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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with most of what is in the article, I always wince when I see whole grains advertised as healthful foods.

They're not. Wheat contains gluten, a known gastrointestinal irritant, and celiac and IBD patients know that wheat is one thing you want to stay away from. It can also trigger inflammation and cause serious health problems for anyone with an inflammatory condition.

Perhaps proposing gluten-free foods is a better idea.

In addition, the guidelines for "advertising to children" are quite peculiar, and I don't know why children should be advertised to at all. What even constitutes advertising to children is not quite clear either.

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Of course, most people don't have gluten-related inflammatory conditions, so whole wheat is good for them!

In fact, it's statistically rare. Unless you mean that self-diagnosed wannabe celiac stuff.

It's called gluten intolerance (or sensitivity), not "self-diagnosed wannabe celiac stuff" and last time I checked it affected something like 5% of the US population (some state the incidence rate is as high as ~20%).

Most people just live with the stomach discomfort because it's difficult to try a gluten-free diet. And dismissive comments like yours also aren't helpful in motivating people to experiment.

I lived with stomach issues for 30+ years, and after trying a myriad of solutions, from eliminating dairy to exercise, I finally tried eliminating gluten from my diet. That did the trick.

Exactly. The jury is still out on exactly how prevalent gluten intolerance is, but the percentage is definitely a lot higher than most would guess.

A second problem is that there is a whole spectrum of how intolerant people can be to gluten. Some people will simply find they are a little more constipated or gassy the next day if they eat gluten and some will find that they need to urgently visit the restroom 30 minutes after consuming it. Neither of those groups of people would be considered celiacs. Many of the people in those groups go through live oblivious as to the cause.

Unfortunately, ignorance like that of lysol's grandparent comment dominates this debate. It's amazing and a bit scary the number of otherwise intelligent people who blindly assume that what is true for them is true for everyone. It's as if the mere fact that some people prefer to avoid gluten in their diets is a personal affront to them. It baffles me.

6 years for me, and it was basically gone in two days after cutting gluten from my diet.

Most people don't realize that they too have gluten issues.

I thought I didn't have any issues with gluten until I stopped eating it for a month. Now if I eat gluten I get a headache almost immediately afterwards.

Whole grains are absolutely a healthy choice in food, unless you have Celiac disease. What you're saying equates to calling nuts unhealthy because many people have nut allergies, but this is obviously the exception, not the rule.

Well, then I'd take it that many schools banning peanut butter outright due to the fractional number of kids with peanut allergies is... overreaction?

People don't have allergic reactions to airborn gluten like they do peanuts. It is not the same.

Of course it is overreaction if the kids are above lets say 10.

It's risk mitigation, that's all. The concept of a kid going anaphylactic at your business is very unattractive.

No, it's appropriate to the severity of the allergic reaction, unless you can show me similarly severe cases with gluten as the following:

http://fox13now.com/2013/04/26/boy-11-dies-after-severe-alle...

Peanut allergies can kill a kid pretty quickly. While it is a very small percentage of people who react strongly enough to it, if you've got a kid in the school with a known hypersensitivity, banning is not a bad idea.

Anaphylaxis from food can take a while (up to an hour or two I believe) to set in. When it does, it can cut off an airway, and then you're basically racing against suffocation with an epipen. If the kid's outside at recess or in the bathroom alone or just slow to tell a teacher, you're in a bad situation.

I don't know how much gluten it takes to trigger some of the scarier symptoms of IBD or if any of them are lethal in children. My guess is they're not, just because I haven't heard of gluten bans in schools.

Well, this is anecdotal, but I'm 14, and a few slices of bread landed me in the hospital with two emergency blood transfusions, and a final diagnosis of IBD.

It was... bad. Another classmate also ended up hospitalized with a celiac diagnosis. Whether it was brought on by food, I don't know, but the prevalence of wheat in a standard American diet could lead one to believe so.

A single peanut can cause an anaphylactic reaction which can be lethal in minutes. IBD symptoms from consumption of slices of bread is not remotely comparable.

EpiPen. Kids should carry them and know how to use them. Schools should not prevent them from carrying them.

>Whether it was brought on by food, I don't know, but the prevalence of wheat in a standard American diet could lead one to believe so.

It definitely shouldn't.

I wondered about this, so I looked up the prevalence of peanut allergies in the US. Here's an abstract:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10200001

This includes tree nut allergies as well. The short of it is that 0.6% of children under 18 in this study were found to have peanut or tree nut allergies. If this is true, that means many schools will probably have fewer than 5 students with the allergy.

In this case, outright bans seem to be more about reducing potential liability in the face of activist or litigious parents than they are actually addressing a student health issue.

Or to avoid kids accidentally killing each other with peanut butter.

Banning peanut butter would help with that, but it couldn't stop there. Plenty of packaged foods contain peanuts or other nuts, or are processed on equipment which processes those things. Foods are often repackaged by parents such that labels are not available.

My understanding of this type of reaction is that it doesn't require a large volume of the allergen to cause a very serious response. Trace amounts can be very dangerous. So it seems impossible to guarantee prevention by banning foods.

In my opinion, kids need to be aware of what they can and cannot eat, and the school must be prepared to actually deal with a reaction situation instead of just saying 'look, we banned peanut butter, what else do you expect?'

Healthy in relation to what, donuts? In comparison to meat, vegetables, nuts, and fruit, I'd say whole grains aren't a very good choice. Any food that readily breaks down into carbohydrates (and by extension, sugar) should be avoided except on occasion. I'm looking at you potatoes.

By your own standards, fruit also fails.

Legumes are probably the best source of carbohydrates with a low glycemic load, so you shouldn't forget about them.

> Whole grains are absolutely a healthy choice in food, unless you have Celiac disease.

Even with celiac disease: that just eliminates certain grains.

Thanks to pyridoxine glucoside, B6 from cereal grain products is absorbed with far less efficiency than that from animal foods

Comparative vitamin B-6 bioavailability from tuna, whole wheat bread and peanut butter.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6655507

the high phytate content of whole grains binds to minerals such as iron, calcium, magnesium, and zinc in the gastrointestinal tract, significantly reducing their absorption by the body

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673673...

EFFECTS OF PURIFIED PHYTATE AND PHYTATE-RICH BREAD UPON METABOLISM OF ZINC, CALCIUM, PHOSPHORUS, AND NITROGEN IN MAN

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1657026

Effects of dietary fiber and phytic acid on mineral availability

It has long been recognized that high cereal grain consumption induces vitamin D deficiency in various animal species, including primates, our closest animal relatives. By studying the fate of radio-labelled vitamin D, researchers observed significantly increased excretion of vitamin D in healthy human volunteers fed sixty grams of wheat fiber daily.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6299329

Reduced plasma half-life of radio-labelled 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 in subjects receiving a high fiber diet.

Full analysis:

http://anthonycolpo.com/the-whole-grain-scam/

Gluten free doesn't mean 100% of the gluten is removed from the food. So most people who are 'severely allergic' to gluten are really just convinced that is the case.

The last time I saw my cousin she looked and acted anorexic, meanwhile raving about her new gluten free vegan lifestyle. She looked terrible. My other cousin who suffers from narcolepsy was on the same diet raving about all her new energy while falling asleep at the table. Meanwhile I went from being the fattest person in the family to the most in shape in less than 10 months. I usually jokingly order a side of gluten these days, just to piss the gluten freers off.

Tip for American grocery shoppers: Don't hit the isles. Stay within the vegetable and fruits section, shop there, only there, then leave. That is a healthy diet. Usually there are nuts and meat in that section. Don't be looking for the gluten free potato chips and cookies, that isn't healthy.

Gluten free means contains no gluten. What are you talking about?

Actually, gluten-free means that there's a very small proportion of gluten in relation to the product, not that 100% of it has been removed.

----

"The current international Codex Alimentarius standard allows for 20 parts per million of gluten in so-called "gluten-free" foods" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet

----

It's enough to prevent exacerbation of symptoms for those with gluten sensitivity, but it's not a complete removal.

What I'm responding to is the fact that most foods don't contain gluten in the first place and people who are severely allergic to gluten know better than to eat foods in which gluten has been "removed" from the food through some chemical process (which is extremely rare, by the way, I can think of only one such product off the top of my head... much more common is accidental cross contamination which is a constant worry for celiacs and gluten intolerant people).

Celiacs don't even eat food prepared in the same production environment as foods that contain gluten. The sentiment that these people are deluding themselves because their very careful planned and meticulously controlled gluten free diets still contain gluten is preposterous.

You knock the gluten avoiders and follow that up by saying you became healthy by staying to the periphery of the grocery store where the fruits/veggies/meats/dairy are (and not the grains/gluten)...

I think you just contradicted yourself entirely.

Well no, you just made my point for me. See, if that is gluten free, then I didn't know it. I am not gluten free I just eat healthy. I have accumulated knowledge of a healthy diet rather than a gluten free one. Good point though.

> Tip for American grocery shoppers ...

As someone who has tried to hack his way out of unhealthy eating (and succeeded somewhat), I've found that the biggest grocery shopping tip is to go to the store just after a meal.

>> Don't hit the isles. Stay within the vegetable and fruits section, shop there, only there, then leave.

I really couldn't say it any better than this. Vegetables people. Get more of them. Fresh ones. Learn to enjoy onions and mushrooms.

I couldn't help but giggle at your choices - onions are not particularly healthy as far as vegetables go (better than potatoes, not as good as nearly any other veg) and mushrooms aren't vegetables. That said, I'm all for eating more vegetables (though fresh v. frozen is not an important consideration in my mind; I eat plenty of frozen peas, carrots, artichokes, and broccoli).

You'd have to be crazy to mix gluten free and vegan diets.

Care to post your sources that show how gluten isn't healthy for those without an intolerance (celiac, IBD, etc)?

"There also appears to be an increased incidence of celiac disease, with one study which looked for antibodies from 1950s American blood samples finding that celiac disease is about four times as common as it was"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet#Popularity_and...

"One study examined the effect of ω-5 gliadin, the primary cause of wheat dependent exercise/aspirin induced anaphylaxis, and found increased permeability of intestinal cells caused by this gliadin and another wheat albumin."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_sensitivity#Gluten_toxic...

"Another line of research shows gliadin binds a chemoattractant receptor and causes increases of a factor that destroys tight junctions. These junctions prevent leakage around the cells that line the small intestine, resulting in the leaking of food proteins into the body."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_sensitivity#Gluten_toxic...

It seems like the jury is still out on how many people suffer from gluten sensitivity, or the extent of the negative effect of gliadin.

> A 2011 panel of celiac experts concluded that there is a condition related to gluten other than celiac disease and named it "non-celiac gluten sensitivity".[51] however, for those without celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, the diet is unnecessary.

The first study is correlative, not causative.

The second and third studies are a bit too specific. Can you break this down into a list of effects on every day people?

I think this quote sums it up best: "Gluten intolerance is one of the most popular self-diagnoses because of its over-expanded list of potential symptoms. The gluten scare is mostly an overblown hippy-fueled movement."

Except that all kinds of auto immune diseases and alergies are rising across the board - so may be something else going on (An article in NYTimes recently suggested that we live in so (relatively) sterile environment that out immune system cannot calibrate itself and is going berserk with the smallest irritant)

Here's one:

Gluten causes gastrointestinal symptoms in subjects without celiac disease: a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21224837

On a visual analog scale, patients were significantly worse with gluten within 1 week for overall symptoms (P=0.047), pain (P=0.016), bloating (P=0.031), satisfaction with stool consistency (P=0.024), and tiredness (P=0.001).

I am someone who at this stage in life seems to have^ an issue with gluten.

Lots of people aren't like me though, and for them I do not believe there is any particularly well documented issues when it comes to gluten.

^Where 'seems to have' is self-produced anecdata: I spend months working through food group diet permutations (starting with removing basically except lightly cooked vegetables, miso soup and congee :-/) in an attempt to zero in on what was causing near-permanent (~10am->sleeping) acid reflux I had developed. Conclusions point fairly strongly to gluten, which I now mostly stay away from (I still eat it occasionally, zomg burgers, I just make sure breads/pasta/etc isn't the base of my diet).

>Wheat contains gluten, a known gastrointestinal irritant, and celiac and IBD patients know that wheat is one thing you want to stay away from.

Yes, and anyone allergic to strawberries know they should be avoided as well.

One demonstrative experiment is to go cold turkey on grains for a few weeks, then try eating something like a bagel or two. When I did this, I found that eating wheat products made me feel sick. Been largely avoiding grains since (though I "cheat" from time to time)

You could do the same with lots of foods. If you don't eat veggies for a while, the same thing happens the first vegetable you eat.

really? Every time I go non-vegetable, they taste and feel awesome when I come back to them!

I find that if I become addicted to junk food after a binge weekend, simply fasting for 24hours makes me craaave healthy foods like vegetables, even spinach which I usually hate, and white meats. Its weird, but I recommend at least 24 hours of fasting each week. Its a great system reset.

That's true of a lot of foods. Definitely true of meat, especially red meat. I don't think the fact that your stomach has to spend some time adapting to a food is really evidence that it's categorically bad for you.

>That's true of a lot of foods. Definitely true of meat, especially red meat.

I'd definitely be interested in a citation if you have one! I find this really interesting, especially since I've accidentally cut red meat out of my diet recently (despite enjoying it quite a lot, so I don't want to be ill next time I have it!), so I'm wondering on what sort of timescales these effects happen (both losing and gaining the ability to digest a certain food group).

I don't have a research paper to cite, but it seems fairly common knowledge that people who go vegetarian for a while --either by choice or by moving somewhere meat is scarce-- often have a period of re-adjustment when they return to eating meat; especially red meat. This is on a time scale of a few months in each direction.

This is not a universal truth -- I was raised vegetarian and began eating red meat in college; I never had an adjustment period. In fact, I suspect the incidence of this is greatly overstated and largely psychological.

It seems that celiac disease and nut allergy is something specific to US.

Not at all. Diagnostics may be more common at the US, or mis-diagnostics. Or maybe they are just over reacting to those two problems.

But both problems happen all over the world.

I feel a Wheat Belly debate coming on.

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