OH BOY!!! Now you've gone and done it..... Probably ten people on the list were fixin' to do an elimination diet and decided to go and quietly open a vein instead. Oh good one Theo..... ROTFLMAO!!! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Baker" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2002 5:22 PM Subject: Plant Breeding and Consequences? Is it too much of a stretch to postulate that maybe paleo people actually had fewer negative dietary responses to what they gathered and ate than what modern peoples do today? Before the advent of agri-chemical pest control, the seeds from naturally resistant plants/strains were an important means of producing more than bugs could eat (or diseases decimate). Open-pollinated plants will readily cross-breed and produce their own mutations for better or worse, but hasn't nature had a great helping or hurting hand from humans who have selectively bred for resistant qualities that actually increase such things as phytate or lectin levels? Isn't it phytates that are supposed to deter bugs from eating the grain? Or is it lectins? I can't remember just now. Could salicylates or other potential offenders also fit this profile? Could we be responsible for some of the chronic diseases of civilization or allergic/intolerant/non-adaptive responses to certain foods because we have tinkered with the genes so much that they are different from their plant ancestors and way different from what our earliest fully human ancestors ate? Maybe 10,000-17,000 years is long enough to have at least some adaptation/tolerance, but not if we keep altering the nature of the foods we consume. Reading the ADHD article made me think more about this since the father noted several times that some foods that were tested several times over elicited wildly different repsonses in his son. What comes to my mind is that there's not just one single kind of generic rice that comes in plastic bags at the grocery store. Sometimes we know what variety we're buying, but most often not. Farmers have choices and preferences for what they grow, and each strain is a little different. Or on any day of the week, I can choose between two different varieties of fresh spinach at the grocery store. They're both spinach, but they're each different in leaf shape, size, color, and taste. A seed catalog gives me even more choices of varieties of vegetables and grains, sometimes almost unbelievable numbers of choices for each fruit and vegetable. Isn't it possible that a person could react to one kind of spinach and not to another or even three other kinds. Or to the starch in 6 different varieties of carrots but not to the starch in 8 other varieties? Or maybe there's something in addition to gluten (or maybe lacking in modern grains) that causes problems for people? As I've mentioned before, wheat gives me a reaction but rye doesn't seem to (though I choose not to eat grains at all). Grocery stores don't usually stick a label above produce saying what variety the eggplant or red lettuce is. Or what variety out of at least a dozen different varieties a pecan is. Or what variety a walnut is. What about allergies to meats? Could the breed make a subtle but very important difference as far as whether there's a reaction or not? Maybe it wasn't just the amines in that fish and poultry. Maybe it was the variety of fish or breed of chicken that gave different results. (And allergy testing is notorious for missing things that people self-report reacting to.) Anyway, for someone who's trying to do elimination testing, the picture gets way beyond complicated, I think. Theola