If you’ve watched my Celiac 101 videos, you’ll be tracking this article pretty easily.
To sum up, most celiacs will never heal because they continually refresh and therefore restart their immune systems memory of reacting to gluten (by eating tiny tiny amounts of gluten).
Ergo, step number one to healing celiac is to avoid restarting this immune memory – avoid eating even microscopic amounts of gluten.
The second part however, seems a bit more tricky: to reseed the gut with bacteria that will sufficiently digest gluten protein. To somebody who can eat gluten, this might seem less, not more tricky. However, from a celiacs perspective, this is a catch-22: you need gut bacteria that thoroughly digests gluten. However, you can’t eat gluten, and therefore, won’t be introducing food that has live bacteria capable of digesting gluten protein.
This difficulty is compounded by the fact that we almost never eat gluten, or anything close to gluten (think oats, gluten-free grains, etc), without cooking it, and therefore killing all the bacteria. If you followed my other article on how to receive the gut and heal dairy intolerance, you’ll know exactly what I mean. I need some way to access live bacteria that eats gluten, without the gluten.
Now, you may have a brilliant idea: why not just eat yeast? The problem is that simply eating yeast, while good for other things, isn’t going to necessarily see your gut well. Think about the last time you started yeast for baking: you put it in warm water with some form of sugar and waited for it to start bubbling, activating. If it were in the winter, you may have even been unsuccessful in getting it to activate. In other words, to start propagating, yeast, bread yeast, requires a relatively ideal environment. It needs the right temperature, minimal competition, and perhaps most importantly, something that it can eat immediately.
Thus, throwing straight yeast down the hatch will very likely result in minimal colonizing – between the competition and stomach acid, it would seem to me that yeast has very little chance to colonize.
But for a long time I was stumped about the alternatives. Do I track down raw, never pasteurized oats, and drink oat water or something? I realized, as with everything food, the answer had to be ancestral; something that our ancestors had done from all of time that was missing in our modern day diet. I researched: perhaps our ancestors had eaten raw grains? A dead end; I found nothing that indicated that this was routine. It had to besomething our ancestors ate that went along with bread, that was not bread, yet disposed our guts to eat bread.
Perhaps I get more excited then the average person about healing my celiac, but I do. So hopefully it won’t be weird when I say that this is one of those moments I will remember the rest of my life: I was sitting in bed, thinking about this question in the back of my mind, waiting for my wife. She asked me a question, but at that same instant the answer occurred to me: instead of answering her question, I yelled out my revelation: it’s wine!
By now, hopefully you are a little less confused than she was. But I was incredibly excited. I believe that I have found the answer: raw unfiltered wine.
What led me to this was the thought process above. I remember thinking, “is there any sort of uncooked liquid mash that is made from grain instead of bread that people had?” DUH. Literally from the beginning of time, as long as man has walked to the Earth, he has drank beer and wine. Both of these creations are uncooked liquid mash that are derived from the same living microorganisms that digest wheat – BOOM. Not only does the production of these things involve massively reproducing the desired bacteria, but it also creates an environment that powerfully competes for terrain colonization by nothing other than killing (most) other bacteria around it with alcohol – being resistant itself, of course, to alcohol. And get this: take a guess what part of the digestive tractabsorbs most of your alcohol? The duodenum – the very same area that celiac most affects. In other words, of all the places in your digestive tract, the alcohol will have the most contact – and therefore kill the most non-alcohol resistant bacteria – with your duodenum. Amazing – it’s as if time, ancestry, and you all fit together! A bold claim, unless you happen to believe that God created things fearfully and wonderfully.
This should throw into relief yet another way in which we demean our food, specifically alcohol: alcohol is routinely demonized as only having negative health effect. However, eerily similar to dairy, we begin from the premise that by “alcohol” we mean a product that has been thoroughly purified away from its natural state and essentially sterilized (occasionally alcohols are in fact pasteurized, but most are just microfiltered – effectively the same result: in other words, there remains very little, if any, bacteria). Another self defeating victory in our relentless pursuit of sterility.
I firmly believe that the best guard against the misuse of alcohol is the proper use of alcohol. Irrational or simplistic demonization of alcohol helps very little, at least pedagogically, since even the most tenuous dip into the history of mankind drives home the centrality of alcoholic drink in every civilization, of all time. Not to mention God’s example – no, God’s command – through Jesus. The world can literally not be saved without alcohol, via the sacrifice of the Mass: “Do this in Memory of Me.”
Thus, the conclusion of the above should not be construed to mean that guzzling Smirnoff is helpful or healthful, etc. rather, the conclusion of the above is that poetically, all the pieces of the puzzle fit; the story fits the characters who have lost their way. And if we start with story, not science, chances are much better that we will arrive where we want to be.
Someone may object, asking what proof I have for all of this. Frankly, I’m not interested in proof – “proof” is a type of data that is an excellent tool for industry, for precision, for marketing. It is a very poor tool for healing, when healing is needed now, and risk is acceptable. To the disinterested, action and ideation are equivalent; to the one needing healing, however, anything except action is unacceptable.
But I am willing to make my case; I’m willing to chart this course, because by now I have seen it again and again: the story makes sense. It is as visible as the driven road. My kids are perplexed when I point out some subtle social cue or incident, because to their childish length very little of human nature is understood. Someday however, these things will be second nature to them – because they will have seen them, and they will make sense as each situation arises, as visible as the road ahead. It does not seem to me to be a bizarre proposition to argue that what people have naturally been doing since literally the dawn of time, tends to be what is complimentary and natural for us today. In fact, I have experienced again and again that the opposite is true. There os only one great ignorance, and that is pride; thinking that one knows.
I went from being able to only eat liquidated meat, to slowly adding the “safe” foods back, to adding “challenging” foods back, to begin overcoming my genetics predisposition to reintroduce dairy (6 anti-dairy genes! – I will have dairy completely back soon).
I’ve been told countless times by the industry-trained experts, by the articles, but all the approved sources, that I will never be able to heal my Celiac. That story doesn’t make sense to me, and this is another step against that; that yet again makes me realize what does make sense.
