Bread, the staff of life . . . or death?

Earlier, I wrote this post about how grains were not nutritionally superior to other whole foods — fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, dairy, nuts and legumes.

In this post I will go even further by saying that grains are actually bad for you. As in poison, albeit a slow-acting and often super-delicious poison.

I was originally going to write about various negative aspects of grains, but instead I decided to focus today on one issue: gluten.

It’s the sticky stuff in pasta and bread. It’s found in wheat and other grains such as barley, rye, spelt and kamut. It is not in rice. It is not in oats, if they have been processed in a separate facility from gluten-grains.

Gluten has gotten a lot of attention lately. It seems lots of people are eliminating it from their diet these days. Grocery stores have aisles of gluten-free pasta, cookies, cereals. Even Betty Crocker is offering a gluten-free cake mix, replete with all the nasty chemicals you can get with ordinary cake mix! Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View has a cookbook out on the subject called The G-Free Diet. Whatever you think of her political views, read her story here. Like many celiacs and those with gluten-sensitivities, she was told she had Irritable Bowel Syndrome her whole life. It turns out no.

The spotlight on gluten reflects an awareness that a certain percentage of our population has Celiac Sprue, an actual allergy to the protein found in gluten grains such as wheat, barley, rye and spelt. I first heard about this about 20 years ago when I lived in a tiny studio on 11th St. in NYC and my neighbor in the next apartment over told me she had a rare disorder where if she ate wheat she would break out in hives and get diarrhea. She was so meticulous about this that she would ask at restaurants if the fries were cooked in separate oil from the chicken strips and whether they had any batter on them.

What a strange allergy, I thought. But now I know it is an autoimmune disorder caused by a common food ingredient. Celiac is the only auto-immune disease that is directly caused by what you eat.

The reason that gluten is so damaging is that is can literally poke holes in your gut, flattening the villi in your intestines, allowing both bacteria and gluten proteins to enter your bloodstream. Once loose in your blood they can wreak havoc, binding with your own body’s tissue and triggering your immune system to attack your own body. This is the auto-immune reaction. Those with celiac can suffer from all kinds of digestive disorders such as cramping and diarrhea, malabsorption of nutrients, muscle weakness, epilepsy, dementia, infertility, osteoporosis, wasting, migraines, psoriasis and other skin problems . . . the list goes on.

There is a strong genetic component, meaning if your parents or grandparents had celiac, your chances of having it are greater. To get a diagnosis, you can have a celiac blood panel done but the gold standard is a tissue sample from your intestine. However, it is important to note that many people test negatively for celiac but suffer from gluten sensitivity. Gluten sensitivity is a non-allergic, non-auto-immune disease that produces symptoms similar or the same as celiac. Here in the greater DC area, we are lucky to have one of the foremost experts on celiac and gluten-sensitivity in the world. His name is Alessio Fasano, MD and he runs the University of Maryland’s Center for Celiac Research in Baltimore. Click here to visit their website. In this interview, he explained how a celiac’s immune system differs from one who has a gluten-sensitivity:

The innate immune system is the most ancestral form of defense we have against “invaders,” while the adaptive immune system is a more recent branch of our immune system. Once our body comes in contact with a substance from the environment that may represent a signal of danger, the innate immune system reacts immediately to try to eliminate the “attacker.”

At the same time, the adaptive immune system will intervene with a more sophisticated, long process, during which the attacker is studied, its conformation evaluated, and a “customized response” to that particular molecule is engineered (i.e. specific antibodies). Further, the adaptive immune system will save this information as immune response memory, so that at the next encounter there is no need to re-do the job.

In autoimmune diseases, like celiac disease, there is a coordinate response between innate and adaptive immune system, a response that ends up in the wrong direction (i.e.; attacking its own body rather than the “invader”). In gluten sensitivity, there is only an innate immune response, since the adaptive immune system seems not involved.

That is why a positive blood test for Celiac is one that shows the presence of anti-gluten antibodies. There is no question that if you suffer from full blown celiac or are gluten sensitive, you are better off without gluten. But I would argue that everyone should avoid gluten and that those who suffer are the “canaries in the coalmine.” None of us should be eating such a damaging food.

It is especially important that those who suffer from other auto-immune diseases eliminate gluten. First of all, having one auto-immune disorder makes you more susceptible to having more. Believe me when I say, one is enough. But there are undeniable links between gluten and auto-immune disease besides celiac.

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis as a child, an auto-immune disorder in which your thyroid attacks itself.  Though I have drifted in and out of remission since then, I was recently diagnosed with post-partum thyroiditis. This is when the body’s immune system, which has been suppressed during pregnancy, surges wildly after the birth and your thyroid level fluctuates between hyper- (too much) and hypo- (not enough) thyroidism. For those who follow these things — my TSH went from 0 (that’s zero) to 5 in one month. Normal range fro TSH is .3 – 3.

This is the conclusion of a paper published in the Endocrine Reviews that links gluten sensitivity to auto-immune disorders.

There is no doubt that many patients with celiac disease primarily contact specialists other than gastroenterologists. The majority of cases thus remain undetected. A close association between various autoimmune endocrinological disorders and celiac disease has been shown in numerous studies. The diagnosis of celiac disease requires a small-bowel biopsy, usually taken by endoscopy. However, sensitive and specific antibody assays, the antiendomysial and antitissue transglutaminase tests, are helpful in preliminaryscreening for gluten intolerance in cases where symptoms are atypical, appear outside the gastrointestinal tract, or are totally absent. The need to prevent osteoporosis advocates the early diagnosis and treatment of even asymptomatic celiac disease. The benefits of screening for celiac disease in autoimmune disease remain to be proved by prospective follow-up studies. However, there seems to be a good case for extensive screening.

Other, bloggers write about the connection between celiac and auto-immune disorders, I recommend this post, this one, this one and this one.

So much research is being done today showing the link between gluten and auto-immune disorders such as: Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Type I Diabetes, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lupus, Psoriasis, and Multiple Sclerosis to name just several.

There is a lot of talk these days about how we did not evolve eating grains, and how for optimal health we ought to return to a diet that more closely resembles that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is interesting stuff, I enjoy reading about it, but to me it is academic. I care about practical applications in the real world. So, if grains are making us sick, let’s stop eating them.

Basically, if you have any health problems that don’t seem to resolve even after medical treatment, cut out gluten. You have NOTHING to lose. It’s a pain in the tuchus at first but you will suffer no ill-health by not eating gluten. There are loads of great blogs with gluten-free recipes out there such as these: Gluten-Free Girl and Ginger Lemon Girl. Of course, I wold recommend cutting back on all grains, not just gluten-containing ones. Against the Grain is a great website to check out if you decide you want to cut back.

Finally, you will lose weight, especially around your belly. Some call this the “wheat belly.” It looks like a beer belly, but it’s from cereal, pasta, bagels, donuts, crackers and the like. If you’re a guy, this is a good way to lose your man-boobs.