Corn- The Toxic Grain
This will be the title of my upcoming paper on the dangers of corn and its by-products. Thank Goodness we have now decided to make fuel from it. Burning it all up is a great idea. The paper will explain.
In the meantime, please read the prelude to this paper taken from the FAQs & Links page (FAQ #13). You maybe surprised.
Dogtor J
Corn- The Toxic Grain (The primer)
13) I Understand why wheat and dairy cause food allergies but how can corn be a problem? Didn’t the American Indian eat a lot of corn and do well on it?
That’s a great question with good answers- and a very timely topic. In fact, Diane Sawyer just had a segment this morning on how pervasive corn is in our diet and she mentions how she tries to avoid corn. They did not really expound on why they felt it was so harmful (they needed me on there, LOL) but were instead focusing on the role it may play in obesity, which it does in a big way. Here is the link to the ABC broadcast- http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com:80/ver/256.0/popup/index.php?cl=6960848
The main reason that corn causes obesity is the lectins (antibody-sized proteins/glycoproteins) it contains directly stimulate fat production. Here is a great primer on lectins for you- http://www.krispin.com/lectin.html . As the article describes, these lectins can do a number of things when they attach to a tissue cell in our body. One of the reactions is for the cell to duplicate or hypertrophy, which is what fat cells do in response to corn lectins. The glaring example of this is how corn feeding cattle not only fattens them up but causes them to deposit fat directly into their muscle. Do you want fat in your muscle? Absolutely not. But we do this in order to tenderize the meat, don’t we? And how do we accomplish this again? We do this by feeding them- and us- unnatural grains that contain these potentially proteins (lectins).
And corn itself is unnatural. In fact, it cannot even reproduce on its own anymore. If we don’t plant corn, it disappears…forever (which is not a bad thing except that it may make a good fuel source). Another fun fact can be found by doing a search for “corn gluten meal”. You will find that it is used as a natural herbicide. Hmmm… It kills other plants. Does anything that we eat that is known to be healthy do this? If we ground up meat, eggs, broccoli, and bananas we would call it “fertilizer”, wouldn’t we?
Corn is what they now call a “cultigen”. It no longer resembles its ancestors. The origins of corn lie in Middle America. It was later cultivated by the American Indian but something interesting happened whenever corn was introduced into a new population- pellagra broke out. Pellagra is a niacin deficiency and sources like Wikipedia (incorrectly) state that it was because niacin was locked deeply in the early forms of the corn’s kernel and unavailable for absorption. This latter fact is true but would only account for pellagra if corn was their only source of niacin, an important B complex. Here is the link to Wikipedia that discusses the origins of maize (corn)- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize.
Some mistaken people think that people in Biblical days ate corn because the word “corn” is in the Bible. The fact is that “corn” means grain and that is why they called corn “corn”. In Bible usage, corn referred to wheat and barley. And those two grains were safe and nutritious back then because man had not put his hand to them- yet. That was not done until the mid-400’s AD, when the Northern Germanics blended “God’s wheat” with two other plants (weeds) and created common wheat, the ancestor of what we now eat. This ushered in celiac disease which wiped many of them out with severe dysentery (IBS). This is historical fact. Why? Wheat was no longer pure in its generations and remains changed to this day. There are now “tares” among the wheat. And like corn, it has now been hybridized and genetically modified to death…our death.
The fact is that corn is the fourth food- along with gluten (wheat, barley, rye), dairy (casein) and soy- that can damage the villi of the small intestine and cause them to atrophy. These finger-like projections increase the surface area of the duodenum, jejunum and ileum, and are responsible for absorbing our B complex, along with our calcium, iron, iodine, C, and trace minerals (such as boron, magnesium, manganese, copper, zinc, and many others). So, pellagra broke out in these corn-eating populations because it caused celiac-like lesions in those groups just as gluten was doing in Western Europe after common wheat was first cultivated- and just soy was doing in Asia before they learned to ferment the stew out of it.
These four foods- wheat, cow’s milk, soy and corn- were the major dietary mistakes made by groups on each of the main continents, with Africa being one of the only areas where they did just about everything right: Non-gluten grains and the right kind of milk from the what they refer to now as A2 cattle. Here is a link that discusses the second bad choice we made about dairy. The first mistake was jumping ship from goats to cows as the source of milk in the first place. The second blunder was choosing the wrong cow (A1 versus A2)- http://www.nzdoctor.co.nz/news?article=1d81b30f-8bf3-4db3-b838-e5210fead0d9 .
Finally, corn is now being closely studied for its damaging neurological effects, especially in the autistic individual. Once again, certain lectins are capable of killing neurons. We know that gluten can do this in sensitized individuals so we really should not be surprised that corn lectins can do the same thing. High fructose corn syrup is also a neurotoxin. Soy also does this, aided by the neurotoxic amounts of the amino acid glutamate (the parent protein in MSG/monosodium glutamate) and staggering levels of estrogen it contains. Here is a link to some recent studies on the effects of corn on brain function- http://wurtmanlab.mit.edu/publications/pdf/171.pdf
I would suggest an Internet search for things like “dangers of corn”, “corn allergies”, “high fructose corn syrup”, and “corn gluten meal”. I think you’ll agree: We should have left corn’s ancestors alone in Middle America, just like we should have left soy in the ground in Asia, allowed wheat to remain unchanged, and kept tending our flocks rather than developing dairy herds.
I hope this helps,
John
