<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

I posted earlier about anti-inflammatory diets, and i got requests to hear
more about it.  So I am posting what i have learned, and I hope it gets
posted.  Inflammation is involved in gluten intolerance, maybe in causing
it and it's certainly a consequence.

There has been research done on diet for various inflammatory conditions
including rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease, psoriasis,
etc.

The diet that helps for rheumatoid arthritis is:

- low in arachidonic acid.  This is a fat that is found only in food from
the animal kingdom, so if you want to reduce dietary arachidonic acid you
can either go vegan, or look up arachidonic acid contents of animal food
(including scallops etc.) in the USDA database (link to this on my web
page).  There is a link to a study of low-AA diet on my web page, which
used a max of 90 mg/day of AA.

- low fat.  How low-fat?  The studies I have seen have been of a < 10% fat
diet, but if you don't want to eat this little, reducing the fat might
help.

- with EPA/DHA fish oil supplements.  The study linked to on my web page
gives an amount of fish oil they used.

So I figure if you have inflammatory problems it is certainly worth trying
what helps people with rheumatoid arthritis.

I've been terribly sick with my grass pollen allergies this spring, sick
home in bed, and I think this might be related to eating a lot of salmon
for the omega-3 fats.  Salmon has omega-3's, but the farmed salmon around
here truly has a whopping amount of arachidonic acid.  Like 10 oz of
ground lamb, which is red meat that people are recommended to avoid
on anti-inflammatory diet, has  228 mg of arachidonic acid.  And 10 oz of
the salmon that's available here has 3,280 mg of AA!!  It's lower in total
fat and it has 15 times the amount of the pro-inflammatory fat that the
lamb does.

So be cautious about eating fish for health.  It seems like it depends on
the kind of fish, whether it's healthy or not.

Omega-6 fats and arachidonic acid in particular favor production of IgE
antibodies, so avoiding them might help with inhalant allergies, too.

There seems to be a link between insulin sensitivity and inflammation,
and one part of this link seems to be that arachidonic acid is converted
more into pro-inflammatory compounds if your blood insulin level is high,
which happens if you're insulin resistant.

Insulin resistance sometimes shows itself as carbohydrate intolerance, what
used to be called hypoglycemia but isn't literally low blood glucose.

So "hypoglycemia" and inflammation are definitely linked.  I have been
taking chromium and eating less fat and my carbohydrate tolerance has
gotten much, much better, I ate a banana the other day and it didn't cause
problems :)

Laura

http://www.lightlink.com/lark/nutr.html

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