Gluten is bad kids, mmmkay!
Posted on | April 20, 2009 | 5 Comments
So I’m finally finished with the grad project that has been taking all my time, and am really looking forward to getting back to updating this place on a regular basis.
I’ll be updating workout logs, and posting my regular ramblings very soon. First though, I wanted to share a first hand account. I’m apparently one of the lucky people who is intolerant to gluten. Now, I normally eat loosely paleo (I eat some dairy and a fair amount of tubers, and wine) and feel pretty damn good. On climbing trips (most weekends) I’ll indulge in pizza and beer, and don’t normally feel any worse off wear for it.
This weekend was my daughter’s birthday. I cooked for her, and told her I’d make her whatever she wanted, whether if was paleo or not
Over the course of the weekend, I had three meals that contained wheat. They were all also meals I would’ve thought of as “healthy” only a year or two ago:
Chicken parmesan (breaded with actual bread crumbs) and a side of egg noodles with crab meat mixed in.
I had that twice, once for dinner, and some leftovers for breakfast. She wanted to shop the next day (ugh – she’s rapidly becoming a teenager. I hate buying unnecessary crap) and I ate a chicken sandwich while I was out with her.
I felt like crap the entire day. My blood sugar felt fine – no real crashes, but I did feel like I had a brick in my stomach. I also had some lower digestive track issues that I’ll spare everyone the details of (unless you ask).
Today, after having a dinner consisting of some fish, steamed vegetables and potato last night, I’m back to myself. This is clear enough that it’s making me reconsider the weekend cheats. Logistically eating strictly paleo then isn’t really practical, but perhaps I can manage to stay gluten free. I don’t appear to experience these issues with non-gluten grains. Stephan at whole health source has some intriguing ideas about soaking brown rice to ferment it that I may play around with. I’m not sure I’m convinced this is ideal, but it’s starting to seem like a much lesser evil than anything wheat based.
Tags: gluten > grains > paleo
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April 20th, 2009 @ 6:02 pm
Welcome to my world. From the amount of wheat you ate I’d say you have quite a mild case. The amount of inflammation wheat generates in an individual is very much a sliding scale. I slide in and out of thinking wheat is harmful to everyone, just on different scale, but I often think I’m projecting. Celiac tends to develop as you age; for some reason your body starts producing less peptidase in your stomach and letting the harmful peptides through to the intestine.
It’s actually the gliadin peptide in gluten that causes the problems, and unfortunately casein has a similar peptide that challenges a lot of celiacs. Gluten grains can be subdivided into categories, with wheat/rye/barley being the worst and corn/oats being an order of magnitude less harmful. Milk casein is somewhere in-between. Processing to reduce the protein content of the grain can help. I can eat nixtamalized corn without any problems, for example.
Unfortunately I think the less gliaden-like substances I eat, the more sensitive I become. If you ate wheat all the time you wouldn’t notice intestinal troubles, although your small intestine villi would probably be pretty trashed.
April 20th, 2009 @ 7:20 pm
Very good observations. Thanks for sharing this. You completely correct – before I stopped eating grains I wasn’t as sensitive to them – all though I’m still not all that sensitive. I think it was a combination of not knowing how much better I could feel, and of the sensitivity getting worse as I went without them.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but all gluten sensitivity is not celiacs, right? My understanding was that celiac was a specific deformation that rendered people gluten sensitive, but that there were other unspecified issues people could have. For example, a co-worker of mine has tested negative for celiac but is allergic to wheat.
April 20th, 2009 @ 9:11 pm
Technically coeliac disease is ‘gluten intolerance’ whereas ‘gluten sensitivity’ doesn’t have such a name. Functionally, gluten sensitivity is a sliding scale that effects a large minority of the population (! 40 %)
Wheat allergy often refers to the inhaled variation, known as Baker’s Asthma. Some people also think the alpha-amylase inhibitors (i.e. lectins) play a role, but that’s the only real wedge between coelic disease and wheat allergy in the intestine that I’m aware of. Most wheat allergy literature still focuses on gliadin.
The symptoms you describe are nearly identical to mine (general malaise the day after, intestinal trouble one to two days later). I’ve thus far failed to establish a good protocol for what to do if you intentionally ingest gluten since it happens very rarely.
The rate of false negative test results for coeliac disease is quite high. For the standard blood test I think it’s 35 %. Even intestine biopsies have a false negative rate around 10 %. Stephan has pointed to a stool test on his blog a few times that’s supposedly better.
Take a look at this article by Gudjon on coeliacs and casein:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17302893
Things to notice: many of the controls are symptomatic for nitric oxide (i.e. inflammation) and not really any better in terms of antibody counts when challenged with gliadin or casein. The difference between ‘control’ and ‘coeliac’ patients antibody production is about 10 % for the gliadin challenge but 500 % worse than the whey challenge. Based on this study 45 % of the controls (i.e. the general population) were ‘gluten sensitive’ and 6 % ‘gluten intolerant’. This study isn’t abnormal in that regard; gluten intolerance (coeliac disease) is typically considered to be 1-3 % of the population but the statistical cut-off levels are pushed up by all the undiagnosed cases.
Oh yeah, whey (isolate) is fairly safe to use.
P.S. if you want to drink beer, try different brands, they vary a huge amount in reaction. Stay away from unpasteurized beers like Belgain whites but other than that I notice no rhyme or reason for which beer is better.
April 20th, 2009 @ 11:16 pm
You guys are definitely right about the gluten. Something else to consider – if there was a certain amount of eating out/processed foods, you probably ingested some MSG. I have this same feeling when I eat out (rarely anymore) and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s MSG, because mine isn’t always related to wheat. I don’t include MSG in the food I cook at home, and we don’t do processed stuff, so even a small amount gets to me – even my kids have noticed this heavy/icky feeling after eating out.
April 21st, 2009 @ 8:13 am
Thanks for the really helpful comments. Now that I can finally breathe again (my class is over) this will provide for some interesting reading.
This is really little more than a minor annoyance at this point – refined flour (while I think it’s pretty unhealthy) doesn’t cause much trouble, nor do my favorite dark strong Belgium ales. It’s more a new area that I’m developing a lot of curiosity about.
As Robert said, I go back and forth between thinking grains are bad for everyone (as the Paleo crowd would say) or that they’re just bad for a significant minority of the population.
I also tend to agree with the Rob Wolf approach – while it may be possible for some people to eat grains with minimal harm, and while it may be possible to reduce the harm they cause (via soaking and fermenting) it’s hard to make a case for eating them over fruit, vegetables and meat.