The Virgin Diet (8 page)

One of the most common triggers for autoimmune diseases is a vitamin D deficiency, so make sure your levels are somewhere in the 60 to 80 ng/ml range. (Your doctor can test your 25-hydroxy vitamin D level.)

AUTOIMMUNITY AND GLUTEN SENSITIVITY

I’ve known for a while that gluten sensitivity and autoimmunity were related, but I was blown away by this powerful quote from Peter Osborne, DC, a board-certified doctor in clinical nutrition and a leading expert in gluten intolerance and celiac disease:

Be careful when supplementing, though. When vitamin D is manufactured, gluten and dairy are often used to create the finished product, but ingredients used to make an initial raw ingredient do not need to be noted on the bottle. So, if your supplements make you feel worse, you need to check them out. If you’re working with a practitioner who’s
aware of this issue, find out whether your brands are safe. Otherwise, just buy one of the trusted brands I recommend in the Resources section on my website.

Gluten-containing grains have both lectins and phytates, which are just bad news. Lectins can bind to insulin receptors, which then creates insulin resistance, which means that your blood sugar rises making it harder to burn off fat. Lectins can also bind to your intestinal lining, which contributes to altered gut flora, causing you to store more calories from the food you eat and, worse yet, store it as fat. Lectins can also be associated with leptin resistance. Because leptin is the hormone that helps regulate feelings of hunger and fullness, leptin resistance makes you hungrier even when you’ve had all the food you need. It also puts you at risk for metabolic syndrome, the triple threat of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. Fun stuff, huh? Take it from me, you don’t need the aggravation.

Phytates are equally bad. Found in gluten and other whole grains, we call them the antinutrient because they make minerals bio-unavailable. So much for all those healthy vitamins and minerals we’re supposedly getting from whole grains! The whole-grain goodness notion is a fallacy (see page 163 for more on the role of whole grains in the Virgin Diet). If you really want a small amount of grain in your diet, stick to rice, gluten-free oatmeal, millet, buckwheat and amaranth. You can also choose sweet potatoes, quinoa, lentils and legumes, so don’t feel that you need to eat grains to be healthy.

The whole-grain goodness notion is a fallacy.

SOME COOL SUBSTITUTIONS

• Instead of regular pasta,
  try rice pasta, quinoa pasta or spaghetti squash.
  
• Instead of tortillas,
  try brown rice wraps or large leaves of Romaine lettuce.
  
• Instead of wheat or rye flour,
  try almond or coconut flour.
  
• Instead of soy sauce,
  try coconut aminos.
  
• Instead of couscous,
  try quinoa.
  
• Instead of floury pizza crusts,
  try a slice of eggplant or a portobello mushroom.
  

Gluten is
everywhere,
so read your labels carefully. American strains of wheat have a much higher gluten content than those traditionally found in Europe. This super gluten was recently introduced into our agricultural food supply and has now “infected” nearly all wheat strains in America. Now we have light, fluffy white bread and giant bagels. And gluten lurks in even more places.

GLUTEN HIDES IN…

All brans

Baked beans

Biscuits and cookies

Blue cheeses

Bread and bread rolls

Breadcrumbs

Brown rice syrup

Bulgur wheat

Cakes

Cheap brands of chocolate

Chutneys and pickles

Couscous

Crispbreads

Crumble toppings

Durum

Farina

Gravy powders and stock cubes

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP)

Imitation crabmeat

Licorice

Luncheon meats (may contain fillers)

Malt vinegar

Malted drinks

Many salad dressings

Matzo flour/meal

Meat and fish pastes

Muesli

Muffins

Mustard and dry mustard powder

Pancakes

Pasta (e.g., macaroni and spaghetti)

Pastry and pie crust

Pâtés

Pizza

Pretzels

Pringles potato chips

Pumpernickel

Rye bread

Sauces (often thickened with flour)

Sausages (often contain rusk)

Scones

Seitan (doesn’t contain gluten, it is gluten!)

Self-basting turkeys

Semolina

Shredded suet in packs

Some alcoholic drinks

Some breakfast cereals

Soups (may be roux-based)

Soy sauce

Spice blends

Stuffing

Waffles

White pepper

Yorkshire pudding

Many lunch meats are injected with gluten. I guess that’s because it’s so good at stabilizing and thickening, but it’s probably also why so many of us have developed gluten sensitivity. So make sure your lunch meat is gluten-free, or pick up fresh, gluten-free foods instead, such as fresh chicken or wild salmon. If you need “grab and go” protein, consider some gluten-free, grass-fed beef jerky or an aseptic pack of wild salmon. They are healthier choices for many other reasons, too.

Oatmeal itself is gluten-free, so in theory, you should be able to eat anything made with oats (as long as it doesn’t contain dairy, eggs or gluten!). However, oatmeal is often made in places where they also process grains that
do
contain gluten, and there is a great deal of cross-contamination. So make sure you’re buying only oatmeal that is marked “gluten-free.” (You can find a list of brands in the Resources section on my website.)

Now that more and more people are realizing the dangers of gluten, a whole new line of gluten-free products has come on the market. This can be a problem, though, because a lot of these foods aren’t healthy and can lead to weight gain—even if they are gluten-free!

In fact, gluten-free has become the new faux health food. There are gluten-free cookies, breads and muffins. Most of those are loaded with sugar.
Gluten-free
does not necessarily mean healthy—and it
definitely
does not mean good for weight loss.

If you’re looking at a food that’s completely processed, it is not healthy.

I’ve had clients who went along with my recommendation to pull all the gluten out of their diets, and all of a sudden they’re gorging themselves on gluten-free bread, muffins, cookies and cakes. I say, “Hey, you didn’t eat this stuff before! Why are you eating it now?”

I don’t care where you found it or what the label says, if you’re looking at a food that’s completely processed, it is not healthy. A rice cake,
bread, cookie, muffin or cracker might be gluten-free, but it’s processed, so leave it, all right?

Do you want some
real
gluten-free goodness? The very best gluten-free foods come in their own natural packaging. Some of my favorite examples are apples, broccoli, sweet potatoes and avocados.

When you remove the gluten from the diet of someone who is gluten-sensitive, you can get near-miraculous results. My client Petra had suffered for a year with chronic tendinitis. She had seen numerous physical therapists, plus MDs, acupuncturists and pain specialists. None of them could make much of a difference in her condition, and in fact, the pain was getting worse.

Then, she gave up gluten for 1 week, and suddenly all of her pain was gone. If I hadn’t seen it myself—and if I hadn’t experienced a miniversion of her experience with my own gluten-induced swollen fingers—I’m not sure I would have believed it.

Petra is not my only client to experience such dramatic responses to a gluten-free diet, not to mention the countless men and women who simply feel better when they don’t consume it. George, my client who couldn’t bear to give up bread, was actually delighted to discover how much better he felt on a gluten-free regime.

“I just feel clearer and more focused,” he told me when we last met. “And I’ve definitely got more energy. Plus, I have to admit, cutting out gluten made it a lot easier to lose weight!”

“It’s hard to get in trouble when you pull gluten out,” I agreed. “No pizza, no baked goods, no pasta, no bread—a lot of weight-loss obstacles are just out the window.”

George laughed. “I remember how I thought I could never live without gluten,” he told me. “And now, to be honest, I can’t even imagine eating it again. Who could have thought that gluten-free would feel so good?”

For my entire life, I had intestinal issues that doctors were not able to diagnose. For decades, doctors dealt with my symptoms with no clue as to the cause.

Then I met JJ, who had me pull gluten and eggs out of my diet. I was skeptical at the beginning, but then my symptoms disappeared almost immediately. I was so excited to finally have an answer to my health problems! I was grateful beyond words that JJ understood what was wrong with me and could help me find a solution that actually worked.

Any time I add in gluten or eggs, I immediately get the same symptoms that I had before. But when I leave them out of my diet, my energy is better, I sleep better and my overall health is excellent.

Thanks to JJ, my life changed dramatically. I had accepted my physical lot in life as something I just had to live with, and I never really expected to find a solution.

I still can’t believe what a difference it made to pull out these so-called “healthy” foods that were almost killing me. Pulling out these problem foods changed my life.

I get lots of letters and e-mails from men and women who discover my website, see me on television or attend one of my lectures. But the following, hands down, has got to be one of the most moving e-mails I have ever received:

I was so happy to help Bryn—and I was so glad to get the word out about soy. Although there is so much propaganda out there about how healthy soy is, the truth is much more disturbing. Although you might be able to tolerate small amounts of organic fermented soy, you certainly shouldn’t be eating soy in large amounts—and, like Bryn, you might not be able to tolerate any soy at all. Let’s take a closer look.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave the past 15 years, you’ve heard the hype: soy is the new miracle food that helps your heart and makes you healthy. Don’t believe it. The health benefits of soy have been greatly exaggerated, mostly by the soy industry itself.

Here are just some of the key problems with soy:

The health benefits of soy have been greatly exaggerated, mostly by the soy industry itself.

• It disrupts your hormones.
  Soy is what’s known as a
  phyto-estrogen
  —a plant source of the hormone estrogen. The jury is still out on whether soy is a positive or a negative for women, but it definitely isn’t good for children or men.
  
• It’s bad for your thyroid.
  Chronic soy consumption may impair thyroid function, which, as Bryn found out, makes it nearly impossible to lose weight.
  
• It’s new to the food supply.
  Generally, the stuff we’ve been eating for our entire history on the planet is healthier than the food items we’ve added to our diets more recently.
  
• It’s genetically modified.
  The new trend of genetically modifying vast amounts of our food supply is one of the scariest developments in recent years, and the soy crop is one of the most genetically modified there is—more than 90 percent, by most estimates.
  
• It’s overly processed.
  Usually, the more processed a food has been, the more it’s been stripped of vital nutrients. That equals empty calories—and why do that to your body?
  

Now, if you don’t react to soy and don’t have thyroid or estrogen issues, you can incorporate a small amount of fermented soy into your diet, but only organic, please, and not daily—just a couple times a week. But we
won’t know whether it’s okay to put soy back in until we take it out. So, for Cycle 1, I want you to be 100 percent soy-free.

I’d also like you to understand my concerns—and my colleagues’ concerns—about this problematic food. By the time you’ve finished this chapter, I want you to be 100 percent clear about why I find no joy in soy.

Soy has been marketed as the miracle food of all time, maybe because it can be produced cheaply and some big companies have invested in its production and modification. If you go to Natural Products Expo West and other big health-food conventions, they can seem like one big homage to soy.

Yet, eating soy on a daily basis may create problems, whether in traditional forms like tofu and edamame or in more modern incarnations, such as soy milk, soy ice cream and soy cheese. One study showed that high midlife tofu consumption—high being only 2 servings per week—increased the risk of late-life cognitive impairment and dementia in both men and women.
10
Another study, published by Hogervorst and his colleagues, showed that tofu intake was associated with poor memory and dementia in a group of 700 older adults.
11

Soy can be an
anti
nutrient.

Soy is rich in phytates, or phytic acid, which blocks the absorption of minerals, especially calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc. In other words, soy can be an
anti
nutrient. To neutralize the phytates in soy, you’d have to ferment the heck out of it, as they do in Asia. That is not how most of our soy is prepared here.

Soy is also full of trypsin inhibitors. Trypsin is an enzyme produced in the pancreas that we need to digest protein. Trypsin inhibitors can interfere with protein digestion and cause pancreatic disorders. Not surprisingly, in countries where there is more soy consumption, we find more pancreatic, stomach and thyroid cancers.

Soy promoters will tell you that soy is good for osteoporosis. But as we just saw, the phytates in soy can impair calcium and magnesium absorption. So how is that good for your bones? Soy also increases the body’s need for vitamin D. Often, vitamin D2, also known as ergocalciferol, will be added to soy milk. However, the preferred form of vitamin D is D3, or cholecalciferol. This is the form of vitamin D that humans synthesize from sunlight. It is more potent and stable than D2, raises blood levels of vitamin D longer and binds to vitamin D receptors better—but it’s not usually found in soy milk, even as soy increases your body’s need for it. So, in all those senses, soy can be bad for bone health.

The phytates in soy can impair calcium and magnesium absorption.

What about soy as a source of protein? Again, the news is not good. Although soy is a complete protein, it has very low amounts of two essential amino acids, lysine and methionine, so it is not a quality protein source.

You might have heard reports that modern soy foods offer protection against some types of cancer. However, according to a 2002 report by the United Kingdom Food Standards Agency's Committee on Toxicity, there’s not much evidence for that. Soy foods might even result in an increased risk of certain cancers.

Now, there is
some
evidence that soy lowers cholesterol. However, I am still not convinced that lowering cholesterol reduces your risk for heart disease. In any case, there are far better ways to lower cholesterol, including lowering your overall glycemic load, getting rid of damaged fats and increasing your intake of fiber.

If you’ve been keeping score, you can see that there are lots of reasons to avoid soy and really no reason at all to consume it. Unfortunately, there are a lot more soy negatives still to come.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, ATE

Sometimes you think you’ve done all there is to do, and then one of those sneaky high-FI foods makes it into your diet anyway. For example, I once had a very soy-sensitive client who had cut out all the soy—we thought—and she was still getting sick. We wondered where the heck it was coming from.

It turned out that she had been buying chicken—from a well-known health-food store, mind you!—and those chickens had been fed soy. People say, “You are what you eat,” but I say, “You are what you eat, ate.” It is challenging because most chickens, even the naturally raised ones, have their diet supplemented with corn and/or soy. Fortunately, unless you are highly sensitive to soy or corn, this won’t create a problem for you, but ideally you will want to seek out the cleanest sources of poultry you can find. Make friends with your local farmers or check out U.S. Wellness Meats (see the Resources section on my website).

Now, at this point you might be thinking,
But they eat a lot of soy in Asia, and isn’t it good for people’s health there?

For millennia, the Asians used soy as a fertilizer crop. They rotated it in between the plantings of their regular crops because it replenished the soil with nitrogen, much like fertilizer does. Then, someone discovered that if you fermented soybeans, you could overcome a lot of their antinutrient properties. So Asians began consuming fermented soy, but not a lot of it. Having lived in Japan, I can tell you that I never saw anyone eat soy ice cream, soy cheese, soy hot dogs, soy burgers, soy pops or soy milk. True, soy is part of the traditional Asian diet, but they do not eat a big pile of it. You have a little miso soup, some tofu in a stir-fry or some soy sauce with your sushi. You don’t drink a big soy shake in the morning, have a soy yogurt at lunch and have soy cheese or tofu stir-fry at dinner.

Basically, in Asia, soy is a condiment. It is
not
a replacement for animal proteins.

Plus, the soy in Asia is organic—no GMOs and no chemicals in the fertilizer. And Asian soy is very fermented, which helps reduce phytates and lectins. That is a very different way to use soy. Yes, if you ate soy the way they do in Asia—in small, organic, fermented amounts—it would probably be okay. But living in the United States, that is nearly impossible to do, and just about all of our soy crop has been genetically modified. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I want to get to some other health concerns.

Let’s start with sex hormones. For both men and women, this is kind of a scary topic. Researchers are still trying to figure out whether soy stimulates cancer cells—especially breast cancer cells—and the growth
of estrogen-dependent tumors. We don’t yet know, but we do know that soy is a phytoestrogen—a plant source of estrogen. That means that it can disrupt hormone balances for both genders.

For women, depending on how much you eat, soy can affect ovulation. Although phytoestrogens are being touted as good for postmenopausal women, there is not yet any clear proof to show that this is the case.

As for men, how can all that estrogen be good for them? I don’t think it is. Soy can lower testosterone in men. In fact, there’s an old wives’ tale in Japan that when women are worried about their husbands’ fidelity, they feed their men soy—to keep them from fooling around. I don’t know about that, but we do see more infertility with excessive soy consumption. Soy has also been linked to infertility in animals.

Soy can also affect children’s development, thanks to its hormonal effects. Boys’ genitals may not develop fully, and little girls may develop faster and start their menses earlier than normal. You don’t want to feed soy to infants either. It can impact brain and nervous system development.

Bryn found out this sad truth the hard way: soy can depress thyroid function. I’ve seen this often among my clients. When they eat soy every day, they tend to have elevated levels of TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone), which is an indicator of hypothyroidism. Then I see their thyroid numbers come back to normal quickly when soy is taken out of their diets.

Depending on how much you’ve tweaked your thyroid already, you might need some extra support for getting it back in shape, so I suggest you talk to your doctor. Make sure your doctor runs the full panel of
thyroid tests. Many general practitioners and endocrinologists only run tests for TSH and T4, the inactive thyroid. You also need to be tested for free T3 (the active thyroid hormone, which is converted from T4) and thyroid antibodies so you get a full picture of what’s going on.

You want to test the antibodies because, sad to say, soy can trigger an autoimmune condition in which your body makes antibodies that attack your thyroid hormone. As a result, even if your thyroid gland is making enough of this vital biochemical, your body doesn’t get what it needs because the antibodies are destroying it. A high level of thyroid antibodies often indicates some kind of autoimmune condition.

I have heard many clients say, “My thyroid antibodies were high. We’re going to watch them.” That’s not what you want to do. If you see a high level of antibodies, you need to pull out all the potentially reactive foods immediately. When you pull out gluten, dairy and soy, the antibodies often come down quickly. Luckily, with the Virgin Diet, that is what you’re doing anyway.

Soy’s impact is all the more problematic because it’s not the only factor that can affect thyroid function or disrupt the conversion of inactive T4 to active T3. Other disrupters include heavy metal toxicity, nutritional deficiencies and poor iodine status. Aging can be a factor, as can genetics. And of course, our old friend stress has a big role to play, too.

Finally, soy has been linked to thyroid cancer and to autoimmune thyroid disease in infants drinking soy formula. You can see why I’m concerned about you eating soy.

HYPOTHYROID: COMMON SYMPTOMS

Congested skin or acne

Constipation

Depression

Dry, brittle nails

Elevated cholesterol

Enlarged neck

Exhaustion

Feeling cold

Hair loss, thinning or dry hair

Inability to sweat

Infertility

Low libido

Memory problems

Menstrual irregularities