Detergents, preservatives, pesticides and low quality ingredients are all great examples of things you can cut out eating at home. While we don't seem to have enough data to point to each one of them individually, it seems pretty common sense these are the new contributing factors in our environment.
Lectins, specifically gluten, are strongly associated with IBS. Many people have found relief from IBS by reducing or eliminating lectins in their diet, especially gluten. It is worth pointing out that wheat is an extremely common ingredient nowadays, but most of the wheat we grow and eat is no longer the traditional emmer or einkorn but a dwarf hybrid that among other differences produces extreme amounts of gluten.
GF support groups are full of tales from people who were able to eat wheat in Europe but not NA.
What they don't tell you about wheat very often is that people figured out that if you defoliate a wheat plant, it will shove its remaining calories into the developing seeds and then die. You can control the maturity of a wheat field by spraying it with RoundUp late in the season.
So where the reality versus PR for the decay rate of RoundUp in the environment leaves a very long safety margin with early season and pre-emergent uses of the stuff, whatever you sprayed a matter of weeks before harvest very much matters on variance between fields and between customer and manufacturer.
Yes my girlfriend has the same experience. Can eat wheat in Europe but American wheat causes digestive upset. Appears not to have bad reaction to barley or rye.
What you say is true, but the hybrid wheat rich in gluten has already existed for a few millennia and during all this time it has been the main staple food for hundreds of millions or even for billions of people, who have suffered no undesirable consequences from it.
Nowadays it seems that there are more and more people that are affected negatively by gluten consumption. Because this was much less frequent in the past, there must be an additional unidentified factor that causes gluten sensitivity and which has not existed formerly.
> who have suffered no undesirable consequences from it.
Is that really the case? I suspect it was more that people who had IBS or gluten sensitivity in the past just...died. If there was no understanding of the problem, then those suffering from it probably appeared to have something like dysentery, and would like just be lumped in with everyone else that had similar symptoms from various causes.
Unlike today, in Europe until relatively recently (before the use of maize or rice became common) there was no such thing as gluten-free food.
So absolutely everybody was continuously exposed to gluten, especially the poor majority of the population, for whom bread was the main source of proteins.
Anyone with gluten intolerance would have had very severe symptoms with no chance of recovery.
Nonetheless deaths with such symptoms were very rare.
> Anyone with gluten intolerance would have had very severe symptoms with no chance of recovery.
Exactly, anyone born with such intolerances likely didn't survive the early childhood, and anyone developing them later in life were probably not attributed to the gluten themselves. Anyone that made the connection between wheat-based products and their problems would also find themselves lacking nutrition most likely, which also leads to a whole host of problems.
What I'm saying is that we likely can never be sure what the 'baseline' prevalence was because the records do not have enough details to make that distinction. We can only really determine if its recently increasing. It may very well have also been a problem in past history too, but wasn't noticed as one, or was attributed to other causes.
What you say is certainly possible, but nonetheless I find it hard to believe that this has happened in reality.
The reason is that the non-existence of gluten-free food was not restricted to the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but in many places it remained true e.g. a half century ago.
Where I was born, in Eastern Europe, among the millions of citizens, there was no normal human who would not ingest a lot of gluten every day, but child mortality was very low and the incidence of celiac and similar diseases was low enough that the general public was completely unaware that such diseases even exist.
Moreover, there are published studies that conclude that at least during the last few decades the frequency of gluten-caused illness has been increasing.
AFAIU most people negatively affected by gluten are unaware of it, because the incomplete digestion of gluten yields morphine-like peptides which can mask the bowel symptoms.
While most emmer varieties have indeed more gluten than the hexaploid wheat, the varieties described in the article quoted by you have, as written in the article, between 30% and 40% more gluten.
Nowhere in this article an emmer with twice more gluten is mentioned.
Isn’t that article contradicting your point? They weren’t able to find any effect for dish detergent, and the effect they did find for rinse aids was not present at the concentrations used in residential dishwashers?
I just checked, and my detergent (Finish Quantum) has alcohol ethoxylates in it. I wonder if with newer high efficiency dishwashers that use less water, this stuff isn't getting rinsed off as well.
Not if you grew up in a household that never used "rinse aid" and never thought to look up what the little clear plastic window on the inside of dishwasher doors is for!
> "Interestingly, detergent residue from professional dishwashers demonstrated the remnant of a significant amount of cytotoxic and epithelial barrier–damaging rinse aid remaining on washed and ready-to-use dishware."
Yes, the article (and your parent comment) accepts that this is true for professional dishwashers (not household ones):
> A professional dishwasher completes 1 or 2 wash and rinse cycles using 3.5 L of water per cycle. The detergent and rinse aid are automatically dispensed into the water at a concentration of 1.5 to 4 mL/L and 0.1 to 0.5 mL/L, respectively. At these concentrations, the residual dilution factor after rinse ranges from 1:250 to 1:667 for detergents and 1:2,000 to 1:10,000 for rinse aids.
> Household dishwasher detergents in a normal cup and plate washing program typically consume a total of 12 L of water: 4.8 L during the washing cycle, 3.6 L of water for the intermediate rinse cycle, and 3.6 L of water for the final rinse cycle. Between the washing and rinsing cycles, 200 mL of water remains inside the dishwasher. Accordingly, the dilution factor for one 20-g tablet of detergent is 1:80,000 (w/v).
The detergent residue they are talking about there isn't the detergent from washing, it is the rinse aid. Rinse aids are detergents that cut surface tension to let the water bead off faster.
They found nothing wrong with washing with detergent, just using rinse aid to dry in a commercial setting due to the detergent residue the rinse aid could leave.
Because the linked research does not support the point the poster is making. The researchers did not find a link with dishwasher detergents. They found a link with rinse aids, but at quantities and concentrations far higher than you'd find in a dishwasher.
Also, I think we should all be skeptical of someone who says, essentially, "Don't want colorectal cancer? Rinse your dishes and don't eat at restaurants!" Such a simple explanation for colorectal cancer seems suspicious... at best.
This rapid increase is especially puzzling because the rate of colorectal cancer has plummeted among older adults—largely due to regular colonoscopies and lower rates of smoking.
“We don’t understand a lot about the causes, the biology, or how to prevent early onset of the disease,” said Phil Daschner, a program director in NCI’s Division of Cancer Biology. “And that’s important to learn more about because it may affect [approaches for] the treatment and survivorship of early-onset colon cancer.”
The cited paper is not sufficient to explain the dramatic rise. It would have been seen much earlier (since the 50s) that the trend was obvious. Putting forth "just do X" is a low effort post. It has a paper, which is something, but it's far from definitive, although it's phrased as such.
I'm sure someone thought the same as me, but they thought clicking the down button was the correct response. I don't agree, but I understand that not everyone is put together before the coffee kicks in.
I have had 2 quarter-coin sized growths removed from my colon. The underlying cause is undiagnosed. They were not cancerous, by analysis. I believe the growths started in Washington State 6ish years ago and black mold was a contributor, with other factors. Growths have not returned.
It's theorized that the fungus (which was everywhere in buildings I spent time in) created ulcers or disrupted ulcers, allowing the underlying cause to take hold.
The reason I asked is I knew someone who got lung cancer and died (a long time ago) and the oncologist said it was bc of the black mold on the walls in their room. I was wondering if the ill effects extended to colon cancer.
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(22)01477-4/ful...
Detergents, preservatives, pesticides and low quality ingredients are all great examples of things you can cut out eating at home. While we don't seem to have enough data to point to each one of them individually, it seems pretty common sense these are the new contributing factors in our environment.