Gluten - is it only in grains?

If you are someone who has a gluten allergy but don't have celiac disease, you may be reacting to lectin. Lectin is found in soy, peanuts, beans, dairy including milk and milk products, eggs, tomato, eggplant, and potatoes.

There is new research on lectins that links them to degenerative and autoimmune diseases. This is not an allergy, but rather an intolerance to the lectins in food. Arthritic symptoms may be related to eating tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and potatoes. Gastric symptoms such as bloating and gas may also be related to this intolerance. The best way to test it is to go off of these foods for 2 weeks and then add in a group such as diary and see what symptoms arise.

The research is indicating that lectins may be involved in all forms of arthritis, inflammatory joint disease, diabetes type 2 in adults, obesity, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Happy 2008!

Some of you are probably wondering what happened to me. The day after my last post, my hard drive decided to die. I finally got a new upgraded hard drive, but then I had to get programs reloaded, etc. It took a while for the computer geeks to try to recover some of my data from my old hard drive - not a total success, but did recover some things.

Since I wrote last, I spend 5 days with Dr. John Gray learning about his system which is specific for men and women for balancing minerals in the body. I learned so much it is difficult to write it all down here.

But for today's tip, let's just make it simple. Two great sources of iron are raw cacao and black strap molasses. Now if you just eat some of the raw cacao nibs which you can find at places like whole foods, it will taste like you're eating dirt! Best is to mix it into something, but you can also just put them in your mouth and suck on them for a while and as they get soft you can chew them and they don't taste so bad.