New Yorker article examines the anti-gluten trend

[kenny]

Long, but worth reading: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/grain?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook

Cliff Notes, quotes in blue:
Only about 1% of the population have celiac disease, yet "nearly twenty million people contend that they regularly experience distress after eating products that contain gluten, and a third of American adults say that they are trying to eliminate it from their diets.
...
Sales of gluten-free products will exceed fifteen billion dollars by 2016, twice the amount of five years earlier. "
...
"The fear of gluten has become so pronounced that, a few weeks ago, the television show “South Park” devoted an episode to the issue. South Park became the first entirely gluten-free town in the nation.
Federal agents placed anyone suspected of having been “contaminated” in quarantine at a Papa John’s surrounded by razor wire.
Citizens were forced to strip their cupboards of offending foods, and an angry mob took a flamethrower to the wheat fields."
...
"Doctors rarely diagnose non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and many don’t believe that it exists.
Few people seem to have been deterred by the lack of evidence.
“Everyone is trying to figure out what is going on, but nobody in medicine, at least not in my field, thinks this adds up to anything like the number of people who say they feel better when they take gluten out of their diet,” Murray said.
“It’s hard to put a number on these things, but I would have to say that at least seventy per cent of it is hype and desire.
There is just nothing obviously related to gluten that is wrong with most of these people.’’"

I certainly do not want to make fun of people who actually do have the medical condition celiac, but regarding the other millions of anti-gluetnites ... as a wise friend said ...
"Imagine if, in 2004, someone told you all about how the gluten free revolution, or fad, or whatever, would unfold over the next decade.
Then they said 'guess which ones of your friends will discover they are gluten intolerant by 2014'.
I'll bet you you could have guessed with 80-90% certainty."

I agree.

 

[kenny]

Re: The New Yorker puts the anti-gluten trend into perspecti

Another snip.

"Peter H. R. Green, the director of the celiac-disease center at the Columbia University medical school and one of the nation’s most prominent celiac doctors, says that the opposition to gluten has followed a similar pattern, and that it is harming at least as many people as it is helping.
“This is a largely self-diagnosed disease,’’ Green said, when I visited his office, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
“In the absence of celiac disease, physicians don’t usually tell people they are sensitive to gluten.
This is becoming one of the most difficult problems that I face in my daily practice.”

He went on, “I recently saw a retired executive of an international company.
He got a life coach to help him, and one of the pieces of advice the coach gave him was to get on a gluten-free diet.
A life coach is prescribing a gluten-free diet.
So do podiatrists, chiropractors, even psychiatrists.’’
He stopped, stood up, shook his head as if he were about to say something he shouldn’t, then shrugged and sat down again.
“A friend of mine told me his wife was seeing a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression.
And one of the first things the psychiatrist did was to put her on a gluten-free diet.
This is getting out of hand.

We are seeing more and more cases of orthorexia nervosa”—people who progressively withdraw different foods in what they perceive as an attempt to improve their health.
“First, they come off gluten.
Then corn.
Then soy.
Then tomatoes.
Then milk.
After a while, they don’t have anything left to eat—and they proselytize about it.
Worse is what parents are doing to their children.
It’s cruel and unusual treatment to put a child on a gluten-free diet without its being indicated medically.
Parental perception of a child’s feeling better on a gluten-free diet is even weaker than self-perception.”"

 

[kenny]

Re: The New Yorker puts the anti-gluten trend into perspecti

I suspect the culprit is not the gluten but the good stuff they remove from the wheat kernel to make white flour, and the bad stuff they add to make industrial bread profitable:

"Jones is a careful scientist, and he said more than once that he had no evidence that a growing reliance on any single additive could explain why celiac disease has become more common, or why so many people say that they have trouble digesting gluten.
But he and his colleagues are certain that vital wheat gluten makes bread taste like mush.
“Flour that is sliced and packed into plastic wrapping in less than three hours—that’s not bread,’’ Jones said.
He and Bethany Econopouly, one of his doctoral students, recently published an essay in the Huffington Post in which they argue that the legal definition of the word “bread” has become meaningless and ought to be changed: “FDA regulations state that for bread to be labeled as ‘bread,’ it must be made of flour, yeast, and a moistening ingredient, usually water.
When bleached flour is used, chemicals like acetone peroxide, chlorine, and benzoyl peroxide (yes, the one used to treat acne) can be included in the recipe and are masked under the term ‘bleached.’
Optional ingredients are also permissible in products called bread: shortening, sweeteners, ground dehulled soybeans, coloring, potassium bromate . . . and other dough strengtheners (such as bleaching agents and vital gluten).”"