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Book Review: The Gluten Lie And other myths about what you eat

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The Gluten Lie And other myths about what you eat

Alan Levinovitz, PhD

If you have friends like I do, this book has been in and out of your feed for a while now. If you are like me you’ve been waiting for it from the library eagerly looking forward to it the way you did Salt Sugar Fat, Paleofantasy, and other books about nutrition, diets, and obsession over both.

Alan Levinovitz is different than the other authors in that he is not an anthropologist or a nutritionist, but rather a specialist in ancient Chinese religions.  Which sounds terribly wrong at first, but oh so right when you think about it. He brings a slant that the ‘modern’ craze for dieting (going back a few hundred years) has many similarities with religion. I really liked the way he explained that the myth (in this case a diet) remains but the logic supporting it changes.

He also uses his expertise to clear up that no, a 5000 year old tome of Chinese medicine does not talk about using salt to control blood pressure. He says that the line “from the Huangdi Meijing, aka The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine: “Hence if too much salt is used for food, the pulse hardens….”
”This line, widely repeated in the literature on salt and blood pressure, has a great deal of persuasive power. Even the ancient Yellow Emperor knew this stuff would kill you! Compelling evidence, right? Wrong. Wrong in so many ways.
”First: the Huangdi Meijing says no such thing. The origin of the quote is actually a 1956 anthology called Classics in Arterial Hypertension, compiled by Arthur Ruskin, MD, of the University of Texas. One wonders where Ruskin got the quote, since it’s nowhere to be found in the Chinese text. When I checked the original, the only passage that could be construed as referring to high blood pressure— excess yang qi— recommended treatment with increased salt.”

Well, he can mike drop on that one.

The Gluten Lie covers not just gluten but all the recent dietary demons that we’ve been taught to avoid: Salt, sugar (including high fructose corn syrup), fat (barely touching cholesterol) and carbs, concentrating on gluten. He effectively covers Michael Moss’ 350-page Salt, Sugar, Fat in 220 pages. Moss’s work took me a bit to read, and was fascinating (and introduced me to Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, which I loved). The Gluten Lie took hardly any time to read. It reads like a blog, friendly and simple. He isn’t negative or skeptical about either celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, so those criticisms are out. However, if you are like me, you may have some issues with his footnotes and references. I know, I should be glad that there are footnotes at all, but I can’t be. Now these are what just jumped out at me, not a definitive list. He supports a statement about meat not being bad for you twice, once with the BBC, and once with a doctor’s quote. He neglects to mention that the BBC article is about that doctor, and that doctor’s quote is from the article.

The second one is when he quotes three full paragraphs of a 1922 herbal medicine pamphlet, and there are no records in his note of what that pamphlet is. Admittedly, a Google search allowed me to find it (it’s The Herb Doctor and Medicine Man by the Indiana Herb Company, published in 1919) but it doesn’t bode well for what I didn’t research.

Now, that’s important to me, and it may not be to you. In any case, it’s fairly negative towards people like Vani Hari and things like low sodium diets, but fairly positive towards people suffering from real diseases. I do like his facetious diet at the end. I highly recommend if you like skipping around a book (like I do) you don’t mistake it for a serious recommendation.

Food, pulses, weight loss, weight loss, whole grain

Intermittent fasting: Gina’s take.

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My takeaways from the book about fasting: Life in the Fasting Lane by Jason Fung, Eve Mayer and Megan Ramos.

Recently I was in an internet squabble with a woman who declared that pulses (do NOT come at my pulses!) were bad for you and you should never eat them. Then she told me to look up Dr. Jason Fung and I would learn everything. So I did. And because we live in the future, I was able to grab three of his books from the library.

Fung and his coauthors are selling a system they promise will work with your hormones and do not involve a calorie deficit. They will allow you to eat all the food you want. They claim that modern doctors have no clue how to deal with weight loss, and that anyone who tells you calories in calories out is misinformed.

Ok, that’s an interesting take.

They then proceed to teach an intermittent fasting method. In their method you fast for anywhere from a few hours to a week or more. Perhaps the biggest thing that hit me is the emphasis on eating normally* on the days you ‘feast’ (‘feast days’ are just days you eat a normal amount, not a day you splurge, like Thanksgiving). Oh, and you need to cut out all snacks- they want you eating 2 healthy* meals a day, not too large, and that’s it. So what do you get if you go from 2-3 meals a day with 1-2 snacks a day to 2 meals a day with no snacks AND skipping 2+ meals a week?

Say it with me- a calorie deficit!

How they managed to convince the thousands of people who like their program that this is not a simple calorie deficit is beyond me. There’s a lot of talk about hormones and basal metabolic rates and how fasting isn’t going to make your body think you are starving because literally ‘starvation isn’t voluntary, fasting is’ I don’t get. I don’t get how one of the authors ‘cured her PCOS’ by fasting- PCOS is currently incurable. You can reduce the symptoms with diet and medicine, but no one can possibly cure it. I have it. This woman who made this claim is a ‘clinical researcher’, so she ought to know.

Another thing that ‘clinical researchers’ ought to have caught is the authors interpretation of the studies which say that insulin causes weight gain. The studies they referenced watched diabetics gain eight after receiving insulin. The researchers continued to explain that as a result of the insulin, the people studied were more able to absorb nutrients from food, and the weight gain was prevented by reducing calories in a high protein, high fiber, moderate fat and carb diet.

I was also concerned with the ‘don’t talk to your doctor’ suggestion in the book. Saying that your doctor will think fasting is a fad (when it’s been around for 1000s of years) and advise you not to do it is a red flag to me.

Another red flag to me is the attitude towards food through out the book. People are not eating, they are ‘stuffing their faces’. Birthday cake should be avoided at all costs. Eating lasagna is a ‘bad day’. Remove yourself from dinner with the family so you aren’t tempted to eat. These just sound like they are promoting a poor relationship with food. And, of course, saying to avoid my beloved pulses, in addition to not eating potatoes, rice, mangoes, oranges, or bananas, just demonizes foods that are not in the least bad for you.  

Overall I found the book to be not helpful. It seems to be a warmed over Keto/Atkins style diet with little advice on how to have a healthy relationship with food.

Organization, Uncategorized

The Black Basket

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Black Basket of Stuff

I am a belt and suspenders type person. I don’t like being caught out without something we vitally need that makes life so much less comfortable for missing it. I only hope that this isn’t as outdated as the Office in a Bag.

So we’ve created a basket of things we leave where guests can see it in the bathroom, and take with us nearly everywhere it could be used. So, working the election, camping, the Fair, art festivals that aren’t 100% walking around with no car, etc.

It’s really handy and worth taking. So here it is.



The basket itself is a black basket because it was the beginning of November and it was on sale for 50¢. It’s not Halloweeny except for being black, and that’s fine with us. Any easily portable container would work.

Inside is a smaller container that’s a plastic ware that is missing its top. In that smaller container are bandages, a lens cleaner pad from the eye doctor, a small tube of cortisone (great for allergic reactions) a small tube of anti bacterial cream, for cuts, a tube of Benadryl (can you tell we have allergies?), and a mini eyeglass repair kit.

Larger things are a lint brush (I said this is left out for guests!  ), sun block, a reseal able back of wet naps (they kinds you get when you order ribs at a restaurant), Cutter Deet Free insect repellant, nail file and buffer, hand sanitizer (yes, this predates 2020- porto potties can be ick), Tylenol, Ammens Powder in a reused spice jar, tissues, dental floss, Nail polish remover wipes, a small bag with tampons and pads in it, and a small portable tube of bubbles.

Depending on where we are going, a deck of cards and/or a roll of toilet paper can get thrown in there.

My purse normally has a multitool, lifesavers, gum, a handkerchief, and a dice game called Cosmic Wimpout. If those weren’t carried separately, I may throw them in the basket.

Do we take this everywhere? No. Do we always bring it all? No. The lint brush is often left on the floor by the door when we leave. Do we carry this around all day? No. This is mainly for leaving in the car or at our site. And we don’t take it to the Beach because we have a separate bag for items that go there attached to our mini cooler.

But it’s a useful thing to have, in the bathroom for guests for find themselves in need, or watching Shakespeare in the Park and offering bug spray to the people next to us…

Surviving independently in a city.