WHERE DOES IT ALL GO?

If  you are of a certain age (this usually means that you are old) you never had to worry about the sugar content, caffeine content or gluten content of your food.  In fact, there was no sugar free, low sodium, caffeine free, gluten free food.  People seemed to have survived.  Today, we have tremendous choices of foods without this or that, including whole supermarket shelves dedicated to low something, all natural foods.  The food science industry has developed the means to extract just about anything from our food, all in the name of health.

Here is my big question: “What is being done with all the stuff we are removing?”  The food industry does not waste anything.  The example, a cow is utilized within one or two percent of its weight.  We get not only meat but the bones are used.  The intestines are used and even the hoofs are used.  This tells me that the food industry is doing something with the things it takes out of our food and is doing something with those products.  The question is what.  My feeling is that they are adding the things they extract to other foods.  Higher sugar content for some products or higher caffeine concentrations in others. The one I really want to know about is gluten.

Gluten, as you know, is protein, or rather proteins, found in grains and nuts.  There are diseases where gluten is harmful, such as celiac disease. (Celiac disease is a condition in which the GI tract cannot tolerate gluten causing severe symptoms for a patient.)  Recently, people have been going “gluten free” with no diagnosis of celiac disease.  For many of these gluten free lovers not only is there no evidence of disease, but when secretly fed gluten they have no problems.  The gluten free/without disease  folks have even been given their own diagnosis, Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity.  I am not going to debate this issue if you want to be gluten free, be my guest.  I just want to know where all the gluten is going.

I see no food labels that say “more gluten added”. There are no foods I know of that are high, extra gluten foods.  This tells me that, unlike other chemicals removed from our food, gluten must be so nutritionally toxic that it cannot be added to other foods, but where is it going?  I wonder if the dirty little secret is that the food industry is clandestinely disposing of gluten in ways that may be harmful to the general population. Are there large landfills where thousands of tons of gluten have been buried? Could these landfills be poisoning our water supply?  There are many diseases which seem to be occurring with increased frequency. I don’t seem to remember any member of my family with dementia. I went to school with some peculiar characters, but none with special diagnoses. Now there seem to be many more patients with Alzheimer ’s disease and more children with autism.  There is more obesity and diabetes in America.  Could the blame for the increase in these diseases and others be related to ground water polluted with gluten?

For my part, I want no special credit.   I am just an ordinary guy trying to blow the lid off the 55 gallon drums of gluten placed in secret locations all across America. I want to know the names of the people responsible. I call on our leaders, congress itself, to put aside their current squabbles and look into the murky world of gluten storage.  If the food industry has nothing to hide, have them tell us what they have done with all the gluten.