We have gotten in the habit of eating way too much and exercising way too little. It sneaks up on you. Mothers, have the problem, fathers have the problem, babies have the problem, children have the problem. The first thing we do with a baby is start giving them juice, i.e. sugar.
As they get a little older we make sure they have the colas. Now we get them addicted to the caffeine as well. We give them the cooked foods that come out of a box.
Have you ever noticed that the cooked foods that come out of a box have a lot more ingredients than the cooked foods that come off your stove made from scratch. Several years ago I worked with a man in Idaho who developed a carrot pudding. Now this carrot pudding was a recipe handed down from his mother, actually his grandmother. It was good carrot pudding, carrot cake if you will. A carrot cake has quite a few potatoes in it and it obviously has gluten, so right now I wouldn't eat it, but at the time he was trying to market this to some of the stores. I remember one time he was telling me he was trying to market the Seven Eleven and they had taken some and put it in their store along side their competing product. In other words, in the store, they had a carrot cake selling for years and then they put some of my friends carrot cake along side of it. It doesn't sell very well, so he and I started looking to see why. When you flip over the back of each package my friends carrot cake had some potatoes, had some carrot flavoring, I don't remember, about half a dozen items. The other carrot cake that was selling had sugar, way higher on the list, it had caffeine in it. Who needs caffeine in their carrot cake? It had mono sodium glutamate, it had yeast, there was absolutely no reason for yeast. I no longer remember the rest of the items, but what it does is it appeals to people who have food addiction. Certainly it was appealing to those that had a wheat addiction, i.e. the Celiac. It also appealed to the people who had a caffeine addiction, I.E. those that drink colas or other caffeinated drinks all day long and or the coffee and to a small extent chocolate. The yeast is addictive, it had yeast in it. Don't get me wrong, we still have to have yeast in making some products but there is no need in putting yeast in something that doesn't need it. The same with some of the other chemicals in it. Since then I have started looking.
You look at a can of soup. The old stand buys have twenty items in the soup. The health food ones only have four at five. Those you make at home only have four or five. What do we need with those other fifteen items? I submit that those items are in there to appeal to those who are addicted to those items.
Having gone through these addictions myself, I know what a pull they can have on us mere mortals.
Getting off both the gluten and the sugar, allowed me to break that chain of addictions. I have to still be very careful, I still need to loose another fifteen pounds. I have learned in the past though, that my yo-yo diets to be very, very careful, My target right now is about a half a pound a month take it off and keep it off. In the past, I would take off twenty quick pounds and then put back on twenty quick pounds. I hated that, actually I would put on thirty quick pounds and three or four yo-yo's like that you are way over weight, which has always been a problem. One of the major indications of Celiac is being short. I am short. So you can see that I have fought that wheat addiction all my life. Now I am certain that the Celiac condition didn't kick in until I was a older, never the less, the propensity was there.
Again, the most dangerous implement in the US is the spoon. If we as people will think about it, we can take back our health. The doctors fight an up hill battle. I asked one, one time, why he doesn't tell people that they are over weight? He said when I do, I just loose the patient. What he meant was, if you tell a patient that they are over weight, they quit coming back to that doctor, they would rather go to some other doctor that won't tell them they are over weight. The doctors can only fight the symptoms, the base cause is with us and for most of us, it is that spoon.
For some of us it is Celiac. The Celiac makes us want to use the spoon more often. So does the sugar, so does the caffeine and so does the other addictive materials that we take in to our body. The old adage, that the best thing to do is go back as far as we can in our food supply is still the best. Whole wheat, for those who can eat whole wheat is way better than refined wheat. No sugar is better than refined sugar. High fructose syrups are nothing more than another way of making refined sugar. In the book Sugar Blues, it pointed out something I had never even dreamed of, the plague in Europe, occurred about the same time that sugar was readily available to the people that lived in the towns. I had read about the plague in my history books, but it always said that towns were hit harder than the country sides. The authors had indicated that they thought it was because people were closer to each other and infection could travel faster. The author of Sugar Blues says, no the guy from the village came to town several times a week to sell his groceries. He just didn't have the sugar available to predispose him. That predisposition deteriorated their health enough that they were not able to fight off that plague when it hit them. Now is that really the cause? How do I know, nobody would really know, but it sure makes a lot of sense. It makes an enormous amount of sense.
Everyone of us with a pet dog knows we aren't suppose to feed him any chocolate or sugar. Why, it is not good for him. A dog is omnivorous just like you or me. One of the other things pointed out in Sugar Blues is that there has been times when sugar was available for free. People had tried feeding it to cattle. You know a cow can metabolize just about anything, they can even metabolize cement powder, but they will starve to death on sugar. That ought to tell us something.
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