This Is Your Brain on Gluten

I figured I would post this here as I think it is a well written article that could spur some fun discussion:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/this-is-your-brain-on-gluten/282550/

Now it is rather long and if you only read it halfway you might come away thinking that Dr. David Perlmutter has found the most compelling reason yet for avoiding gluten but if that's where you land then you are missing the whole point. Instead, here are some pertinent quotes for the TL;DR crowd:

“It’s important to realize,” Kresser says, “that just because a low-carb diet can help treat neurological disorders, doesn’t mean the carbs caused the disorder in the first place.”
Kresser also tells concerned patients about cultures that do just fine on carbohydrate-based diets.

Lustig says that at this point gluten is a grab bag. “I have taken kids off of gluten, but in no way, shape, or form do I think this is a panacea.”

“Of course,” Katz added, “Everything about the Paleolithic Era is subject to debate. Most of us don’t know what we had for breakfast yesterday, let alone what people were doing 100,000 years ago.

Perlmutter has estimated that the Stone Age diet was 75 percent fat, a claim Katz finds “wildly preposterous.” Anthropological research, he pointed out the work of Loren Cordain, suggests that in the age before cooking oil, humans ate mostly plants with a scattering of seeds and nuts. “Virtually nothing in the natural world is that concentrated of a fat source, except maybe for the brain. Maybe if they just ate the brains of animals? They didn’t have oil. They only started adding oil to the diet after the Dawn of Agriculture. What the hell could they possibly have eaten that would be that fatty?'"

The law of good science is that you can’t say “I’ve got an idea and I’m going to fall in love with it and selectively cite evidence to support it.”
“You’re only being a good scientist,” Katz said, “if you say, ‘I’m going to try to read the literature in as unbiased a manner as I possibly can, see where it leads me, and then offer the advice that I have based on that view from an altitude.’ I don’t see that going on here, and again, I think it’s kind of sad because I think the public is being misled.”

We do not have reason to believe that gluten is bad for most people. It does cause reactive symptoms in some people. Peanuts can kill some people, but that does not mean they are bad for everyone. I agree with Katz that the diets consistently shown to have good long-term health outcomes—both mental and physical—include whole grains and fruits, and are not nearly as high in fat as what Perlmutter proposes.

When a person advocates radical change on the order of eliminating one of the three macronutrient groups from our diets, the burden of proof should be enormous. Everything you know is not wrong. Perlmutter has interesting ideas that I would love to believe. I’d love it if a diet could deliver all that he promises. There is value in belief. It's what the Empowering Neurologist literally markets. His narrative comes with the certainty that you are doing something to save yourself from cognitive decline and mental illness, which is probably the most unsettling of disease prospects.

All in all, I think any diet which promises to cure you of most if not all of your ills is rather suspect. I choose to believe that if you want to feel better than step one is listening to your body as it really does know what it needs to be healthy. Step two is to consult a registered dietician. Since we are all special and unique snowflakes there is not going to be any one diet/plan/book which will work for everyone and personalization is the key.