Wheat Free, Gluten Free, Grain Free – What’s the Difference?

What’s the wheat free gluten free difference? If you’re starting out with a lower carb diet or choosing less gluten it’s an important distinction.

Here’s help to get your gluten free diet started.  Or maybe you’ll start with wheat free. Good luck and watch for great things to happen!  My life changed the day I stopped eating wheat.  I hope your’s does as well!

Does the Wheat Free Gluten Free Difference Matter?

Wheat, rice, corn, and oats are categorized as “cereal grasses”. When we eat these grains, we are eating grass seed, a biologically oddity since humans are not grass grazers. We can’t chew or digest grass, and ancient grasses (as opposed to modern hybridized ones) had tiny seed heads on top of large plant stalks.  The animals we hunted ate the grass, and converted it to protein and fat for us.

Gluten is a combination of glutenin and gliadin, proteins found in wheat, barley, spelt and rye seeds, and usually in oats as well. Corn and rice are gluten free but high in starchy carbs.

Commercial grains have undergone extensive hybridization, and more recently, genetic modification as well. The plants don’t look or taste the same as they did 10,000 years ago, and are not the same biologically.

This may be one reason why the autoimmune intestinal disorder, Celiac Disease, has tripled in the last 50 years. (One in 100 people now have Celiac Disease, but as many as 80% of them don’t know it. Could you be one of them?).

Going completely gluten free is a good start for Celiac patients, or for those wanting to see how they feel without this man-manipulated grain, but in my experience Celiacs need to actually go Grain Free and follow a Paleo Diet to heal the gut.

Want to try a health experiment? Here’s some tips on eliminating grains and what to eat instead.

Possible Benefits from Reducing Grains?

Watch for positive changes in weight, blood sugar, digestion, sleep, reflux, pain, skin, gas, temperament and more. These are important clues you are on the right track. Keep going!

• Step One: Eliminate wheat products first (breads, pasta, gravy, pancakes, etc.). Read up on wheat-free foods and discover where wheat is hiding in plain sight, such as cornbread and gravy. Eat more proteins, veggies, fats, butter and eggs to replace those starchy, fattening breads and cookies!

• Step Two: Eliminate the other gluten grains – rye, barley, spelt, and usually oats. Read where gluten is hiding to master this step. Beer, soy sauce, packaged foods, sauces and mashed potato can all hide a teaspoon or more of flour or gluten.

Helpful Hint: Try to avoid commercial gluten free cookies, cakes, cereals, pasta and breads made from high starch ingredients such as potato starch, corn, rice flour, tapioca starch and sugar. They are high in calories and will increase glucose levels.

Going gluten free should bring weight loss, not weight gain.

• Step Three: Ready for more? Eliminate rice and corn products and other grain-like foods such as Quinoa and go Grain Free! Add more butter, ghee and coconut oil to your diet to stay satisfied, and double or triple your vegetable intake. If you are losing too much weight, add more fats, winter squashes or some Wild Rice. Athletes may require some sweet potatoes but there is controversy whether even they actually require starchy foods.

Helpful Hints: There are hundreds of websites, Facebook pages, Podcasts and books to help you with a Grain Free, Gluten Free Paleo Diet. Including my own “The Diet For Human Beings“. If the improvements in weight or health symptoms haven’t convinced you or seemed obvious to you yet, try eating all your old foods for a week or two.. You’ll be shocked how indigestible they are now that your body has had some relief from inflammatory grains.

Nut and Tuber Based Gluten Free products – if you feel you’ve got to have them

There are many almond or coconut flour products and recipes, as well as those using cassava root and other starchy tubers. Whole Foods carries many. My Podcast and Book Review with the author of
Latin American Paleo Cooking has some great ones with alternate flours.

Digestion and Bowel Support from my Clinic

Here are a few products in my online store that might help while you’re healing:

D- Digest has support for the intestine, as well as enzymes and a little HCL hydrochloric acid.  I’ve sold this for years.

C- Colon will help move the bowels if you’re constipated, and it has some gut healers as well.

LGut – Leaky Gut Mastery is a sophisticated formula to help Leaky Gut damaged by years of stress and poor food and medication choices.

Premier Probiotic contains a nice blend of Probiotics, requiring no refrigeration.