A bitter pill to swallow: how giving up “healthy wholegrains” might be better than pharmaceuticals for health

Last week, fat had something of a national pardon. Butter and lard have been declared no longer the enemy of the nation’s waistline by the newspapers – and the government health advisors who drip-feed them.

With a generation expanding on a food pyramid that placed complex carbohydrates firmly at the base, with fat at its tip – an artery busting treat to be enjoyed rarely or never, alongside cola and chocolate –  it seems the world has tilted on its axis and the government are facing a stealthy climb down.

That fat’s not the enemy is a tub my nutritionist friend, Anneliese Setchell, has been thumping for a long time now. In a feat of furious back peddling, scientists are now agreeing with a long held holistic view that carbs may actually be the problem. With diet so absolutely fundamental to the nation’s health it strikes me as completely bonkers that the advice dished out for decades by the medical community isn’t just flawed, it’s plain wrong. And this dietary about-face is so typical of the prevailing medical culture that seems to routinely misinform normal people and fail to look at the long-term outcomes across populations before dishing out advice that is detrimental. Tough though it is to shed the prevailing wisdom (and the extra inches that comes with it) bad science has forced me to learn to live a life without grains, thanks to the ill health I believe it has, at least in part, caused.

Carbs are cheap, and, I thought, nutritious – certainly harmless. Throughout university I merrily gobbled whole grains in fulsome knowledge that my low fat diet was doing me good – all the while thinking my undergraduate drinking habits were making me have to work harder at the gym. The lethargy that crept in when writing essays was due to late nights, not that salad sandwich with low fat spread I’d just eaten.

At least, that’s what my GP said, whichever one I got at the undergraduate health service, all the while writing copious prescriptions for antibiotics to manage my skin problems that simply exiting puberty hadn’t seemed to erase.

Just as I believed the advice I had been given at school to make “healthy wholegrains” the basis of my diet, I trusted doctors, who were prescribing cyclical and repeated doses of broad spectrum, long-term antibiotics for acne throughout my late teens and twenties. My acne never went for much more than the duration of the treatment, but over the years, the number of health problems I was experiencing, from strange rashes to tiredness to depression seemed to get worse. I was taking antibiotics till the day I discovered I was pregnant. When my son was born, his placenta was ragged. The midwife told me it looked as though I’d been smoking 20 a day, despite my so-called “healthy diet” throughout. When he was six, he was diagnosed autism spectrum. Make of that what you will.

My nutritionist told me years ago that the symptoms with which I’ve been living all stem from the gut, where antibiotics and modern diet depletes good bacteria, allowing yeast to grow in their place. Every time I ate carbohydrate (basically sugar) the yeast in my gut that had replaced the good bacteria would ferment, releasing toxins which essentially caused me to feel drunk and then hungover, hence the tiredness – the typical sugar arch that is so evident when my kids eat sweets. Although this seems a simple explanation for the symptoms that I was experiencing, (and my son, through the gut brain connection, a concept now being more widely embraced by the medical community) it took a while to believe her.  The thought that my teenage vanity, medical shortsightedness and eating bread may have unwittingly damaged my son and caused chronic health problems was hard to swallow.

When I spoke to a doctor about it, it was half-heartedly acknowledged as a possibility, but, he added, there was no concrete evidence to support it. Candida (thrush in the gut) he said, was largely an illness made up by natropaths and their ilk, although systemic Candidasis can affect people with severely compromised immune systems. But, I argued, if years of antibiotics have damaged my immune system, then it was feasible that I have a form of Candidias. Anyway, I wondered, why would nutritionists and alternative health professionals make up an illness that could be managed by diet and diet alone?

Eventually, the eczema plaguing me around my eyes, and body wide rashes, meant vanity won out over my refusal to believe that bread  was the bad guy. If my skin problems were caused by vanity, then vanity would cure them too. I followed the nutritionist recommenced anti-candida diet strictly for a few weeks, and the results could be seen almost immediately. Within days I had lost ten pounds. I no longer felt tired whenever I ate something, and the rashes started to heal.

I managed grain-free for nearly two years, eating thousands of calories every day through whole avocados, coconut oil, dark dark chocolate, all the nuts and snacking daily on cheese and raw onion, shedding any excess body fat in the process, and regaining my energy levels depleted from baby-based sleep deprivation, in the process. But it can feel like hard work avoiding foods that are considered “normal”. People think you’re fussy. Or accuse you of being “naturally thin”, or worse, have an eating disorder, which feels quite insulting when you’re basically just trying to be well. Eventually real life – stress, convenience and fun –  got in the way.

These days, I try to avoid dairy and gluten, but I love a cuppa, and with two children, it’s hard to avoid the convenience of the odd slice of toast. I still keep an eye on my sugar, but working in an office means there’s inevitably a birthday, or holiday sweets and I don’t want to be the girl who never accepts a slice of cake or drinks a glass or three of glass of wine. But on this normal “healthy” diet my health problems – and extra pounds returned.

Now, as well as adult acne, I also have folliculitus which may be caused by topical treatments for acne disturbing the bacterial flora on my face, in the same way antibiotics disturbed the good bacteria in my gut. The eczema round my eyes that plagued me in the early baby years of sleep deprivation is back, and, adding insult to injury, around my mouth –  flaring up every time I eat something starchy. Now I believe years of harsh medication caused me to develop a sensitivity to grains. But getting a straight medical answer isn’t simple.

With a winter of comfort eating looming, I sought a proper diagnosis from a doctor who was willing to listen to my concerns. A raft of blood test followed, but nothing showed up. When I mentioned all the antibiotics I had been given over the years, and my seemingly unlinked symptoms, the doctor suggested I might be suffering from Inflammatory Bowel Disease. IBD means either Crohns or Colitis – it’s not an iffy stomach and should not be confused with IBS or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Either way it’s a nasty collection of symptoms which are not dissimilar to the widely-scorned  by the medical community nutritionist catch-all yeast-based illness “Candida”. Both stem from problems in the intestinal tract. Skin rashes, tiredness and joint pain are part and parcel of a condition which is chronic and life-long. It feels like it’s essentially the same disorder by any other name.

A FODMAPS diet  was suggested, usually recommended for IBS – not unlike the anti-candida diet recommended years ago by my nutritionist friend, except much more complicated, and banning onions and garlic- two of my favourite  and most nutritious foods – while an IBD test kit was put on order.

It also turns out that doctors believe IBD can be caused by antibiotic use, and exacerbated by the pill, which I’ve been on and off all my life in an attempt to find a hormonal treatment for acne – of which only Dinette was effective, but which is now implicated in an increased risk of breast cancer and blood clots. It’s funny how pharmaceutical companies don’t seem to list serious or chronic illness as potential side effects of everyday drug treatments- the long term effects aren’t always known. Except that it’s not funny at all.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve lost faith in medical advice and have turned to alternative treatments for help. For me, nutritionists’ simple dietary advice: more fat, more protein, fewer grains, less fruit, more raw veggies, more meat, more nuts and seeds, more eggs – has been key to making me feel and look healthier, where doctors by and large, with their careless prescriptions of drugs and low free diet advice have made me sicker.

I’m still waiting for the IBD kit. Christmas and New Year largely put paid to the FODMAPS diet, and by January I was in a state and hiding away. Something needed to be done. In the hope of a quick fix, I accepted the challenge of testing out Microbiome Plus+ GI Probiotic from ihealthnutriti.com. It’s a probiotic that includes a prebiotic – the fibre that feed the “good bacteria”  which they need to take up residence in your gut.

Cited as being the new weapon against modern diets and antibiotics use, probiotics are seen by many in the holistic health community as a magic bullet for just about every health condition you can think of, from autism to auto immune disorders to eczema – which may or may not stem from chronic inflammation, depending on where you get your health information from.

Given my fears about the havoc wreaked by years of antibiotics, I have taken probiotics  on a semi-regular basis for several years, from the expensive refrigerated tablet kind to fermented dairy drinks like Yakult often packed with sugar or sweeteners that some believe detracts from their effect, to plain natural yoghurt, or more recently kefir, a type of fizzy fermented milk that flexes my gag reflex unless I drink it in a smoothie.

None of them has waved a magic wand to well-being, but taken as part of a balanced diet and exercise program, they have helped with the mix of things I do to keep me on an even keel. I have even relentlessly topped up my children’s diets with them in the hope they will undo some of the damage caused by the inevitable reliance on bread, cereals and sweets that modern life makes so difficult to avoid.

No, probiotics haven’t cured my son’s autism , but I do see a direct result in his behaviour depending on what he eats – too much beige stuff, and he goes a bit stir-crazy. It may or may not be overstating it to say the probiotics help ease the symptoms of his carb-based mania, but they do seem to help a bit with the crazies. However, short of getting him – a fussy eater at the best of times – to follow a nutritionist recommended GAPS diet (which removes all grains from his diet as well as nutritious broths and fermented food, and – you guessed it – probiotics), they are, in my opinion, a good way to offset some of the problems inherent in the average kid’s diet.

With my body in all out protest as winter progressed, I hoped the tablets might have a tangible effect on my overall health. In short, they haven’t, though I’ve been taking them for weeks in the hope to report back something more encouraging. Perhaps they might have prevented things from getting worse. Perhaps, the fact I’ve taken probiotics already, patchy though I’ve been about it, has meant taking them routinely now isn’t giving me any additional benefits.

But then my diet hasn’t been exactly on top form either recently.  Starting a new job means I’ve been eating for speed and economy rather than health, but with my eczema, aches and pains, fatigue  – and thrush – getting worse, I can’t fail to make the link once more between consuming carbs and feeling crappy.

So, if there’s no magic bullet to unravel the damage caused by a decade of medicine that wrote a prescription for bad health, perhaps I need to bite the bullet instead, and simply leave the grains off my plate in the future, as my nutritionist friend has told me in no uncertain terms, on more than one occasion. Consulting with Anneliese about this article, she said:

 

The issue with grains, in a nut shell is they were only introduced 10,000 years ago and they contain phytic acid, gluten and lectins which can cause inflammation in the gut and inhibit the absorption of vitamins and minerals.

Right now, I’m willing to try anything to feel and look better. And without a clear medical answer on the horizon,  I’m taking the situation in my own hands and treating myself to a grain-free diet. Which means no cheating with rye or spelt, although I’m sticking with brown rice to help keep things moving.

Whstever the outcome of any diagnosis, I’ll continue to be suspicious of any medical advice I’m given. Strapped for cash health systems, not unlike food and pharma companies and governments driven by short term profit – are forced to choose short term cost savings that fail to see the bigger picture.  

If you’re suffering from acne, I’m told that laser works really well, but it’s not available on the NHS. Perhaps if it had been, the NHS might have saved a fair few bob treating a chronic lifelong condition caused by cheap, old microbiome destroying antibiotics. Those kits, for which I’m still waiting, are expensive as is treatment. But in any case, I’m now going private.

Update: I’ve been keeping off grains for the best part of a week – wheat, oats and corn and white rice – for a week or so, eating only brown rice, and buckwheat which isn’t actually a grain at all. In addition, I’ve been using lacto-free milk in my tea, because life just wouldn’t be worth living without it.

My eczema has cleared up, as has the other thing, and I basically feel more energetic (and slightly thinner for all I’ve been dolloping coconut oil into my (black) coffee at every opportunity).

I have a doctor’s appointment for next week – a month since I tried to get one, but now I have little to show for it. Perhaps that’s a good thing or else I would have been offered topical steroids which don’t touch the causes, but which would have increased my skin’s sensitivity in the long run. But for now, as far as I’m concerned, it’s diet 1, pills nil.The next battle is trying to stick with it long term!

Anyhow, I’ve got 5 packs of Microbiome Plus+ GI Probiotic to give away to the first to follow and retweet this article. Try them yourself and let me know what you think!

Disclaimer:

I’m not a health care professional. All the information found on this website should be used for informational purposes only and is not intended to replace proper medical advice. Always consult a qualified health care provider before embarking on a health or supplement plan.