Democraps: "We're full of it."
Democraps: "We're full of it."
I just send my crap out the back door. Works every day (except when I’m dieting).
I still say nothing is better than a good healthy BM in the morning to get the day started right.
There was a trend — I was going to say, a “movement” — in California (where else?) a decade or so ago to visit clinics where you would be administered mega-enemas under the delusion that a high colonic was a lifesaver. I don’t know how many of them have survived, but it’s proof that idiotic fads are always cropping up among stupid, gullible, trend-addicted people.
I had an acquaintance who drank a bottle of olive oil one day in a month. She refused to take any antibiotics. She was convinced that she and liver problems (she probably did) and that this monthly cleansing was necessary to preserve her liver. She was always sick and looked awful.
“It made no difference that neither the specific poisons nor the mechanisms by which they might be causing harm were known or named. In the realm of quackery, vague is better.”
Sounds awful to the global warming nonsense...settled science, vast agreement and totally bursting colons of quackery.
If you fast, you don’t poop or pass the gas.
Highly recommend Mary Roach’s “Gulp” mentioned in the article.
I disagree about the author’s implication that gluten intolerance is just a fad. There really is a biochemical issue with consuming grains. But as some have pointed out, the problem may be that bread today is mass produced with rapid techniques that leave the gluten in the final product, whereas bread used to be slowly fermented, rising over 24 hours to several days.
“Today, autointoxication lives on in the form of fruitless cleanse diets and enemas of all sorts.”
This is one of the problems with absolutist writing. Often medical fads have at least some truth behind them, so an “either/or” approach doesn’t work.
As far as cleanse diets go, some of them are quite efficacious, and are backed by science. For example, human bile is generated to neutralize stomach acid; then after doing so, it is recycled in the body. However, several toxic metals can be recycled with it, eventually building up in the body.
So consuming some water soluble fiber that tend to bind with bile will flush a lot of it, and these associated metals, out of your system.
Other cleansers are used after the liver and kidneys have been stressed in some way, or after several years for the liver, which may need a bit of routine cleaning. No surprise, because it is quite a chemistry lab and does a multitude of complex reactions.
For the several million Americans who knowingly or not suffer from celiac disease, gluten is a scientifically proven villain. Since most cases of celiac disease are never medically diagnosed, for such individuals, gluten is the root cause of a lifetime of nonspecific complaints of fatigue, poor health, and of specific maladies like osteoporosis and autoimmune disorders.
Celiac disease and other digestive disorders commonly also affect mood and personality. Some gastroenterology references describe a complaining "celiac personality" that improves with the elimination of gluten. Indeed, for celiacs, a missing digestive enzyme leads to the creation of a toxic peptide -- which is a way of saying that for celiacs, gluten is toxic.
Similarly, food intolerances and allergies, IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and IBD (Inflammatory bowel disease) are common ailments that are usually diagnosed only after years of vague ill health. IBS and IBD are influenced by diet and can to a degree be treated by dietary changes.
A century ago, was the idea of "autointoxication" wrong? By modern standards of medical science it was, but in many cases, it surely described digestive complaints that were genuine and would now be diagnosed in modern terms as food allergies and intolerances, celiac disease, IBS, and IBD.
Even Mechnikov's odd practice of drinking sour milk cannot be entirely rejected. Beneficial bacteria are now recognized to be helpful in many digestive ailments. In some rare cases, such good bacteria are provided via a "poop transplant" when an especially dangerous bacteria Clostridium difficile has taken hold.
The bottom line: the comparison fails at both ends. For millions of Americans today, gluten really is a scientifically proven villain, and a century ago, the term "autointoxication" broadly described the wide range of digestive ailments that we commonly suffer from.
...and global warming.
I eat wheat, I get heartburn. I don’t, I never get heartburn. 20 years of having a Tums bottle in every room of the house was enough for me. Done with wheat.
