You probably know someone who has recently adopted a gluten-free diet. Maybe you even thought it was the trendy thing to do.
Well, it is trendy, it may be a fad or there might just be some solid science behind the increasing prevalence of gluten sensitivity, gluten intolerance and even celiac disease.
Let me detail a personal experience: While I have cast iron digestion, my husband does not. In the past few months, he’s noticed increasing gastrointestinal discomfort and sometimes even gastric pain.
We discussed the possible causes and came to the conclusion that we should try an experiment: We would avoid gluten for three weeks and see if it changed anything. This is called the classic elimination and challenge diet. The idea is that you avoid a food that you suspect may be causing the problem and then challenge your system by eating some of that food in moderation.
In our case, we planned to be gluten free for three weeks, then we would each eat one piece of bread and track the results.
It didn’t take three weeks. It only took about a week for it to become obvious that my husband is gluten intolerant. The improvement was nearly immediate and dramatic. In fact, it was so dramatic that he doesn’t want to do the challenge part at all. I don’t blame him!
He wonders why he has never had a problem in his life and now suddenly he is gluten intolerant.
I think there are several possible answers. All or some of them may be true.
The first culprit is highly the hybridized wheat grown today, which has vastly different protein structures than wheat varietals of the past, according to Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly.
Among those triggers are gliadin proteins that have been shown to trigger celiac symptoms, which Dr. Davis says have been “enriched in modern wheat and was nearly absent from wheat of 1960 and earlier.”
He also associates the increased risk to changes in the structure wheat germ agglutinin that has toxic effects on the small intestine and may block leptin, the hormone of satiety.
Finally, Davis says, modern wheat is replete in antigens that stimulate the immune system, creating intolerances.
Modern farming techniques that have recently begun to embrace the use of glyphosate (the active ingredient in the weed killer RoundUp) to quickly dry wheat crops to speed their readiness for market. Spraying glyphosate on ripe or nearly ripe wheat crops concentrates the herbicide in the grains. That means that virtually all commercial wheat (except organically certified wheat) grown today is suspect.
What does glyphosate have to do with gluten sensitivities? Quite a bit, it turns out.
Definitive research has come from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Stephanie Seneff has concluded that glyphosate contamination in our food (including in wheat) prevents the manufacture of three amino acids humans must get from food or from normal gut bacteria. But then, glyphosate kills off normal gut bacteria and causes remain bacteria to create toxic alternative amino acids, which has an effect on our intestines “like a wrecking ball,” Dr. Seneff says. It can also cause kidney and liver damage.
The result: diarrhea, cramps, systemic illness, leaky gut that can spreads toxins throughout your body, liver and kidney damage. Some agricultural workers exposed to massive amounts of glyphosate have died from kidney failure.
Our personal experience has helped us make the decision to become gluten-free or as gluten-free as possible since there is hidden gluten in many, many foods, including almost all soy sauce.
We may take the plunge and try a challenge on organic wheat products, which are not contaminated with glyphosate, but may still be produced with highly hybridized wheat. For now, it’s easy enough to avoid wheat and all foods that contain gluten, thanks to the quickly expanding demand and supply for such foods.
