I saw a feature on Fox News just now about the gluten-free diet. I can’t believe this thing is still a fad, or understand why it ever was one.
Dr. Leffler, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told psychologytoday.com that, “People who are sensitive to gluten may feel better, but a larger portion will derive no significant benefit from the practice. They’ll simply waste their money.”
1. A person who truly needs to eat Gluten Free has a very serious medical condition known as Celiac Disease.
2. Eating Gluten Free food for the rest of us denies our bodies of complex and rich carbohydrates necessary for hunger satiety, digestion, stamina and fuel during exercise. Is it possible therefore that this life-style approach is really an eating disorder in disguise?
Pick up virtually any product in a grocery store today, and on it you will find some colorful bubble bragging about its lack of gluten. Do non-Celiac Disease sufferers (99% of the population) even know what gluten is, what it does, or why it’s supposedly bad for them? Probably not. But they’ve heard the term “gluten” thrown around a lot by people who are hip, and if a product is boasting of not containing gluten, then gluten must be a bad thing, right?
Celiac researchers say that “Claims [about gluten-free diets] seem to increase daily, with no adequate scientific support to back them up.”
“No adequate support to back them up.”
What else does this sound like? “Climate change,” “the war on women,” and opposition to the Keystone Pipeline?
Presactly. And the left is winning on all of these issues because they yell louder and oftener. It doesn’t matter if what they say is backed up by facts, because if it did, they’d never make it off the ground.
Fads are invented to make somebody a quick buck, and with liberals, it’s no different (though with the quick buck also comes oodles of power). Liberals are the masters of making fads catch on; the problem is, liberal fads are much more damaging than gluten (which isn’t really dangerous), hula hoops, and Dubstep, and far more forceful.
Conservatives fight an uphill battle because mass media is controlled by and large by the left. So what are we to do? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The only way fads gain steam is by sheeple who eat them up (pun intended in the case of gluten), so how can we lose if, rather than addressing liberal poison and taking the “dignify with an answer” approach, we change the subject and shout back facts until people start to listen?
Teresa Mull is the managing editor of Human Events.
