Is Gluten Free right for you?
Lets start with why you are wanting to eat Gluten free in the first place.
Is it because you have heard you will loose weight, you will have less belly bloat, you will have greater energy or maybe less joint pain. At its worst stop immediate bodily responses that you may have, such as diarrhoea or a sore stomach that stays around for hours.
Or are you thinking, I don’t want to eat wheat as it is a different seed to what it used to be and an irritation to the body, a product sprayed with pesticides in conventional farming and an ingredient that makes cakes and many of those childhood treats that I don’t want to have in my diet now.
Yes absolutely you may want to eat gluten free if you are allergic to gluten, or most grains (wheat derivatives). But have you thought it through to the point that if you are buying gluten free, because you are reactive some times to some foods, that you are only needing to replace some of your staples?
You may feel a larger response when you get a bowl of pasta so gluten free is an option, but you are also still causing a reaction in the body if you are eating a product that has small amounts of gluten in them too. Those sauces and flavours on your rice noodles and corn chips for instance are still doing damage unbeknown to you too!
Further to the gluten found in wheat, there are hundreds of different kinds of gluten proteins found in other grains, and this is not what you are hearing.
Gluten sensitivity is a systematic autoimmune disease whereby the immune system attacks itself. Not only does it affect the intestines (Celiac Disease) but intestinal lesions from the skin to the muscles to the brain.
To really know if you have a problem with Gluten you are not able to rely on a standard blood test either as the damage can start many moons in advance and are not detected until you have a major concern with the Thyroid, Gut, Skin or brain.
The current blood test offered in most labs looks for an immune reaction to the gluten peptide of wheat and elevated antibodies to gliadin or deaminated gliadin. However this has now been found to not be sensitive enough and hasn’t always picked up cases of Celiac Disease, so you can’t rely on it.
Research is now saying it is not appropriate to compare gliadin antibodies against Transglutaminase or Endomysial antibodies. They’re not false positives, it’s the immune system saying we’ve got a problem here that is not happening only in the intestines but manifesting somewhere else, such as the brain or nervous system aswell.
Therefore identifying antibodies just to gliadin is not thorough enough in looking for an immune reaction to gluten.
Scientifically put an exposure to a large peptide on a rare occasion would not likely have an initially been a problem. But with exposure in the smaller items of our meals, sauces, dressing and flavourings along with other grains eventually will pay its toll. You will at some stage reach your limit and boom pain.
So do you think shopping for Gluten free products is enough in what you want to do?