In the last few days I’m seeing all sorts of headlines that claim food allergies are all in our heads and implying things like health consequences if we don’t eat wheat.

I can’t think of anything further from the truth.

Wheat is not a required ingredient in anyone’s healthy diet. In fact, we are so bombarded by wheat in everything - I have found it as starch in everything from soup to cheese spreads to juice-based drinks! Wheat has become the one size fits all food, even though it’s so highly processed in most items that your body could hardly recognize it.

People have been living on this planet without eating wheat for millennia. What about all those traditional cultures who lived in parts of the world where wheat was unknown? How come they weren’t dying like flies? The Inuit never ate wheat before the influence of European cultures and diabetes in their peoples is now reaching epidemic proportions.

So, what’s behind all this noise that we shouldn’t exclude a food from our diet before we are diagnosed? If I feel better when I don’t eat wheat, then that should be enough evidence that avoiding wheat helps me. I don’t have to have an “official” diagnosis of allergy: after all, people do have other kinds of food intolerances that also benefit from excluding a food from the diet.

It really makes me wonder. I bet if I check the funding for the studies and medical experts who are speaking out on this topic, I’d be able to follow it back to one of those companies who depend on wheat - in one way or another - to make a profit.