Your health guru has just told you to fix your health problem, you need to follow an elimination diet. This elimination diet goes beyond the obvious things you should eliminate – sweets, cookies, chocolate and chips. You’re eliminating REAL foods, foods that have been part of the human diet for thousands of years.

The major items on your ELIMINATE list include

• wheat, rye and barley – because gluten, a tough little protein which causes your gut to leak.
• milk – because in addition to lactose, which is a challenge to digest if you’re lactose intolerant, it has casein, THE PROTEIN in cow’s milk, casein can also cause your gut to leak
• plus, nightshades (aka potatoes) and legumes ……

You reaction to this elimination diet – is it will “eliminate” you, because there is nothing left to eat.

Eish………

How did REAL food become bad for you ?  Actually it is nothing new….

Chemical warfare the norm

Plants are SITTING DUCKS……. sitting being the operative word. If you SIT in one spot, you and your kin, are vulnerable to being eaten by anything that passes by.

Savvy plants, realizing the constraints of SITTING, long ago made a plan.

The plan…………….. POISON the thing trying to eat you. Okay, POISON is a bit extreme, but the aim of the game, make eating YOU, a not so pleasant option.

So plants have sophisticated weaponary to “fight back”. Gluten is wheat’s piece de le resistance.

But hungry beetles need to eat

Beetles need to eat, so hungry beetles needed to make a plan to survive and thrive, in a toxic world.

Researchers from Penn State University have uncovered how the Colorado potato beetle fights back against tomato plant’s defences.

Their secret weapon – BEETLE JUICE.

What is beetle juice ?

In a word – spit, gob, saliva.

Sort of, beetles do not actually have salivary glands or teeth, for that matter. So when a beetle sits down for dinner, they have to spit secretions on the leaf, to get the digestive process going.

These secretions contain a mix of enzymes and things, plus an assortment of the beetle’s special friends. Beetles, just like humans, cultivate a gut garden full of gut flora, who help with digestion.

Beetle tummy aches

The beetles bacterial crew, neutralize the jasmonite weapon of the tomato plant, which is designed to give marauding beetles, a gigantic tummy ache.

Allowing the beetles to keep munching.

And munching. And munching.

Leading to healthy beetles and happy bacteria. And…… not so happy tomato plants.

Only when the bacteria are forcefully removed from the beetle juice, by dosing the leaves with antibiotic, do plants succeed in thwarting the beetle attack.

Just three species lead the counter attack

The team discovered beetle juice includes 22 different types of bacteria.

Only three of the species were able to suppress the plants anti-herbivore defences. Three VERY SPECIAL friends.

Pepping up with beetle juice

Bacteria turn beetle juice into a concoction which peps up beetles, allowing them to survive and thrive… despite the plant’s attempts to defeat them.

The final score……

BEETLES 1 : PLANT 0

Are we missing an ingredient in our “beetle” juice, which is turning wheat into a winner ?

The wheat wars

Right now, the score

WHEAT 10 : HUMANS 0

For decades, man has been ahead in the wheat war, but more and more people are succumbing to the gluten weapon. The evidence that wheat upped it’s game and is fighting dirty, is not supported by science. It is far more likely, we’ve lost the services of a friend or two….

Cultivate your microflora, to give yourself the edge in the wheat wars.

Further reading

Are today’s kids too clean for their own good ?	Stress eruptions cause gut residents to flee	Fat people aren’t lazy they just have very busy friends

Feel like you’re allergic to the world ? 

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