Probably five years ago, I had never heard of gluten-free anything. Now every restaurant you go to has gluten-free items marked on the menu. There are even entire restaurants that are gluten-free.
Is celiac disease a recent epidemic? Or is a gluten-free diet some kind of crazy new fad?
Most of the gluten-free people aren’t celiac. Many are hippie-types, who either feel it’s healthier or more natural. There is also a theory in autism treatment that a gluten and casein free diet helps improve behaviors, I don’t think this has a whole lot of support.
In previous generations, celiac people may have just had a poor life outcome because we didn’t know what was causing their problems.
My opinion, and it is just an opinion, is that much like anything else that sees a sudden surge in diagnoses, it is a combination of (primarily) not having been a known thing in the past, as thelurkinghorror pointed out, and (to a lesser degree) being somewhat overdiagnosed or self-diagnosed.
The GQ answer is all of the above. It is trendy in some circles to go gluten-free. We are diagnosing more people who never would have been labeled in the past. And there is more true incidence - I don’t have the study handy but there was a retrospective study looking back at serum saved from a decade or more past for a different study (the normal controls) and testing it for the celiac antibodies compared to a matched population today. There were many less undiagnosed positives in the old samples than in the current population.
Why? One suspects that the reason is likely the same as the general increase in autoimmune diseases, whatever that turns out to be.
Concern about GI problems was relatively ubiquitous even long before Hippocrates. Historically it is clear that it has always been a very common complaint, particularly among the aristocratic sort who ate well and lived long. So while I don’t have a medical opinion about the validity of the recent celiac craze in particular, it would not at all be surprising if it were true.
Gluten free items can also be beneficial to people with other disorders, such as food allergies.
For example, if you are allergic to barley taking a gluten-free option would ensure there’s no barley hidden in there. Thus, a person who isn’t a celiac may be eating a “celiac food” or a non-gluten option not because gluten is a problem but because something else that just happens to have gluten is problematic for them.
While I think the current science on the gluten-free casein-free (GF/CF) diet is mostly bunk, I know a couple who put their formally diagnosed autistic daughter on it with marked improvements. It is also the case that when she consumes even a tiny amount of food with gluten or casein she reverts to a non-talking, non-interacting state. I don’t think we really understand how gluten and casein interfere with neurological processes (although there are a lot of similarities in the receptors and enzymes in the intestine and in the brain) but there is pretty clearly some causal link.
[QUOTE=thelurkinghorror;13286174In previous generations, celiac people may have just had a poor life outcome because we didn’t know what was causing their problems.[/QUOTE]
Indeed. Most people who suffer from celiac disease can eat wheat and dairy products; they just suffer from varying degrees of intestinal distress. It is also the case that many non-celiac disorders can be amplified by the consumption of gluten and casein. While it is going to far to say that these proteins are unhealthy, the fact is that we’re not evolved to eat products with gluten or casein, which come from processed and/or domesticated sources and are fairly recent in evolutionary terms to the human diet. Obviously some people can consume them without great distress, but then, some people can eat circus peanuts, too, despite the fact that they appear to be made of a particularly irreducible form of Styrofoam.
Stranger
All of the above PLUS:
The internet.
People who would never have heard of gluten intolerance or celiac disease now have a world full of people they can chat with who have similar symptoms.
One of the suckiest things about gluten intolerance is that you can have symptoms, sometimes quite dramatic ones, and not test positive for celiac disease. That is, if the test is positive, then you have it, but if it’s negative, we just don’t know. Even worse, you have to eat gluten for 2 weeks before the test, and just suffer through the symptoms. This is the boat my daughter is in. She’s been gluten free two years and has far fewer GI symptoms, fewer colds, less pneumonia and bronchiolitis and is growing better (before taking her off gluten, we were one office visit away from a Failure To Thrive diagnosis. In the two months right after we removed gluten from her diet, she grew 2 inches and put on 4 pounds!)
An informal test of giving her a few Wheat Thins after a couple of weeks off gluten, and she was vomiting with abdominal cramps and diarrhea within hours. Her doc did a serum test recently which came back negative. When I pointed out that she’s been gluten free for over a year, so we shouldn’t expect her to have antibodies in her serum right now, he said, “Oh. Right…” and ordered some gluten capsules to put her on before testing her again, this time with a biopsy.
I just can’t see the use of making her sick again to maybe get a diagnosis that would tell us to keep her gluten free (the only treatment for celiac disease) or maybe be a false negative, in which case we’d have to keep her gluten free. In other words, there’s simply no way to definitively rule *out *celiac disease or gluten intolerance with today’s testing. So I’ve refused the testing.
So, until the test gets better, we’re some of those people buying the gluten free foods, even though she’s never been diagnosed with celiac disease. And I’m so incredibly grateful they’re available in supermarkets now!
I have a few hypochondriacs in my family and they’re all gluten free now. I think it’s placebo effect, but they claim they feel better, so I don’t argue.
How about a chef’s perspective? I do banquets for conventions and other large groups, and for the five years I’ve been doing this kind of work (been in foodservice for 27 years, but 5 in banquets/conventions), I’ve seen definite patterns.
Groups that skew toward membership with higher education levels and, usually, a more “liberal” or “left-leaning” tendency (environmental groups, women’s groups, advocacy groups, Democrat Party fundraisers, any group where the women far outnumber the men, etc.) tend to have a much higher percentage of members with “special” dietary needs, including gluten-free, all manner of allergies, vegans/vegetarians, lactose-intolerant, etc., while lesser-educated, more conservative types of groups and groups with more men than women tend to cheerfully eat whatever the hell we put in front of them.
Confirmation bias, sure, but food is my livelihood.
Of course, you also get the occasional person who claims a whole battery of food issues, obtains the menus in advance, and then provides us with an itemized list of what they can and can’t eat at each meal we’ll be serving them so that we can concoct alternatives for them. And then when you actually stop and look at their list you start noticing how it contradicts itself from one meal to the next, and you realize you’re not dealing with a “special dietary needs” person, you’re dealing with an attention whore 
Hmmm…I’m not sure if you meant to quote my post or not, but now you’ve got *me *wondering if those traits may also describe the demographics of internet users most likely to look for health information and discussion on medical malady related message boards. Which would support my hypothesis. 
Yes, it was an intentional quote, for the demographic reason you mention (which I notice I forgot to tie in). People attending a conference on global warming are probably more likely to investigate these things than the guys attending the Wrestling Coaches Association conference.
While you are right that there are some people who are just high-maintenance and fussy, I think you also are only getting one side of the story. It seems like you likely serve pretty standard banquet food. If you ran, say, a South Indian catering service you’d find people in the first group would generally enjoy it, while in the second group you’d run into lots of people who don’t eat fish, can’t handle even mild spicyness, don’t think it’s a meal without beef, refuse to eat cauliflower, don’t do yogurt, etc.
I think if he ran a south Indian catering business, people with a problem with vegetarianism, spicy food, cauliflower, yogurt, and fish probably wouldn’t hire him that often.
If you’re suggesting that many of these people with “special dietary needs” are simply claiming them because they don’t care for the dish being offered and want something different, you’ll get no argument from me