Gluten free diet blog

According to the statistics one of a hundred Americans suffer from celiac disease also known as gluten intolerance that is actually a genetic disorder. Weight loss, diarrhea and mulnutrition are only classic features of celiac disease symptoms. It also can have implicit symptoms such as isolated nutrient deficiencies but no gastrointestinal symptoms. Up to now it have been considered that the celiac disease influenced mainly European people, but latest researches indicated that Hispanic, Black and Asian people are affected as well. They endure damage to the villi (shortening and villous flattening) in the lamina propria and crypt regions of their bowels when they use specific toxic amino acid sequences (food-grain antigens) contained in rye, wheat and barley. Traditionally oats have been considered to be toxic to celiacs, but newest scientific investigations have proved the opposite. On account of that these invetigations are in process it may be too early to draw exact inference.

Owing to wide range of celiac disease symptoms it can be hard to diagnose. Many people spend years to go through tests and misdiagnoses before doctors finally find the problem. The symptoms can include “mild weakness, bone pain, and aphthous stomatitis and also chronic diarrhea, abdominal bloating, and progressive weight loss”. Scott Adams who had celiac disease tells: “Like many people with celiac disease I’ve spend a lot of years and money until doctors found my problem…because of the large veriety of symptoms diagnosis can be very difficult..most doctors are taught to look for classic symptoms and often make a wrong diagnosis, or no diagnosis at all. During my doctor visits my diet was never discussed, even though most of my symptoms were digestive in nature. My symptoms included abdominal pain, especially in the middle-right section while sleeping, bloating, and diarrhea (off and on over a period of several years). A simple (and free!) exclusionary diet would have quickly revealed my problem. An exclusionary diet involves eliminating wheat, rye, oats, barley, dairy products, soy and eggs for several weeks, and recording any reaction as one slowly adds these foods back to their diet”.

Studies shown that in the case when a person who has the disorder proceeds with using gluten his chances of gastrointestinal cancer will raise by a factor of 40 to 100 times that of the normal person. Than, “gastrointestinal carcinoma or lymphoma develops in up to 15 percent of patients with untreated or refractory celiac disease”. It is very important to diagnose the disease as quickly as possible to treat it properly.

According to figures above we can get the total number of people in America who have celiac disease: 2.18 million (compare it with the total population of 290,356,028). This figure is very weighty for doctors to realize how many people have the disease and to make generally accepted testing to bring the diagnosis rate in line with the disease’s epidemiology. These tests are rather simple and include screening the patient’s blood for antigliadin (AGA) and endomysium antibodies (EmA), and also a biopsy on the areas of the intestines, which is still the standard for a formal diagnosis.

Celiac disease is only treated by strict adherence to a 100% gluten-free diet for the whole life because this diet can avert almost all complications caused by the disease. The diet means the exclusion of all products containing wheat, rye and barley, and also any of their derivatives. This is not a simple task because many processed foods contain hidden sources of gluten.