Are You Really Gluten-Intolerant? Maybe Not
realclearscience.com
realclearscience.com
The way it works now, I go to the supermarket. I see, say, a frozen spaghetti and meatball entree. I carefully read the long label to see if it has anything that makes me want to avoid it [1]. It passes. I buy it. I like it. Can I now just buy it again, without reading the label?
Nope! Food companies like to tinker with their products to improve consumer satisfaction and to cut their costs and increase their profits, so I need to read the label again.
If they put version information, such as a last change date, on the ingredient list I could then just glance at the date and see if it has changed since I last bought the item.
This should be doable at almost zero cost to the food producers if it is phased in by making the switch to versioning on a given product the next time they are changing the label.
[1] I have no known foods that I must avoid for medical reasons, but I have some admittedly irrational requirements. Some time when I was a kid, I decided for some reason to stop eating meats other than beef and pork. I have sometimes described myself as a lacto-ovo-bovo-porco vegetarian.
Is this something new? Growing up in a different country I don't remember _ever_ hearing about this. And here is a huge "Gluten free X" market, where X is just about everything.
Does this sound odd or strange? Isn't gluten something people have been eating for a very long time now? And now we've evolved this strange sensitivity to it. So the idea is that it is these FODMAPs. Do we today end up eating more products with FODMAPs while before when baking bread it just didn't have that many of those?
I feel the same is happening with allergies. I don't remember hearing much about allergies. I only knew one kid in my high-school who had asthma. But now I know a lot of people in this country that are allergic to all kind of things. Heck my wife is. I have become allergic to pollen in the spring (and it never bothered me as a kid).
Anyway, it just seems very puzzling.
Maybe try a different doctor. Maybe keep a diary of what you eat. See if there is something in particular the make it worse.
We had to do it for our kid to see if they are allergic to certain foods (since my wife is).
It took quite a few years to figure that out.
Food's a social thing. Placing nonsense limitations on what's allowed can really cramp social settings.
There is absolutely a third option between "Coeliac" and "can eat gluten without any unsavory symptoms". Even a doctor may be unable to diagnose Coeliac disease via blood test but able to diagnose a sensitivity to gluten (via similar tests) that has a different cause (Coeliac is not the only explanation).
I understand the frustration of dealing with people who are self-diagnosed (it's unreliable, and comes with its own host of caveats and questions), but I'd refrain from drawing conclusions like this without actually knowing the person's history.
I avoid wheat products given the choice, but I won't stop eating wheat products as A) I like them, B) I don't want to be one of the whiny "I can't eat this" crowd (who also seem to come out with crap like dust allergies, or smoke allergies - everyone sneezes at those).
The test for celiac requires a person to have been eating regular amounts of gluten for 3 months before the test is done. When my wife is in a position such that a crumb of normal bread in her meal can cause her pain afterwards, there is no way she can eat gluten for 3 months in order to get a diagnosis by a doctor. The best she can get now is a statement that she is sensitive to gluten - but that sensitivity is enough that she can't have food cooked in the same pan as your food when you don't give any consideration to her.
So don't say this is "bullshit food intolerances" - just because you don't have to deal with it does not mean that it is not real.
Suddenly something as simple as ordering a dozen cheese and a dozen pepperoni pizzas the morning of the party turns into a multi-day consensus finding exercise and after the histrionics, sensitivity meetings with H.R. and shouting subsides you end up with a catered meal provided by a specialty diet catering company that nobody who would have just eaten the pizza will touch, doesn't taste very good and it costs 5 times as much and now thousands of dollars in wasted time is the result.
Personally I'm currently not eating gluten and appear to experience adverse reactions to it, but I didn't find this article excessively hostile to me or my eating choices. Indeed, I thought it was rather interesting, and might do a limited trial of non-FODMAP gluten to see what it does to me personally.
Alcohol is evil BUT that science is always ignored.
World Health Organization 1 in 5 deaths is alcohol related. 20% of the worlds deaths are related to alcohol consumption and well we don't care. SCIENCE
You've heard the term "pothead"?
I was just responding to the general issue that people think pot is non-harmful health wise. Don't get me started how people who are emotionally medicating themselves checkout of life is painful to those around them.
Reading through the study, it seems that there is an overlap between the foods proscribed by a gluten-free diet and the foods proscribed by a FODMAP-free diet. So it's really not even criticizing the diet; it's suggesting a more precise explanation for people who believe they are gluten-intolerant[0] (along with some other foods to consider avoiding as well).
EDIT The same website does have a more recent article on the topic with a much more sensational headline: http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/05/gluten_sensitiv... .
[0] Even among people who are gluten-intolerant/gluten-insensitive, there is an awareness that "all gluten" may not be bad - it's just easier to avoid all gluten than to go through the effort of identify the specific compounds that trigger their symptoms by trial-and-error.
Just by coincidence I ran across a very nice comment yesterday making this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7055194.
Quick lesson on pharmaceutical studies: they are extremely expensive and often can only have a limited sample size.
Quick lesson on statistics: it was developed to deal with small sample sizes and allow you to generalize to larger populations.
As such, pharmacy has very strict statistical standards with how to setup, design, and analyze experimental results. I'm a statistician, and I was impressed by how well designed this experiment was.
More so, the study only aimed to find a more precise cause of the issues. And, even with the solid analysis they had, are simply saying, "Hey, we should question this anti-gluten thing, it might not be as big an issue as we think".
Raise more questions, that's good science.
I did not take a test, but my (non-alternative) internal medicine doctor told me to go on the gluten free-diet after I explained (in gory details) my symptoms.
Is the test really necessary then? Really?
Also: if you learned that gluten in general could be on the menu again, but that you should avoid gluten products that also contain chemical X, wouldn't it make your life (or the life of people cooking for you) a bit easier?
(health insurance may pay some, but I'll still have a bill in 3 months staring at me asking for money.)
Do you have any issues with them? They are identified as high FODMAP foods.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-1746.2009....
I eat very few processed food, canned food.
I eat all fruit (except kiwi--i get irritable bumps on my tongue), meats, cheeses, vegetables, rice, potatoes, dairy products, wine, and non-beer, non whiskey alcohol. (Also, some Shoju is made from wheat, so I only drink those from sugar cane, potato, sweet potato, etc).
I eat very little fried foods. (Although I won't pass up french fries on occasion).
But I've thought that I've been missing a variable for a while. Wheat-based pancakes trigger pain, but I've also very occasionally had pain after eating things that didn't contain gluten at all. A few times I've accidentally eaten things that should have contained a fair amount of gluten, but they didn't set me off.
My problem experimenting with an exclusion diet is that my pain is quick to show up, but slow to leave. It took two weeks after I cut gluten for my stomach to finally settle. The effects of subsequent accidental dosages of gluten took a week to wear off.
I roll my eyes at the sheer quantity of people avoiding gluten, but if your symptoms are really overt[1] and the difference was that quick, I'm not going to question you.
I'm bothered by people who are 80-20 gluten free or can't point to any concrete issues, because I suspect they are attaching themselves to a fad. And I'm bothered by people with serious symptoms being diagnosed by chiropractors. I think that level of random speculation is often not just pointless, but potentially harmful.
[1] You didn't say what they are, beyond energy, but I'm trusting your judgment here.
The marketing website is way out of date, but the app is current, regularly updated (dedicated staff) and has the largest database of gluten-free brands and products available. The next release (out as soon as I can get it past the Apple gatekeepers) adds the ability to easily find NEW brands/products.
If you've chosen to eat gluten-free you know that finding tasty gluten-free products can be a real challenge. I'm trying to help people that have already made the decision to eat gluten-free; I'm not trying to 'promote' the diet itself - any significant diet and health decisions really should be made in consultation with professionals.
Would love to feel some HN love for my app :)
Primarily, although massive grain consumption is evolutionarily very recent, so that counts too.
"Also, what was the diet of our ancestors, and how was this information about our ancestral diet ascertained?"
Talk to the archeologists. However it doesn't require much research to determine very few people ate twinkies or drank coffee a thousand years ago. I would not recommend talking to public relations firms, or people collecting a paycheck from the food industry in general.
Why is there a belief that our ancestors had a singularly common diet? Humans have lived in all areas of the earth with vastly different diets. Some were high in fat, some were high in protein, some relied on plants/fruit, others were more balanced, etc.
Yes we probably on average have a higher carb intake than most humans in the past. But that doesn't mean there was some standardized diet that all pre-historic humans ate. They ate whatever was around to survive.
And sure, the evolutionary pressures were huge. This seems to be the source of things like lactose tolerance (the default is intolerance)
... after childhood.
The modern western diet is mostly made of vegetable oils, caffeine containing leaves and beans, huge amounts of refined sugar, ridiculous quantities of grains, antibiotic infused meats, fruit juices, milks, fermented products, huge amounts of corn syrup. Its no great challenge to go to the store for groceries and come home with nothing not on the list above, yet almost none of it existed more than a couple centuries ago. I realize this is considered an incredibly controversial opinion; I assume "most people" strongly believe our ancestors in 8000 BC mostly ate McDonalds and drank MtDew for every meal.