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Gluten-free diets could lead to deficiencies and cause illness
The Australian ^ | JOHN ROSS | March 10, 2017

Posted on 03/09/2017 11:49:34 AM PST by Gamecock

As a gastroenterologist, Jason Tye-Din sees ­patients who only eat potatoes and sometimes a bit of rice.

“They’re too scared to eat anything else,” he says, “because they get some sort of reaction. Sometimes it’s a real reaction but in most cases it’s because they’ve ­developed such a fear of food. They’re confused about their symptoms and their relationship to food.”

Tye-Din says some patients arrive at his clinic in tears. “They come in saying, ‘I don’t know what to eat.’ They’ve got to the point where they’ve pulled so many things from their diet that it is not ­nutritious whatsoever. They’ve got phobia of food — what we call ‘orthorexia’. They’ve gone to the extreme level where they’ve ­excluded so much from their diet.”

Tye-Din heads the coeliac ­research lab at Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and chairs the medical advisory committee of peak group Coeliac Australia. He deals with a condition in which gluten, a protein found in grains such as wheat and barley, triggers a dangerous immune reaction in sufferers’ intestines.

But in recent years, gluten has been implicated in an extra­ordinary range of additional diseases, from autism, dementia and schizophrenia to obesity and type-2 diabetes. These claims — which Tye-Din says have very little supporting evidence — have helped feed a gluten-free fad that anecdotally he believes has captured something like 30 per cent of the population.

Ironically, a US study unveiled overnight has found that the gluten-free craze may actually be contributing to the global epidemic of type-2 diabetes.

The research team traced links between gluten intake, weight and type-2 diabetes in a longitudinal study stretching back to long ­before most people had even heard of the protein.

“We wanted to determine if gluten consumption will affect health in people with no apparent medical reasons to avoid it,” says study leader Geng Zong, a nutri­tion researcher at Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

The team amassed more than four million person-years of data on gluten consumption and health outcomes, crunching figures from three longitudinal studies spanning three decades and involving nearly 200,000 participants — each of whom had completed food-frequency questionnaires every two to four years.

The researchers estimated ­the average gluten intake for each participant and grouped them into five quintiles, from those who ate the least gluten to those who consumed the most. The 20 per cent of individuals with the highest gluten intake turned out to develop type-2 diabetes 13 per cent less frequently than participants from the bottom quintile.

The study also found that gluten intake had no apparent impact on participants’ weight. “Our findings suggest that gluten intake may not exert significant adverse effects on the incidence of type-2 diabetes or excess weight gain,” says the abstract to the study, which was presented to the American Heart Association’s Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health scientific forum in Oregon.

“Limiting gluten from diet is thus unlikely to facilitate type-2 diabetes prevention. (It) may lead to reduced consumption of cereal fibre or whole grains that help ­reduce diabetes risk.”

Zong believes people who ­eschew gluten may be sentencing themselves to pointless mal­nutrition. He says gluten-free foods are often light on nutrients while being heavy on price. Other researchers suspect gluten-free food may be more insidious than that. Another US study, published last month in the journal Epidemiology, suggested the rice flour used in a lot of gluten-free foods could be exposing people to harmful contaminants.

Rice flour is just one of the ­ingredients introduced to make up for the lack of gluten, which gives dough its elasticity — producing fluffy bread and pastries with chewy texture. Other added extras include tapioca and potato starch and added sugar, says Sophie Egan, a program director at The Culinary Institute of America.

“When consumed, (they) lead to blood-sugar spikes that don’t do the body any favours,” Egan wrote last year in The Wall Street Journal. “Scan the package of a toaster ­pastry from Glutino, one of the ­industry’s leading brands, and you’ll see an excruciatingly long list of ingredients with polysyllabic chemical names.”

Last month’s research, based on another US longitudinal study, found people on long-term gluten-free diets had higher levels of lead, arsenic and mercury in their blood than gluten-eating controls. Tye-Din says it is not clear whether these elevated levels do any damage. “Maybe it doesn’t mean any adverse health effects, or it could mean something,” he says. “The study shows that there are differences between people who elect to exclude certain things from their diet, and end up just eating one sort of grain rather than having a balanced diet.”

University of NSW-affiliated nutritionist Rosemary Stanton says there is arguably a bigger problem with gluten-free diets — they give advocates a free pass to eat whatever they want. “If you need a gluten-free diet, you should go for brown rice and quinoa — those sorts of healthy cereals which aren’t so common. But what we’re seeing with this fad, for people who don’t really need to be gluten-free, is gluten-free cakes, biscuits and snack foods — junk, basically.

“It’s not going to do you any good, and if you think it’s OK to have as much of that as you like, it could do you some harm.” Stanton says the children of well-meaning parents are particularly at risk.

“My concern is that when people think they should put their kids on a gluten-free diet, they buy gluten-free snack foods which are at least as junky as the ones they’re replacing. They think they can put as many of these crackers, biscuits and snack foods as they like in the lunch box ­because they’re all gluten-free, which makes them good. They probably have a lot of sugar, fat and salt and other junk in them.”

Sydney marketing manager Penelope Lowry, who has been gluten-free for 10 years, says advocates of the diet need to read food labels and focus on the levels of sugar and carbohydrate. “I always bring my glasses to the supermarket to make sure I know what’s in all the products I buy,” she says.

Lowry, 47, buys gluten-free products including buckwheat and almond flour from an organic grocer and credits the gluten-free craze for improving the quality and range of products.

“There’s so much more choice now,” she says. “Brands are being far more experimental with flavours and ingredients.”

The Grains and Legumes ­Nutrition Council says fewer than 2 per cent of people — about one in 70 — are coeliac. It says its most ­recent consumption study, in 2014, found 18 per cent of Australians were actively avoiding gluten.

“Only a small proportion of the population needs to be excluding gluten,” says nutrition manager Rebecca Williams. “We know that quality grain foods, particularly those that are high in cereal fibre and whole grain, are associated with a reduced risk of chronic disease such as type-2 diabetes. We’d recommend that anyone who is looking to follow a gluten-free diet, or thinks they need to, seek guidance from either a doctor or an accredited dietitian.”

While people with coeliac disease clearly need to avoid gluten, there are questions over a more amorphous category of “gluten sensitivity”. The Grains Council study found that 2 per cent of Australians reported avoiding gluten because of an intolerance other than coeliac disease — usually women aged 19-30.

Some estimates are that up to 6 per cent of non-coeliacs have gluten sensitivity. Stanton says ­experts disagree over whether the condition even exists, or people are simply reacting to other components of their food.

“Certainly some people say they leave off wheat and feel better,” she says. “If you leave out wheat and feel better, it may be ­because you’re not eating biscuits, cakes, pastries and all the other junky foods that contain wheat.”

Tye-Din says people who go wheat-free often feel better ­because they are avoiding “fermentable carbohydrates”. He says plenty of people feel bloated and uncomfortable after a barbecue feast of bread, onions and beer. “It’s probably got nothing to do with the gluten in those foods,” he says. “Gluten often gets a bad rap.”

Nevertheless, gluten-free is big business. Egan says research firm Mintel has estimated the value of the American market at $US15 billion last year.

Mark Potter, a columnist with The Times, says the British market is set to exceed £500 million ($809m) this financial year. ­Despite this, many of the people the market is intended for are not benefiting from it.

Potter says as many as half a million Britons have coeliac disease but have not been diagnosed with it and are consuming gluten, to their cost.

“Put simply, millions of healthy people are buying gluten-free products they don’t need,” he wrote. “Hundreds of thousands of others with coeliac disease, who should be buying them, aren’t.”


TOPICS: Food; Science
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To: Gamecock

I used to order extra gluten with a side of gluten. Read the book “Wheat Belly”. The wheat grown now is nothing like it was 100 years ago. If I go two weeks without any gluten I don’t feel any different, but then I eat some and I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. Weird stuff. Weird and delicious stuff, that gluten.


21 posted on 03/09/2017 12:41:33 PM PST by bk1000 (A clear conscience is a sure sign of a poor memory)
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To: Gamecock
Gluten is a major component of wheat. Remember when the nutritionists were promoting whole wheat? Remember when they said egg yolks were going to kill you and now say a good source of protein? Red meat, don't get me started.

Remember when heart disease was specifically caused by cholesterol, which is the mother hormone produced by your liver? Now it's about triglicerides. First it was about cholesterol plaque buildup in the arteries, and now it's about inflammation of the endothelium within the arteries and veins.

And then there's the Population Bomb that will kill millions through starvation. The diminishing Ozone Layer that would kill billions. The Alcar scare that bankrupted many fruit farmers. We had 9 planets until they decided Pluto was planatoid. Now they are claiming a "possible" huge 9th planet outside the Kuiper belt of asteroids.

The best was the 70's social scientists claiming no inherent differences between boys and girls. That idiocy has been gone for awhile, but just read they're back to it. You only need to be a parent to see the differences. I am.

I could go on and on how often our scientific community has been wrong. I predict Gluten will be proved later to be no threat to average consumer.

22 posted on 03/09/2017 12:42:44 PM PST by A Navy Vet (I'm not Islamophobic - I'm Islamonauseous. Plus LGBTQxyz nauseous.)
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To: Gamecock

I love gluten too, but I have cooked gluten free. It isn’t hard as long as you cook from scratch, and it shouldn’t lead to obesity or type 2 diabetes - more likely to prevent it.

The simplest way is not to try gluten-free substitutes. You will probably never find a good wheatless French bread. So you skip sandwiches and pizza and go to cuisines that are not wheat-based. Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican. The primary grain is rice or corn.

You eat plenty of meat, eggs, dairy, vegetables, fruit. You don’t worry at all about those things having gluten as long as they’re not processed and pre-cooked for you.

It is possible to make very good gluten-free cakes and cookies - in a cake you want a fine crumb - you’re not making protein strands as you do in a kneaded bread.


23 posted on 03/09/2017 12:45:56 PM PST by heartwood (If you're looking for a </sarc tag>, you just saw it.)
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To: Gamecock

The best gluten free diets rely mostly on protein and vegetables, with limited gluten free carbohydrates and an avoidance of sugary drinks and processed foods. This kind of diet is rarely recommended though, even by doctors. Instead, patients are usually referred to popular books and to the gluten free grain products that they tend to promote. The point of this approach is that it is meant to ease the transition to a gluten free diet. Unfortunately, as the article indicates, this can lead to other health issues.


24 posted on 03/09/2017 12:48:18 PM PST by Rockingham
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To: bboop
‘The earth is replete with the fruit of your works, O Lord, You bring forth bread from the earth and wine to cheer the heart.” Ps 103

Um, that's not in Psalm 103.

25 posted on 03/09/2017 12:48:38 PM PST by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith...)
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To: Gamecock

Kind of depends some on what kind of reaction they are talking about.

There’s not much specific there about those alleged reactions.

However, the guy also needs to rule out Mast Cell Activation Disorder (or disease or syndrome or whatever they are calling it these days.)

Just because it’s not celiac, doesn’t mean there’s not something going on.


26 posted on 03/09/2017 12:53:26 PM PST by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith...)
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To: A Navy Vet
I also believe that no cosmologist nor astro physicist can possibly understand the Singularity. They can use the red shift to watch the universe expanding, but when they do the reverse math back, they will never have an answer to their so-claimed basketball sized super-heated mass into origin. Although, I've read recently that some think such a mass could just pop into existence with out any outside influence.

I really get a kick from their claims that hydrogen came into existence just milli-seconds after the bang, and yet can't explain why. Then some minutes later, Helium was formed, and on it went with the other elements within their equations. Could be wrong about the time of Hydrogen and Helium, but you get my drift.

Where did the Singularity come from? White board equations will never explain it. There is more to this Universe than will ever be known. And that's why I'm an agnostic.

27 posted on 03/09/2017 1:24:17 PM PST by A Navy Vet (I'm not Islamophobic - I'm Islamonauseous. Plus LGBTQxyz nauseous.)
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To: unlearner

I’ve just switched to a meat and vegetables diet and it is SO MUCH BETTER


28 posted on 03/09/2017 1:24:41 PM PST by Mr. K (Go Trump!)
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To: heartwood

My Shanghai-born lady friend cooks gluten sometimes. Yum! Popular in China.


29 posted on 03/09/2017 1:27:22 PM PST by Dr. Bogus Pachysandra (Don't touch that thing Don't let anybody touch that thing!I'm a Doctor and I won't touch that thing!)
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To: bboop

I have tried “ancient grain” called Einkorn with some success - it is supposed to be an unmodified form of wheat that was used for thousands of years, not the modern versions we call ‘wheat’

But then I am a sucker for the latest fads in this kind o stuff.


30 posted on 03/09/2017 1:28:33 PM PST by Mr. K (Go Trump!)
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To: Dr. Bogus Pachysandra

I have a Chinese cookbook that gives instruction on washing away the starch from flour and keeping the gluten.

Then of course you could just eat wallpaper paste (wheat starch).


31 posted on 03/09/2017 1:30:37 PM PST by heartwood (If you're looking for a </sarc tag>, you just saw it.)
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To: Mr. Douglas

My mother used to listen to all the rubbish studies and developed a fear of all food. It got to where she would hardly eat anything and wouldn’t let my dad eat either. I had flown in to visit them, and knew something was wrong, so I asked my friend who is a registered nurse to check their blood sugar. She told them they should both be in the hospital because their blood sugar was so low she was surprised they weren’t in a coma. I ran to the store and bought them some food. My dad was so happy that he could eat. I’m thankful I had gone to visit when I did and that my friend explained to my mom that food is not bad, as I had them both around for another ten years. I got them signed up for wheels on meals before I left, and arranged to have someone come in and help them a few hours a day.


32 posted on 03/09/2017 1:37:17 PM PST by Rusty0604
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To: snarkpup
"Sounds like organic, GMO-free, stone-ground cardboard."

Tastes like it, too.

Gluten-free food tastes like crap.

33 posted on 03/09/2017 5:33:53 PM PST by boop ("We don't feel like we are doing anything illegal"- Democrat credo)
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