Coming onto gluten sensitivity, we all know there’s been a significant rise in gluten intolerance awareness, which is fantastic in my opinion. The media is talking about it, our patients are talking about it. We’ve all heard of the Hippocratic Oath, it has been said all diseases begin in the gut and I wasn’t a believer of this as I was practicing tradition of OB/GYN, but now I feel that there is so much truth to that. We are what we eat, we’ve heard that before. That there are so many diseases that begin because we have a lot of inflammation in our GI tract. There are many studies, many many studies that suggest that as many as one out of three people that we all know, so if you look around yourselves if you have three people sitting together one of you may have gluten intolerance. So what are we doing about that? How do we recognise that? How are we going to treat that? We’ll go into all that. What is gluten? We’ve all heard of it; gluten is a protein composite, it’s a combination of prolamins and glutelins that are added to grains, that is what gluten is. And it’s in many different things, it’s in wheat, it’s in barley, oats and rye for the most common things that we see in our American or Western diet. Gluten is an additive that is added to foods that otherwise lack nutrition. It has been recently introduced as something that actually helps with the texture of the food, elasticity of the food and the binding and filling of food. So it’s not a substance that we’ve had in our foods for centuries, we just have it, it’s a relatively new ingredient that’s been added to a lot of different foods. So our bodies evolutionarily are not used to really processing this high quantity of gluten that we see in everything, unless you’re on a gluten or yeast free diet, you know a lot of us, or a lot of our patients are eating breads and they’re eating anything with grains, and they’re eating whole wheat this and whole wheat that and cereals, oatmeal, everything that we have for all this time considered it so healthy, ‘Oh yeah well I eat whole wheat bread all the time it’s so healthy’, alright, ‘I eat oats every day for breakfast or I eat bran cereals they’re so healthy’. If you don’t have gluten sensitivity then perhaps, but if you do, it’s actually going into your gut and creating a lot of inflammation and then we as doctors are seeing what it does to our patients. Today fortunately testing is much more predominant to determine these sensitivities, people know what they might be looking for, whereas in the past perhaps about five or ten years ago people would complain of so many different symptoms that may be due to gluten sensitivity and we as physicians as health care providers thought it would be totally something different so people would come in patients, how many of your patients come in on a daily basis with GI symptoms? They come in with things like abdominal cramping, bloating, gassiness, diarrhoea. How many of your patients come in and they are on a multitude of medications for acid reflux, for heartburn? To purchase this entire lecture series, click here.