Does Eating Gluten Cause Insomnia

Now, our next question is, does eating gluten cause insomnia? That’s a very interesting question. Now, there’s a lot of gluten hype at the moment. Thanks to Dr. Alex Fasano, I think his name is, the Italian researcher who started to discover zonulin and look more at gluten, there’s been a lot of good work completed on gluten. But there is also a lot of fear around gluten. In fact, I saw a great meme awhile ago, like a big picture, and it had The Gluten a bit like The Shining, and then there’s a woman there screaming, “Ah, get it away from me. Get it away.”

So people now, some people that have put some comments down on some of my YouTube videos actually fear gluten and feel it’s almost radioactive, like if you touch it or eat it that you’ll turn into some weird freak show or something. So this is the problem with the internet. There is so much misinformation bandied from one to another. It’s almost like parrots. There’s thousands of parrots out there. One parrot’s saying something, and another parrot copies that parrot but then puts a spin on it. Eventually what was small becomes a tsunami of spin. Okay? And that’s what’s happened with gluten.

Many people benefit from avoiding gluten in their diet, but most people don’t. All right? People like me don’t benefit from taking gluten out of their diet because I really don’t eat bread or farinaceous foods to begin with. But when I do eat bread, which I do regularly, every now and then, it doesn’t affect me at all. All right?

There are some established conditions where gluten is known to be problematic. All right? Autoimmune diseases, for example, certain types, where I would definitely recommend you keep gluten out of the diet and particularly celiacs and cases like that where you can’t eat gluten. We know that, but that’s between one to 2% of the population. But I’m not here to tell you why you should and shouldn’t eat gluten. We’re here to talk about it if it causes insomnia.

Now, that question, if a person asks me that question, my question back would be, what type of preexisting condition do you have? Okay? Do you have any underlying health complaints? Have you got an autoimmune condition? Do you have inflammatory bowel disease? If the person said yes, I’d say, okay, let’s avoid gluten. Let’s take every bit of gluten out of your diet for, let’s say, three weeks and see how the sleep improves. If the insomnia did not change at all, there’s probably not a link there. Okay?

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But if the person had no preexisting condition at all, was in pretty good health like I am, and they said when they ate a slice of toast, they couldn’t sleep. What else did they have? Did they have three glasses of wine or something? I mean, there could be other reasons why people have insomnia. It could be medications they’re taking. It could be Uncle Harry maybe was found in bed with someone. I mean, all sorts of situations occur. People can’t sleep sometimes because they’ve got stuff playing up here. All right?

Two types of insomnia. We’ve discussed these a lot. Sleep onset and sleep maintenance, meaning you go to sleep okay. Okay? Sleep onset. But then you wake up or you wake up and you sleep and you wake up and sleep the whole time. So think carefully on the type of insomnia that you’ve got. Is it the sleep onset that you can’t get to sleep or sleep maintenance where you can’t maintain sleep? All right?

Again, there could be medical reasons why you’ve got insomnia. The first thing I usually ask a person with insomnia to do is take more magnesium tablets. So take two or three magnesium tablets with breakfast, one or two with lunch, and then one or two just before bed. Do that for a week and then come back to me and tell me how the sleep is.

I could easily say that over half the people come back to me and say, “Oh my God, that stuff works so much better than sleeping pills. I’m going to stay with magnesium.” But they also discovered that they were nicer to be around. They were less grouchy and irritable, and their muscles felt better. Okay? Lots of things felt better. Magnesium works for a lot of people.

You don’t need to stop eating bread, people. You don’t. You just need to stop eating all the crappy bread out there, all the white bread. Okay? All that stuff with lots of colors and chemicals and flavors and crap in it. There are many good flours out there still available. Great spelt flours, for example, that are still organically grown, stone ground in old-fashioned techniques like people have done for a long, long time, and they’re still perfectly fine for normal healthy digestive systems like this.

So I will never buy the line that every person on the planet needs to avoid gluten. In fact, with COVID, the crazy thing is everyone’s stepped their gluten intake up. Okay? Because the flour mills can’t keep up with it. And yet I’m not seeing an influx of people dying all over the place and jumping off buildings because gluten’s made them go loopy, and I haven’t seen the hospitals full of people with gluten disease.

So come on, let’s just stop this gluten hype once and for all. People with preexisting conditions, especially autoimmune and people with very poor gut functions destroyed by the medical profession after antibiotics, yes, let’s take gluten out of their diet for a while. Okay? Maybe for six or 12 months. But I’ll never buy the line that gluten is toxic for every single person.

Have a look in Japan where one of the top dishes is actually a 100% gluten dish. Okay? S-A-T-A-N, satan, 100% gluten. All right? Wake up. And also, remember, the last thing I’ll leave you with. If you have got insomnia, check out my insomnia videos. There should be some of them.