Laura Schoenfeld: Yeah, so the gluten cross-reactivity thing can be an issue for certain people. There are basically two ways to establish if corn is going to be an issue for someone. Always the best way to decide if a food’s not a good idea for somebody is if they physically have symptoms after eating that food. If somebody eats corn and they get, like, skin breakout or joint pain or gut pain or GI distress, it doesn’t matter if corn is “paleo” or if they have any sort of lab values that suggests corn sensitivity. If they have a symptom when they eat a food, just tell them to avoid it. I know that sounds really basic, but I think a lot of times people don’t understand that they should be listening to their symptoms primarily.
As far as just Paleo orthodoxy is concerned, there’s nothing wrong with having some corn if you’re not sensitive to it. I wouldn’t necessarily build a lot of my diet based on corn mostly because corn is pretty hard to digest, and a lot of it is GMO. If you’re having some organic corn chips or organic corn tortillas for some nice, healthy tacos once in a while, there’s really not a big deal there. If you are not having symptoms right after eating corn, but there are some lingering symptoms that you’re not sure about—and I say “you.” I guess I should be saying “your patient.” If your patient is still having mysterious symptoms and they’re eating a slightly loose Paleo diet, like they’re having things like corn or rice or other foods that might not be technically Paleo, then your options would be to do another 30-day reset, maybe do an autoimmune version of that reset, depending on what their health condition is, or you could try doing some testing.
The testing that I typically see used for food sensitivities will be the Cyrex Array 4, and that is going to show if somebody is having an either IgA or IgG immune response to corn. The one thing about that is that the person needs to have been eating corn in the last four to six weeks for it to be accurate, but if they’re having somewhat of a diverse diet and they’re eating things like corn or other grains or lots of dairy or something like that, then you’ll be able to see if they’re having an actual immune response to the corn.
Really, if you’re just talking about the general population, corn is probably not that big of a deal as a treat. I wouldn’t eat corn every day, and I wouldn’t eat it as a major part of my diet, but I think having some flexibility with food for enjoyment purposes is really important.