One of the key ideas of Neanderthin is that proteins identified
by the human body as foreign can lead to auto-immune diseases, in
which the body's immune system begins to attack tissues that are
*not* foreign.  One way in which this can happen is "molecular
mimicry", in which dietary protein A is identified by the immune
system as foreign, causing it to be targeted for agglutination
and destruction by macrophages.  If protein A sufficiently
resembles the body's own protein B in some tissue, then the
immune system may subsequently mistake B for A, and that is
auto-immune disease.

A question:  Once the mistake has been made, and protein B has
been mistakenly targeted by the immune system, removing protein A
from the diet ought to be of little help.  The immune system has
a memory, and so far no one knows how to edit it.  It will
continue to attack protein B even though A molecules are no
longer present, simply because it doesn't know the difference.
The immune system can of course be suppressed to some extent by
various drugs and natural substances, but this suppression is not
selective.

If all this is accurate, then an unhappy consequence is that
paleodiet may be more useful for preventing autoimmune diseases
than for treating them.  If removing a food from the diet
actually does improve an autoimmune disorder, wouldn't that
suggest that the disorder was not in fact autoimmune but an
intolerance of some sort?

Another mechanism of molecular mimicry that does not involved
autoimmunity may be more readily affected by diet change.  I am
thinking of the phenomenon in which wheat germ agglutinin (WGA)
is similar enough to insulin in structure that it is capable of
binding to insulin receptor sites, preventing insulin from doing
so.  This has the effect of increasing insulin resistance and
thus causing the various manifestations of Syndrome X.  In this
case, removing WGA from the diet would be expected to make a
difference.  Similarly, removing other lectins that bind to
certain tissues in the digestive tract, impairing function of
those tissues, would be expected to be helpful.

I'm just thinking "out loud" here, and doing a bit of reading
about lectins and diseases.

Todd Moody
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