Fructan, not gluten, induces symptoms in patients with gluten sensitivity
gastrojournal.org
gastrojournal.org
I saw 3 different digestive specialists (I believe all gastrointestinologists, it's been a few years). Their approaches did nothing. Then I searched for digestive disease research centers, went to one, and was "cured" after two visits. The doctor said that my situation is becoming more prevalant, and that the issue is typically one or more of the following: A hostile bacteria in the digestive tract, overgrowth of one or more bacteria in the digestive tract, or a parasite.
A round of the following two drugs fixed me within a few days: Alinia and Neomycin. I was drinking beer and eating noodles again without any problems.
Now I have to take an antibiotic that targets the digestive tract every 1 - 1.5 years as symptoms return. This indicates that my problem is bacterial rather than parasitic, although the exact cause of my problem hasn't been identified.
An interesting side note: I traveled to Japan while affected by gluten (but before corn became problematic), and I ate in restaurants the whole trip with only one problem. I am certain that I was consuming small amounts of gluten with each meal. I learned that Japan and other countries have rejected US wheat shipments over certian GMOs, but I couldn't reliably explain why I was largely unaffected in Japan.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Congratulations on escaping all those terrible symptoms!
I've been struggling with gluten sensitivity for 1.5yrs (been through the gastroenterologist circuit already, with 0 results) so your comment blew my mind.
Thank you! My email: chris [à] chris-hartwig.com
I’d be happy to provide more details to you if your interested in trialing this path.
If there's one thing I've learned, when researching how diet can affect myself, it's that different humans react to different food types and intake, in different ways.
If a ketogenic diet works for you, the same diet may not work for others. Similarly, other types of diet may not work for you.
It's for that reason I decided to vote you up again - there is no reason to downvote what you posted.
One particularly enlightening book which changed my outlook on diet, raised an eyebrow, and just clicked with me, was "Eat Fat and Grow Slim", written in 1958 by Richard Mackarness, M.B.,B.S.
I also happen to have numerous food allergies, so the gastroenterologist thought "add gluten to the list".
If nothing else works, maybe I'll try a keto diet, but I love sugar... I'm already gluten free (I'm french, no bread), fruit free, raw veggies free, lactose free (I'm french, no cheese), olive free (I live in Spain!)... cutting sugar would be hard ;-)
A key fact! This type of information could really help a dietician assist finding a solution if you run out of avenues yourself. I said the same about loving sugar but funny enough the cravings / desire simply goes away once your body adapts to a new energy source (which is not glucose anymore). Having just recently been to Spain, the hardest part is eating out and missing out on all the great tapas!
--2013-- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/where-will-japan-g...
--2016-- http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wheat-gmo-japan/japan-...
[1] http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/2008/04/a-bacterial-safe-house-a-n...
I'm pretty convinced by the literature that gluten sensitivity isn't really a "thing" outside of celiac disease, but even with me, I have problems with painful acne breakouts when I eat gluten, that don't happen when I don't have gluten. And from doing some googling and informal surveying of friends, it seems I'm far from alone on that.
Now is that because of gluten itself? Who knows. Maybe it has to do with how wheat is processed these days, or something else. It's really frustrating that something so basic and common doesn't seem to have any scientific answers, though.
Glyphosate is popular when growing non-wheat non-organic produce; if a glyphosate allergy existed, it would likely not appear like a gluten allergy because most products that once contacted it are not gluten-containing.
You can buy glyphosate products at home depot for experimentation.
It would appear to be a cheap and simple hypothesis to test.
I only know of glyphosate resistant soy which ends up in cow food. You usually don’t spray glyphosate on stuff you want to eat because it kills it, which only in the case of wheat is what you want.
So it's not nearly a universal practice, but on the other hand, North Dakota does account for 20% of the US wheat production. (And on the gripping hand, I don't know what wheat distribution in the US looks like; will ND wheat tend to be consumed in a particular region, or will secondary distribution through eg packaged foods tend to distribute it nation-wide?)
Glyphosate is typically used in conjunction with "Roundup Ready" crops, or before/during planting in "no-till" crops. While Monsanto developed a Roundup Ready line of wheat, it never actually made it to market, AFAIK, so why would you be spraying glyphosate on wheat?
(Serious question; while I have some background in agriculture, I'm not familiar with all of even the common practices.)
ETA: Reading the Snopes link, looks like it's mainly practiced in North Dakota, which explains why I've never heard of it.
[0]: https://freetheanimal.com/2016/05/enrichment-promotes-everyt...
[1]: https://freetheanimal.com/2015/06/enrichment-theory-everythi...
I was constantly trying to figure out why people with gluten sensitivities don't have reactions in most European countries. The enrichment theory seems pretty persuasive.
"Foods with gluten often contain fructans, a type of fermentable oligo-, di-, monosaccharides and polyols"
https://www.verywell.com/wheat-and-the-low-fodmap-diet-19447...
So maybe fructan. I wonder what affects fructan levels in wheat products.
The issue with glyphosate is the volatility, the fact that it stay in the ground, it can be absorbed through the skin (hence bad for farmers and people living near farms) but at least in europe, the quantities you can ingest are too small to endanger you. The fact that the main arguments of anti-glyphosate is this flawed argument, lobbies can easely convince the legislators that this argument have non-scientific ground (obviously) and should be ignored.
Her doctor has labelled it as gluten sensitivity, but we're well aware that it's not really clear she has any such thing, or if such as thing even exists. The FODMAP/fructan stuff sounds promising, but one common source of FODMAPs is garlic, and she adores garlic and eats it with everything in vast amounts which 1) strongly suggests that at least some FODMAPs are fine for her and 2) makes her extremely reluctant to try a FODMAP free diet.
The whole this is baffling. She clearly doesn't have coeliac disease, small amounts of gluten are (normally) fine, large amounts of things containing gluten are not fine, very similar things without gluten are fine, but something other than gluten that is consumed even when gluten is being avoided is not fine, at least some high-fructan/FODMAP foods are fine...I feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle. My current pet theory is that it's a reaction to at least two different substances, but what?
For now she just avoids gluten and (mostly) avoids outbreaks. It's confusing but it's an easy coping strategy.
So basically, I eat what I know is safe for me. If there's something that appeals a lot, I may test a little.
Bread used to go dry after a day, now it lasts for a week... That is not normal.
Ascorbinsäure (E 300) Natrium-L-Ascorbat (E 301) Calcium-L-Ascorbat (E 302) Lecithin (E 322) Guarkernmehl (E 412) Mono- und Diglyceride von Speisefettsäuren (E 471) Milchsäureester von Mono- und Diglyceriden von Speisefettsäuren (E 472 b) Wein- und Essigsäureester von Mono- und Diglyceriden von Speisefettsäuren (E 472 f) Saccharoseester von Speisefettsäuren (E 473) Zuckerglyceride (E 474) Polyglycerinester von Speisefettsäuren (E 475) Natriumstearoyl-2-lactylat (E 481) Calciumstearoyl-2-lactylat (E 482) L-Cystein (E 920)
It's nowhere near as bad as it was, I can eat wheat with no problem, but can't eat a lot for a long time.
But, imported Italian pasta doesn't give me a problem.
I've noticed even now with US wheat I can get constipated, but not with the Italian pasta.
I've heard so many things, like US wheat has 4x the gluten, or is sprayed with RoundUp after harvesting to dry it out, so who knows, but there does seem to be something different.
It took years for it to be diagnosed, partly because doctors weren't considering for a while, but also because it can be elusive -- might it be possible that any tests doctors made on your SO were false negatives? It's not uncommon unfortunately.
Also, a surprising number of things contain gluten unexpectedly. Some toothpastes for instance. Vinegars. Lemonades. So perhaps your SO's paradoxical outbreaks are compound effects of "hidden" gluten she has consumed over the day.
There are also coeliac's sufferers who have a tolerance to low amounts of gluten in that they don't feel distress. They are threatened by the same health risks as those who feel pain though (such as increased cancer risk).
Again, not armchair-doctoring here, I just want you to have extra information which might help you both understand this better.
So when I do have an outbreak despite trying to be careful, I am never sure whether it invalidates my hypothesis about the cause or indicates I just wasn't careful enough.
"Overall GSRS-IBS scores differed significantly during gluten, fructan, and placebo challenges; mean values were 33.1±13.3, 38.6±12.3, and 34.3±13.9, respectively (P = .04). Mean scores for GSRS bloating were 9.3±3.5, 11.6±3.5, and 10.1±3.7, respectively, during the gluten, fructan, and placebo challenges (P = .004). The overall GSRS-IBS score for participants consuming fructans was significantly higher than for participants consuming gluten (P = .049), as was the GSRS bloating score (P = .003). Thirteen participants had the highest overall GSRS-IBS score after consuming gluten, 24 had the highest score after consuming fructan, and 22 had the highest score after consuming placebo. There was no difference in GSRS-IBS scores between gluten and placebo groups."
Not to mention that they're explicitly trialling this with people "for whom celiac disease had been excluded". So an alternate conclusion could be "people without celiac disease but with self reported gut issues don't respond significantly differently to fructan, gluten, and placebo". Which is... not surprising?
You want a low p-value, the lower the p-value the stronger the evidence.
A p-value is cutoff traditionally at .05 (1 in 20), and if it's p < .05 you can reject the null hypothesis. The "null hypothesis" is the OPPOSITE of your paper's hypothesis (so you want to reject it): the null hypothesis is "All the variation we saw was from chance"
If you start by assuming A and B are related, your experiment would have to fail reject that notion in order to prove that A and B are indeed related, which is a less direct way of approaching scientific discovery.
Also, the intro of that page contains blatantly incorrect statements:
>"In the significance testing approach of Ronald Fisher, a null hypothesis is rejected if the observed data are significantly unlikely to have occurred if the null hypothesis were true. In this case the null hypothesis is rejected and an alternative hypothesis is accepted in its place."
There is no alternative hypothesis in Fisher's significance testing.
Here is a better wikipedia page:
"We may, however, choose any null hypothesis we please, provided it is exact."-Ronald Fisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments
I've heard that a lot of math fields really fail to teach history, perhaps that is what happened in your stats program.
No, the p-value is the probability that the given data generated is as far away or farther by random chance given the null hypothesis is true. That is to say, we assume the null hypothesis to make some predictions and see if the data is a likely occurrence under those assumptions.
This is not the same as the probability that the null hypothesis is true. If that is what you want (and most of us do want this), then Bayesian methods are more appropriate though they are more complicated and more sensitive to initial assumptions.
Sure, but thats why the null hypothesis should be predicted by your theory. Then you are checking your theory. Most people could care less about whether there is a miniscule difference between groups or not.
>"The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true."
No, as pointed out by jostylr this is wrong.
This usually means that the alternative hypothesis is the ‘interesting’ one, which is probably what the researcher would like to occur. Which maybe isn’t entirely intuitive.
But I f you don’t follow those restrictions, the math is meaningless.
If you swap the terms in the math, you’ll confuse anyone who knows the stats, while not really benefitting anyone.
And if you’re not using the math, why refer to a ‘null’ and ‘alternative’ hypothesis at all?
"Null" stands for hypothesis to be nullified in this case, not zero.
But now let's say that you assume they are different. Well, how different are they? You need to make that choice in order to get predictions. And then your rejection is not a rejection of "being different" but "being different in this one specific way".
Yes, precisely. You should predict a specific thing will happen based on some theory and check it with data. This sounds like the science we learned about in school.
Only predicting "there should be some difference" with your theories is more like astrology or something.
I would not be surprised if the way we're processing / spraying our wheat here is giving some folks problems.
Sadly... my inability to refind this article makes me suspect that, though I may be unsurprised by this idea, I have no evidence for it. So, if anyone can help refute the idea, that would be great! :)
I found “Oral allergy syndrome” http://acaai.org/allergies/types/food-allergies/types-food-a...
Edit: Just read the other reply. I'm definitely allergic to birch and grass pollen and I've always had hay fever. That solves that mystery.
I ultimately take "allergy" to mean, "we don't fully understand the reason."
In Switzerland some bakers have started to go back to the old methods because of this.
Edit:
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/02/bread-gluten-...
Also I think the FODMAP people are on to something important.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/23/sourdou...
The longer fermentation lets bacteria break down some of the gluten, so it's all round easier on the gut.
There are many chemicals in bread one can be allergic or intolerant to. Gluten proteins are but one. Bad lactose intolerance and lactose sweetened breads may be responsible for some reported symptoms. Soy protein or bean protein used in fast mixes. Fructans are another.
(I also have a central European colleague who has actual celiac disease. That said, I agree that the general gluten panic is way overblown.)
After my first treatment, I made yogurt with special starters that contained specific strains of bacteria based on those suggested by the SCD (Simple Carbohydrate Diet). The next time I took a round of antibiotics, which was after symptoms returned a year later, I didn't do anything special to repopulate flora. My symptoms did not return for 1.5 years.
I tend to believe that eating probiotic-containing foods is generally a good thing. It's best if you ferment your own foods, because the bacteria counts are typically much higher compared with store-bought products. Sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi, water kefir, ginger bug, and others are incredibly simple to make.
That said, the various common strains of bacteria are debated and their effect on existing flora is not yet well understood. It's possible that some fermented foods could be bad for some people. Hopefully one day the medical community will have a good grasp on how to effectively prescribe fecal transplants!
I don't know anyone who has stuck to a strict FODMAP diet long-term.
That's not how the high fodmap issues work. Everyone has some tolerance level for fermentation in their digestive system. These people just have a lower tolerance so the total high FODMAP foods in their diet has to be lowered. You don't have to give up bread, past, etc. You just need to cut things down. And honestly it's usually easier to cut out other things, like certain fruits. The reason it's done by iterative exclusion is because you don't know just how much you need to cut out and it would be really harmful to your life to cut out more than necessary. So you remove one thing at a time until you've cut enough. Generally you start with the foods on the list that are your least favorite and go that way.
The OP provided a link that doesn't go to an Elsevier-affiliated website.
Elsevier is an academic publisher that is a relic of a pre-digital world. Essentially, it leeches on universities, charging money for access created by academics,funded by the state, and peer-reviewed by volunteers for free. They justify their need to charge money by reasons such as hosting costs, but whenever someone tries to host their articles for free, they pull out the big guns.
Such actions, in particular, led to death Aaron Schwartz (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz ).
Elsevier is not liked around here.
Speaking of resources that anger Elsevier by hosting articles for free, Sci-Hub is one. In particular, you can read the full text of the article by going to https://sci-hub.cc/ and looking up the paper's DOI (10.1053/j.gastro.2017.10.040).
This full text is not available for free on the original publication link (nor on the NIH website). The study was funded by: the Extra Foundation Health and Rehabilitation, the Norwegian Celiac Association, the Throne Holst Foundation for Nutrition Research and the Wedel Jarlsberg Foundation - neither entity being Elsevier. (You can find this in the paper once you pay Elsevier to access it).
So yes. Oh, Elsevier.
I've always wondered which languages use brake pad (or any part of the braking mechanism) in the same way.
An interesting study would be take some "old world" wheat (that has not been impacted by the industrial-scale farming practices of the West), and see if the gluten-sensitive people still have the same reaction to that.
N=59 which is enough to justify for a larger survey but probably not to garner the attention this piece is receiving.
This will trigger massive swings in how certain food groups are perceived, affect farmers, etc. Caution is required.
A french wheat producers syndicate has published web pages to say even coeliacs should eat gluten, just less of it... That's even the first article my mom found about gluten intolerance and she called me to tell me gluten intolerance isn't really a thing according to the internet. My guts and my gastroenterologist both disagree.
That's what happens when you listen to politics and silence scientists.