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.”
All I know is when I eat commercial break I itch like crazy and need to take a benedryl
I have no idea if it is gluten or the RoundUp they are spraying on wheat or what...
Pasta I get from Italy (no Roundup used) does not seem to affect me- but any bread with tomato sauce seems o be OK
I did not have these effects all my life until about 8 years ago
i.e. if your body does have an adverse reaction to gluten, don’t consume it. Otherwise, you SHOULD consume it.
I think what is happening is that a lot of precious snowflakes see all these scare articles on local news about how this or that “may” be bad for you, so they avoid it, and the next thing you know, they get sick.
People have to stop believing everything they see on tv and in facebook. EVERYTHING is poisonous to SOMEONE.
I think I am very blessed. I can eat anything without batting an eye.
Later
I don’t eat bread or most carbs on purpose but I wouldn’t say it’s because of Gluten intolerance. I just feel better and eat less in Ketosis.
90 lbs I lost, now at 48 I can beat my 6’5 19 year old in pickup hoops. I love bread though if I’m going to have a cheat day, you can be certain bread is involved.
‘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
I am a bread-maker by obsession, so I hold these words dear.
You should go to an allergy doctor and get tested. You may have a mild gluten allergy which some doctors will tell you to ignore. If you are allergic to it or some other foods, it is better to avoid them even if they do not make you dangerously ill. The inflammation they cause in the body will age you.
Besides avoiding white breads, I avoid anything with added wheat gluten. Everything I read says added gluten is not a problem, but I'm not buying into that. It just might be that added gluten and gluten that's the result of processing is the problem. I'm just guessing here, but following this guideline has worked for me.
I can eat anything, too, Mr. D. We are really blessed.
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that's not the type of doctor that's pushing you.
It’s important to know how to read scientific literature if you’re going to pronounce scientific fact.
Gluten is a perfect example. The vast majority of “gluten intolerants” are lifestyle choices and poor ones at that based mainly on the influences of the media and a lack of deep thought.
A few years ago, a scare tactic was going around about some kind of vegetable oil that is used in Gatorade and Pepsi and was sure to kill us all.
I did a little research online and in 5 minutes found out is was a big scam. I found the Safety Data Sheet for the product and since I work in the chemical business, I know how to read them. (most people don’t and shouldn’t. They are written by safety people for safety people and not really for public use. There are lots of terms that sound scary but aren’t)
Anyway, one part of a SDS is the lethality of the dangerous components. It’s referred to as LD50 and it’s the lethal dose, over a specific amount of time for 50% of the population of the test subject, often lab rats.
In this case, extremely small amounts of this vegetable oil are used in drinks to prevent separation of the ingredients (like ketchup does) The LD50 was something to the tune of five gallons of it a day, when a heavy Gatorade user may consume 3-4 drops of it a day.
It’s the same with all of these crazy “intolerances.” I have an uncle who is legitimately allergic to gluten, but he was actually diagnosed as Ceilac.
I lead a boys outdoor group with about 50 boys. Thankfully, we don’t have any significant food allergies, but I’ve told my leaders that if necessary, we will work with a kid who has a legitimate diagnosed condition. If it’s just a preference, he eats what he gets.
My son is our only serious challenge. He has Crohn’s Disease and has to be careful what he eats. He finds out the menu and brings his own food for when he needs it. No issues.
Wouldn't they notice that they have awful gastric distress and diarrhea all the time?
One thing that cracks me up about those tests that get us to LD50 is that it could be used to prove that water kills.
Was it 8 years ago you started to believe everything you read in the news?
This is on my car:
http://www.cafepress.com/mf/18208364/i-love-gluten_bumper-sticker?productId=116220527
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