I like observing life, thinking about life and then connecting the information dots within life.
Here is a thought about food intolerances, by connecting facts and observations. I may be wrong, or I may be up to something. Perhaps these thoughts will lead me or someone towards another thoughts that will be correct. Or you may pass this thought, as Aristotle said: „It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.“.
I will summarise a few facts and my observations which leads me to a thought that the raise of gluten and lactose intolerance might be only a “back mutation” happening. Back mutation is a known process that causes reversion of a mutation to its origin.
I am gluten and (cow’s) milk intolerant as well as my child is. So, I have first-hand experience with these conditions. I was told by doctors these conditions are untreatable diseases. A disease is described as a disorder of structure or function.
As I understand those conditions, our body does not process these kinds of food. Are we odd for that? Or could be the disease the odd one here?
In the last decade or so, many adults and children find out they are also intolerant to one or another food, if not to both. Around two-thirds of adult humans are lactose intolerant or have reduced lactose tolerance. Northern Europeans are the most lactose tolerant. Lactose tolerance is referred to as a beneficial mutation.
Findings from ancient graves are that many thousand years ago humans did not have the required enzyme for dairy or gluten tolerance. It changed with agriculture coming into a picture. Or at least around that time. The humans got by this a surviving advantage for the time being, I can guess. Now, what if we do not need this surviving advantage anymore and the time for a change has arrived?
We know of a back mutation, which is a process of a change that restores the original sequence of mutated genes, for humans, or viruses. It is like there is a blueprint and if it is changed or mutated, it comes back eventually anyway. And we may then also question (and questions are good) what is the original settings, or the blueprint, of the Homo sapiens.
So, how about this raise of people becoming intolerant is not anything unnatural but actually just the opposite? Rather it might be a very natural process during which our genes are being restored into their original sequence, the back mutation in a process.
It makes sense to me. Also it means we do not need to be „treated“, we just need to eat the natural food for us, the way our DNA is set up.
Which also might be a reason, even only partly, why this has been reversing just the last decades. Because we can choose other food than only common gluten grains or (cow’s) dairy. We have started to think about food, what we eat, too. We listen to our body and give the body the needed food.
I can imagine there are people with different and even limited options. In such cases human body can be set to survive, so the body can process many types of energy source, and in the smallest portions if necessary and as long as it is possible. I can imagine in such cases there is not much room for genes to go back to their origin, as they might be in this survival mode.
But if we have at lease the luxury of choosing, we should probably think over what our body does need to run on, also when our body needs it, or what is natural to our body. Because we write down to our DNA what we eat, what we do to our physical body or to our mental health. And all that we then pass on to our descendants (see quite interesting study – Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones).
Here we could also probably further argue what is natural for humans in terms of food. Is it for example vegetarianism and the like? Or, do we need to eat three times a day? Well, perhaps the answer is also in our own human history.
In any case, what I know is that observing and listening to my own body is the way how I can give my body what it needs and when it needs it, no matter what we people know, or what we think we know, about our bodies. As a child I just stopped eating bread, yogurts and such food, therefore I probably have saved my body some health issues, as in the past there was nobody around who knew or cared about some food intolerances. It was worth it to trust myself, even though I heard so many times these accusations that I was doing something wrong. And you see, I was just doing something other people were not.
The right answers are within us. We should really trust ourselves, and sometimes we should literally trust our guts ;-).
Photo source: https://www.pexels.com/cs-cz/@chokniti-khongchum-1197604
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