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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

In the beginning, nothing was obvious. New things become obvious every day.

Definitely it’s not obvious that gluten specifically would be the cause, but seemingly obvious to test specialized diets?

So I guess I’m surprised people didn’t discover “avoid wheat” a lot sooner even if it took until the late 20th century to actually understand the mechanism.

Wheat was such a fundamental part of European diets until relatively recently that I suspect most serious celiacs died in childhood in earlier times.

Or just lived with minor discomfort, as plant strains were different and were consumed in much lower quantities anyway.

Celiac disease is far more severe than what's now called "gluten intolerance". But maybe they're related.

I get that "Celiac disease results from genetic abnormal immune response to gluten."[0] I'm not sure what that means, in detail. Perhaps there's a particular allele of one of the immunoglobulin genes. But whatever it is, perhaps other alleles cause "gluten intolerance" of varying severity.

0) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16095159

Per the article, mortality rates in children with celiac were extremely high until alternative diets were discovered.

That the ailment is nutrition based competes with all other factors. It is a giant diagnosis problem, not a just a nutritional elimination problem.

Combined with this with the role bread used to play. It was a massive part of diets until relatively recently when we turned bread bland and relatively nutrician free with mass production techniques.

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