4 ms·

Can people please stop calling gluten free a fad or "bullshit". The reactions to gluten are autoimmune not some simple thing only to do with the walls of the in

Can people please stop calling gluten free a fad or "bullshit". The reactions to gluten are autoimmune not some simple thing only to do with the walls of the intestines. Classic intestinal Coeliac reactions while the most common are only one of the manifestations. We've known for ages that it can also cause problems with the skin (Duhring's disease, discovered in 1967 and also still not fully understood) and there is a growing body of work showing connections to the nervous system.[0] The bottom line is it's an autoimmune disease and we simply do not know the full extent of the interactions and effects when the immune system is going wrong so people like you, who don't know what you are talking about to the extent you can't even spell the name of what you are talking about properly, are the real purveyors of bullshit. That's to say nothing of the fact that even in your world where there are only people with classical Coeliac those people have to put up with the implication from the people mocking and sneering that they aren't genuine, and have to put up with waiters and waitresses who don't properly handle food or disclose its ingredients because they think it's a fad. [0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_citedin&from_uid=20170845 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_ci...

tptacek 11y ago
On the other hand, as an article I read recently pointed out, there is a faddish "why not ask for gluten-free" component to the phenomenon, and while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place) just because it's a trendy thing to ask for. The concern then is that restaurants will stop accommodating (because they simply can't afford to) altogether, and people with serious health issues will just have to eat elsewhere, which sucks.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  I know a Coeliac who is diagnosed properly - with the genetic test showing the relevant genes, then a blood test showing the antibodies and then finally a biopsy showing damage to the gut - and they are older and travel quite a lot. The change over the last decade has been wonderfully beneficial for them. I've seen that observation repeated many times online as well, pleasure at having so many more options than just a few years ago. It's not just about restaurants either, I don't remember there being a gluten free section in the supermarket growing but now they are everywhere (Australia). I've never seen a comment suggesting the other way. Huge numbers of people have problems with modern diets, you can see it if you dig into any report on work absenteeism. It makes perfect sense if you reason evolutionarily that there would be a far greater number of "low level" allergies/problems than "high level" ones like those that cause people to go into anaphylaxis from nuts or shellfish. If allergies that can kill you quickly from fairly common things exist, i.e. not everyone suffering from them has died, then it would be suprising if lower level allergies to even rarer things were less prevalent. That's to say nothing of how little we actually understand our gut flora, i.e. not an allergy but just an unsuitability at that present moment, and how diverse it is across populations. This faux-masculine "just toughen up and eat your veggies and that thing that's making you not feel well" hides behind a mask of intellectual superiority. It sneers down its nose at people who are trying to improve their health and pretends changing your diet to alleviate symptoms of various kinds is exactly the same as homeopathy. I think it's bled over from the criticism of fad diets for weight loss that pretend to get around the laws of thermodynamics, but diets can address health in many more ways than just weight loss so not all diets should be grouped together as somehow intellectual bankrupt. It's absurd in the case of gluten where there are numerous non-classical symptoms associated with it and the only rational scientific response is to keep funding university research at the randomised double-blind peer reviewed research level. While we wait for the researchers to exhaust that research area, which will likely take decades given how, difficult it is to do studies on diet that are totally blind it will probably come through greater research into genetics and the immune system, people suffering symptoms should not be castigated for experimenting in a non-blind way on themselves. Of course that's subject to placebo and all the rest, but it's not remotely near anything like "my fad diet can defy the laws of physics".
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I have no idea who you're responding to, but it's not me. My point is not that there aren't people with serious gluten intolerances, nor did I ever tell anyone to "toughen up and eat their veggies".
    - jkldotio 11y ago
      It's only really the first paragraph directed at you and your point, I suppose I should have made that more clear. The rest is more generally blasting out at an extremely annoying trend I've seen online which is more to do with siliconc0w.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  >while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place) This is technically true, but nothing requires "asking for changes" to done with the same painful effort as avoiding allergens. You don't need separate prep and storage to skip an ingredient, and 1% cross-contamination isn't going to hurt someone that just wants a different taste or nutrient balance.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    The point of the article was that the restaurant can't always tell whether customers are asking because they have real problems, so that 1% contamination is going to be a huge problem, or just a preference. If they're going to serve someone who says they have a food allergy, they often have to err on the safe side.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      Are we looking at the same article? Is asking too hard, or are there really that many people lying about allergies?
siliconc0w 11y ago
While we're linking to the NIH: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24026574 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24026574 "Recent randomized controlled re-challenge trials have suggested that gluten may worsen gastrointestinal symptoms, but failed to confirm patients with self-perceived NCGS have specific gluten sensitivity. Furthermore, mechanisms by which gluten triggers symptoms have yet to be identified. " So, yes, there is a lot we don't know - about a lot of things but there really isn't any evidence, even in your linked search, that people without wheat allergies or celiac disease should care about gluten. Not enough to justify slapping gluten-free on everything - which makes it a fad.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  Thanks to whoever downvoted me. Seems I am arguing against people who downvote against the spirit of the rules and who can't even spell the thing they are talking about.. Regarding your point siliconc0w as I say in my other comment diets are experiments. Let's not conflate "my diet can defy the laws of thermodynamics" regarding weight loss with a diet directed at a different part of health. Nor should we forget that people can experiment with diets knowing the limitations of self-experimentation whilst simultaneously supporting double-blind peer reviewed work. Conflating people on a diet for the relief of symptoms with people on a diet because they think it suspends the laws of the universe is stupid, suggesting people with symptoms aren't allowed to experiment on a personal level while science grinds away at more solid conclusions is also stupid. The second point is one of elementary reasoning. If someone points to a pile of papers with some published in 2014 and 2015 then a paper from 2013 with includes a couple of trials of ~30 people and ends inconclusively isn't a trump card. The paper, if you actually read it, makes no bold claims at all and is more of a meditation on how to methodologically advance our understanding, i.e. how to design experiments to exclude hidden coeliacs with better tests for them, the question of how gluten and gluten-free diets testing for NCGS need to control for FODMAPS, dairy and the like. They literally end with "Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is an entity awaiting validation, better diagnostic criteria, and, if it does exist, pathogenic mechanisms". And the studies they cite had mixed results on small n, again it's about more and better designed studies which I am sure those authors would agree on. But they were all just looking, as far as I can tell I didn't go to the studies they themselves cite, at basic symptoms. The MRI brain data came along in 2014, after all this.

tptacek 11y ago

On the other hand, as an article I read recently pointed out, there is a faddish "why not ask for gluten-free" component to the phenomenon, and while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place) just because it's a trendy thing to ask for. The concern then is that restaurants will stop accommodating (because they simply can't afford to) altogether, and people with serious health issues will just have to eat elsewhere, which sucks.

jkldotio 11y ago
I know a Coeliac who is diagnosed properly - with the genetic test showing the relevant genes, then a blood test showing the antibodies and then finally a biopsy showing damage to the gut - and they are older and travel quite a lot. The change over the last decade has been wonderfully beneficial for them. I've seen that observation repeated many times online as well, pleasure at having so many more options than just a few years ago. It's not just about restaurants either, I don't remember there being a gluten free section in the supermarket growing but now they are everywhere (Australia). I've never seen a comment suggesting the other way. Huge numbers of people have problems with modern diets, you can see it if you dig into any report on work absenteeism. It makes perfect sense if you reason evolutionarily that there would be a far greater number of "low level" allergies/problems than "high level" ones like those that cause people to go into anaphylaxis from nuts or shellfish. If allergies that can kill you quickly from fairly common things exist, i.e. not everyone suffering from them has died, then it would be suprising if lower level allergies to even rarer things were less prevalent. That's to say nothing of how little we actually understand our gut flora, i.e. not an allergy but just an unsuitability at that present moment, and how diverse it is across populations. This faux-masculine "just toughen up and eat your veggies and that thing that's making you not feel well" hides behind a mask of intellectual superiority. It sneers down its nose at people who are trying to improve their health and pretends changing your diet to alleviate symptoms of various kinds is exactly the same as homeopathy. I think it's bled over from the criticism of fad diets for weight loss that pretend to get around the laws of thermodynamics, but diets can address health in many more ways than just weight loss so not all diets should be grouped together as somehow intellectual bankrupt. It's absurd in the case of gluten where there are numerous non-classical symptoms associated with it and the only rational scientific response is to keep funding university research at the randomised double-blind peer reviewed research level. While we wait for the researchers to exhaust that research area, which will likely take decades given how, difficult it is to do studies on diet that are totally blind it will probably come through greater research into genetics and the immune system, people suffering symptoms should not be castigated for experimenting in a non-blind way on themselves. Of course that's subject to placebo and all the rest, but it's not remotely near anything like "my fad diet can defy the laws of physics".
- tptacek 11y ago
  I have no idea who you're responding to, but it's not me. My point is not that there aren't people with serious gluten intolerances, nor did I ever tell anyone to "toughen up and eat their veggies".
  - jkldotio 11y ago
    It's only really the first paragraph directed at you and your point, I suppose I should have made that more clear. The rest is more generally blasting out at an extremely annoying trend I've seen online which is more to do with siliconc0w.
Dylan16807 11y ago
>while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place) This is technically true, but nothing requires "asking for changes" to done with the same painful effort as avoiding allergens. You don't need separate prep and storage to skip an ingredient, and 1% cross-contamination isn't going to hurt someone that just wants a different taste or nutrient balance.
- tptacek 11y ago
  The point of the article was that the restaurant can't always tell whether customers are asking because they have real problems, so that 1% contamination is going to be a huge problem, or just a preference. If they're going to serve someone who says they have a food allergy, they often have to err on the safe side.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Are we looking at the same article? Is asking too hard, or are there really that many people lying about allergies?

siliconc0w 11y ago

While we're linking to the NIH: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24026574 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24026574 "Recent randomized controlled re-challenge trials have suggested that gluten may worsen gastrointestinal symptoms, but failed to confirm patients with self-perceived NCGS have specific gluten sensitivity. Furthermore, mechanisms by which gluten triggers symptoms have yet to be identified. " So, yes, there is a lot we don't know - about a lot of things but there really isn't any evidence, even in your linked search, that people without wheat allergies or celiac disease should care about gluten. Not enough to justify slapping gluten-free on everything - which makes it a fad.

jkldotio 11y ago
Thanks to whoever downvoted me. Seems I am arguing against people who downvote against the spirit of the rules and who can't even spell the thing they are talking about.. Regarding your point siliconc0w as I say in my other comment diets are experiments. Let's not conflate "my diet can defy the laws of thermodynamics" regarding weight loss with a diet directed at a different part of health. Nor should we forget that people can experiment with diets knowing the limitations of self-experimentation whilst simultaneously supporting double-blind peer reviewed work. Conflating people on a diet for the relief of symptoms with people on a diet because they think it suspends the laws of the universe is stupid, suggesting people with symptoms aren't allowed to experiment on a personal level while science grinds away at more solid conclusions is also stupid. The second point is one of elementary reasoning. If someone points to a pile of papers with some published in 2014 and 2015 then a paper from 2013 with includes a couple of trials of ~30 people and ends inconclusively isn't a trump card. The paper, if you actually read it, makes no bold claims at all and is more of a meditation on how to methodologically advance our understanding, i.e. how to design experiments to exclude hidden coeliacs with better tests for them, the question of how gluten and gluten-free diets testing for NCGS need to control for FODMAPS, dairy and the like. They literally end with "Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is an entity awaiting validation, better diagnostic criteria, and, if it does exist, pathogenic mechanisms". And the studies they cite had mixed results on small n, again it's about more and better designed studies which I am sure those authors would agree on. But they were all just looking, as far as I can tell I didn't go to the studies they themselves cite, at basic symptoms. The MRI brain data came along in 2014, after all this.