What’s the deal with gluten?

Factual Questions
21

Thelabdude - dunno if it confirms anything for you, but one of the triggers that my wife knows she ate some gluten is sores in the mouth. Nothing as horrible as you’ve described, but then again she’s also been pretty careful, so the amount of gluten ingested is usually fairly small.*

WhyNot - very happy to hear your daughter is doing well! Two symptoms that I eventually led doctors to my wife’s diagnosis were a general fatigue+fogginess and what appeared to be lactose intolerance/irritable bowel. She had both for a good portion of her teen years, but they were diagnosed as “get more sleep” and “avoid milk/lactose/etc”. Interestingly, after going off gluten both issues pretty much disappeared. Celicas/Gluten Sensitivities are very hard to diagnose.

The worse part (someone upthread mentioned this, but it’s worth repeating) is that the blood test to “confirm” Celiacs is diagnostically significant only in like 60 or 70% of the cases (don’t quote me on the figure, I can’t find a cite, so I’m going from memory) so 30-40% of people have a gluten sensitivity or even Celiacs and don’t know it unless they try a GF diet for a few months and “feel better”. It’s difficult to live with.

  • Meaning she doesn’t eat a big bowl of pasta and then gets a sore - its more like she at some soup or maybe a sauce used over meat used a little bit of flour as a thickener, or a burger used some breadcrumbs as filler. We try very, very hard to avoid running into the situation of the big bowl of pasta because we don’t want to know the consequences.
22

I think that was me. And yeah, this is why we haven’t bothered with the testing. There are really only two scenarios it could lead to: either it would be positive, and then the only treatment is to keep her off gluten, or it could be negative, but then she might be one of the large percent of false negatives, so we’d…keep her off gluten.

Since I “diagnosed” it by eliminating gluten - and ONLY gluten, to avoid the “Jenny McCarthy effect” of making more than one change at a time - and she immediately stopped throwing up and having diarrhea, and then a week and a half later got some Wheat Thins from another kid at a party and threw up and had diarrhea that night, I’m calling it close enough to a true intolerance, even without the test. I have quantifiable changes (the vomitting, the diarrhea, the growth and the number of respiratory infections) that correlate to the consumption of gluten. It’s not enough to run a gold standard study on, but it’s enough to make a parenting decision on. I’ll keep her off the gluten, at least until there’s a test with better sensitivity and specificity created.

23

PDF warning

This is a forty page excerpt of a lecture about ADHD/ADD linked to in the MPSIMS thread about living with ADD. Long but very worthwhile read. If your friend does some research into what ADHD in the brain looks like, what it is caused by, and what it does (or rather, doesn’t do) it will become clear that cutting out gluten won’t fix a thing.

24

Some of these claims sound crazy to me.

I am a celiac. It runs in my family. I can tolerate only a small bit of gluten (maybe a cookie or two a week). Gluten intolerance has nothing to do with your brain. Nor is it an allergy. Basically, wheat gluten affects your intestinal villi. It can gum up the works, smother them or weaken them. Villi are like tiny hairs in your intestine that absorb nutrients and help push material on. When the villi are damaged or non-existent, it affects your immune system. The results can snowball.

Many people who have had radiation or chemo can be temporary celiacs, because the chemo kills the villi. They will regenerate however.

Some people are born as “true” celiacs. They never had the villi and never will. They tend to lead tough, and until recently, short lives. As understanding of celiac disease has grown, the quality of these people’s lives have improved.

If you want to learn more about the disease go look at some reliable medical sites. WebMD, Harvard Medical Review or the Mayo Clinic are all good resources.

25

Since gluten seems to be in nearly as many processed foods as high fructose corn syrup, eliminating gluten from the child’s diet is likely to eliminate almost every possible allergen the kid could run into. There is some anecdotal evidence that food dyes exacerbate ADHD, but the scientific evidence is mixed. There have been some recent studies showing that the elimination diet above did help with hyperactivity, but no indication as to which substance is actually the culprit. It may be a secondary effect - an allergen causing a histimic reaction, which in turn causes increased hyperactivity.

26

I don’t think that’s true at all. There are still plenty of processed items that are gluten free. Heck, Cool Ranch Doritos are gluten free (if you’re not so sensitive that you need to worry about cross contamination from factory lines). Cheetos are gluten free. Kool-aid (which certainly has plenty of food dye in it) is gluten free.

27

There are a lot of foods that are gluten-free if you just look around you. It’s just that you have to get away from the idea of bread. IMO, most gluten-free bread is crap. No sandwiches, no pizza, no pasta (unless it is rice pasta). Instead, I eat stir fry, salads and soup. It generally makes for a much healthier diet. The down side is that these foods take more time to put together than a sandwich.

Occasionally, I will make a gluten-free pizza and I can buy pretty decent ones at a local GF bakery. But that’s a treat, not for everyday.

Naturally gluten-free foods I love:
Enchiladas
Onion Bhajis (similar to onion rings)
Spaghetti over sauteed onions and peppers instead of noodles
Popcorn
Rice crackers
Broth soups
Soft-shell crab
Fritattas (like an omelet with hashbrowns in the mix)
Roasted potatoes and sweet potatoes (use rice flour to create a crust)
All natural or organic ice cream
Pesto potatoes
Every single fruit, vegetable, meat and dairy item is gluten-free until someone start to turn it into something else (breading the fish or adding stuff to the sausage).

And last, but most important of all…

Chocolate is gluten-free. :smiley:

28

Udi’s Udi’s Udi’s! :smiley:
(I swear, I’m not a shill; it really is good enough to proselytize!)

29

Just how much gluten is there going to be in stuff like the breaded chicken and fish at fast food places? In some cases, don’t they use a mixture of wheat flour and corn meal as the breading?

What can you buy at Burger King that is low or free of gluten?

30

Anything that is breaded with wheat flour has gluten. Anything with any wheat in it at all. Anything with barley or rye has gluten.

It’s not just bread - soy sauce has gluten - soy sauce is made from a mixture of soybeans and wheat.

So… at Burger King the buns have gluten. Anything breaded and deep fried has gluten. Anything also deep fried in the same oil *may *be cross-contaminated with gluten. So damn little will be gluten free.

31

Burger King’s gluten free menu.

This does not account for cross contamination in the kitchen, including fryers, of course. It seems that some people can tolerate a small amount of gluten without reaction (including my daughter) and others are triggered by cross contamination, or even playing with Play-doh!

A standard order for my daughter if we go to McDonalds is a Cheeseburger Happy Meal with no bun (they place the patty, cheese and condiments in a small salad container), apple dippers and a milk. Burger King is cheeseburger no bun, small salad with Ranch dipping sauce - NOT the Ranch dressing; the dressing has gluten, the dipping sauce doesn’t - and a milk or juice.

She’s really struggling this week with being gluten free and not getting to try all the new foods she wants to. :frowning: She was very happy to hear that I told you about Udi’s bread, and that there are other people I’m talking to who are gluten free, too.

KFC is the really terrible one. EVERYTHING there has gluten, including the mashed potatoes and the grilled chicken! Ok, not quite “everything”, but if you’re gluten intolerant, enjoy your meal of Green Beans, Potato Salad, Seasoned Rice, Jalapeno peppers and Corn. That’s it for gluten free options.

This is a fantastic website with gluten free menus - both official and compiled - from many different restaurants, including lots of fast food places.

There is much debate over whether or not soy sauce has gluten. Certainly it is made from wheat, but no one seems sure whether the gluten is in the final product or not. Just to be safe, until it’s sorted out, we buy either labeled wheat-free tamari, or cheap LaChoy soy sauce, depending on our shopping budget. I like the taste of the tamari better, but the LaChoy is also gluten free. However, if soy sauce is somewhere on the ingredient list of a processed food, we don’t worry about it, and she’s been okay with it. But again, the seems a fairly tolerant intolerant, and if she wasn’t, I wouldn’t risk it.

32

Curious if anyone’s heard about any research/evidence about gluten causing Arthritis? My mother’s been on some weird highly restrictive diet for the past few years, which included cutting out all gluten.
I’m somewhat sceptical to say the least about any diet which advocates cutting out ‘preservatives’ and, even more vaguely, ‘additives’, but she does seem to have stopped getting the joint problems, and no longer takes anti-inflammatories. Possibly something she’s cut out was aggravating it, but currently she’s a bit of a nightmare to find food for… So anyone know of any decent evidence one way or the other?

33

Filbert - nutritiondata says that gluten is very mildly inflammatory. Unfortunately, while the inflammation factor is interesting, they don’t have a search on it (or gluten for that matter, which would be handy in this discussion).

Following the pathways of my mind, I found that Wikipedia states that “that wheat allergy and celiac disease are different disorders” (original source here - pdf). In the wiki on wheat allergy they do state that

34

I have to concede this point to you. I went to the store on my lunch break and checked a few common foods often fed to children that I thought might hide gluten. I only found a couple of prepared foods that had gluten - all were Campbell’s soups, and the only really surprising one was tomato soup (the other two I checked were cream of chicken and cream of mushroom - no surprise to anyone who’s made cream gravy)

There were a few more that had “modified food starch”, but if someone was allergic enough to be affected by any trace gluten in this, they’d be going into anaphylactic shock from eating a slice of bread.

35

I am so annoyed that Campbell’s soups *all *have gluten. They make one soup, under the “Wolfgang Puck” label, that is gluten free: Tomato Basil Bisque. Canned soups are pretty much a thing of the past in our house. :frowning: I make a very thick “Cream of Goop” substitute that mimics the condensed stuff. Chicken broth, sometimes mushrooms and sometimes celery and lots and lots of corn starch. I use it in casseroles where I used to use Campbells. It doesn’t freeze well at all, though, as I recently found out to my chagrin.

“Modified food starch”, if in a product made in North America, cannot be from wheat, rye or barley, so it won’t have gluten. Foreign made products, however, may vary.

If you really want to give yourself a headache,check out this list of gluten containing ingredients, many of which are, indeed “hidden” gluten.

36

Nah, Udi’s doesn’t cut it with me. Tesco’s in the UK have a brand that is good enough for grilled cheese, but God only knows what they use to make it that way. It’s called LivWell. I’ll stick with the occasional Bittersweet Bakery loaf.

37

I used organic boxed broth or homemade broth as a base for soup. For a thickener (which is why cream soups use wheat) I have had some success using corn starch.

Lots of convenience foods cannot be labeled as gluten-free because they are produced in the same facility as wheat products. That’s not such a big deal for me, but a friend’s five-year-old niece cannot tolerate *any *gluten so the whole family eats only gluten-free labeled food or food they make themselves. It’s expensive but she’s worth it.