The Great Gluten Panic, Part 1

Reader Contribution by Stan Cox
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In the February-March issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine, I discuss the health benefits of eating whole-wheat foods. But I also stress that wheat isn’t good for everyone. Just under one percent of people in the United States suffer from an autoimmune condition called celiac disease, in which certain peptides — protein fragments produced during digestion of wheat’s gluten proteins — severely damage the walls of the intestines. In addition, an estimated one-half percent are allergic to wheat, while a still-unknown number of Americans have a less well-defined condition often characterized as wheat sensitivity or gluten intolerance. It is universally recommended that people who have celiac disease, allergies, or a definitive diagnosis of gluten intolerance refrain from eating foods that contain grain from any type of wheat or from related species such as barley or rye.

As often happens with widely publicized medical conditions that affect a very small segment of the population, millions of additional people have become convinced in recent years that they also are gluten-intolerant when they are not. During the past two and a half years, a cloud of confusion has enveloped the issue of wheat’s impact on the human body. Much of the fog has been created by cardiologist William Davis and his bestselling 2011 book Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health. In the book and elsewhere, Davis recommends that everyone, including those who are free of any wheat-related medical condition, should adopt a wheat-free diet. He blames wheat consumption for causing a host of medical problems: gastrointestinal disruption, obesity, diabetes, autism, hyperactivity disorders, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, dementia, coronary artery disease and even erectile dysfunction.

There has been other anti-wheat writing coming out — for example David Perlmutter’s more recent Grain Brain — but the wheat-free frenzy, which show no signs of ebbing (yet), was largely triggered by Wheat Belly. To support his claims, Davis cites evidence from his own practice, noting that patients whom he has put on wheat-free diets have lost weight while experiencing other health improvements. However, such anecdotal observations do not implicate wheat as the sole or even primary cause of those conditions.

Experts have pointed out that the symptoms that lead many people to a self-diagnosis of gluten intolerance can be caused by a wide range of factors unrelated to wheat, and that excluding wheat or any major ingredient or class of food from the diet usually does lead to lower total calorie consumption and weight loss. On the other hand, a 2010 report from the long-running Framingham [Massachusetts] Heart Study showed that subjects who adhered most closely to dietary guidelines that included five servings of grains per day—with whole wheat products prominent—achieved greater loss of belly fat than any other group.

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