What is bad about gluten

For an estimated 0. Furthermore, studies have shown that a gluten-free diet may benefit some individuals with schizophrenia , autism , and a disease called gluten ataxia 18 , 19 , Digestive discomfort is the most common indication of gluten intolerance.

The person may also have anemia or trouble gaining weight. To figure out what is causing your discomfort, people can ask their doctor to check for celiac disease first. There are two main ways to find out if a person has celiac disease 8 :.

If a person thinks they may have celiac disease, they should consult with their doctor before trying a gluten-free diet. If the person does not have celiac disease, the best way to find out if they are sensitive to gluten is to follow a strict gluten-free diet for a few weeks to see if symptoms improve. If the symptoms do not improve on a gluten-free diet and do not get worse when they re-introduce gluten, then the culprit is probably something other than gluten.

The gluten-free diet test is not a sure-fire way to diagnose the issue, and people should not try this on their own. If a person suspects they may have an issue, they should seek guidance from a healthcare provider and get tested for celiac disease or allergies.

Many people are unable to digest these properly, which can cause various digestive symptoms One study of 37 people with self-reported gluten sensitivity placed participants on a low-FODMAP diet, which reduced symptoms. The researchers then gave them isolated gluten, which did not affect their digestive symptoms However, many people may find this challenging, which may lead to deficiencies.

People should follow this diet with the help of a healthcare professional. Many processed foods contain wheat. Anyone who wants to avoid gluten will need to read labels carefully. Some people may find starting a gluten-free diet rather challenging at first. In this diet, people should eat mainly healthful whole foods, as most whole foods are naturally gluten-free.

Avoid processed food, cereals, and grains that contain gluten. There are a few grains and seeds that are naturally gluten-free and available to purchase online. These include:. However, while oats are naturally gluten-free, they may be contaminated by it. Therefore, it is safest only to consume oats with a gluten-free label. As a rule of thumb, it is better to choose naturally gluten-free food, rather than processed gluten-free products.

These tend to be low in nutrients and high in added sugar or refined grains. Various gluten-free recipe books are available to purchase online. Many gluten-free foods also available online, including gluten-free bread and gluten-free snacks. Read about which foods are gluten-free here. However, for people with certain health conditions, removing gluten from the diet can make a huge difference. However, people with celiac disease, dermatitis herpetiformis, or gluten sensitivity should avoid gluten.

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This article was medically reviewed by Jason R. Our stories are reviewed by medical professionals to ensure you get the most accurate and useful information about your health and wellness.

For more information, visit our medical review board. There is no conclusive evidence that gluten is bad for the average person's health. In fact, gluten-free foods are often more processed and less nutritious. Gluten is only bad for people with celiac disease and dermatitis herpetiformis. Two minutes later, she returned and handed me a shard of vital wheat gluten.

It looked like a prehistoric weapon, or the hardened bone marrow of a small mammal. It just stayed there. Nothing happened. The next morning, before leaving Seattle, I stopped by the offices of Intellectual Ventures, the patent and invention factory run by Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft.

Myhrvold has long been a serious amateur chef and has also served as a gastronomic adviser to the Zagat Survey. I shook my head. He placed a small ball of raw gluten in a microwave and pressed start. After about twenty seconds, the gluten puffed up like a balloon, at which point it was removed, set carefully on a plate, and served. It had the texture of pork rind. Gluten has a long culinary history, and has become a common substitute for meat and tofu. In Asia, where it is particularly popular, gluten is called seitan, and it is often steamed, fried, or baked.

It was an era of true condescension; the idea was that we know better and these poor people are noble, but they think that spirits are everywhere. That is exactly what this gluten-free thing is all about. We are the same people who talk to shamans. Scarsdale, Atkins, South Beach, Zone, flexitarian, pescatarian, and paleo have all been awarded their fifteen minutes of fame and then shoved aside for the next great diet.

They are rarely effective for long. Some nutrition specialists say that the current preoccupation with gluten-free products reminds them of the national obsession with removing fats from foods in the late nineteen-eighties. While there are no scientific data to demonstrate that millions of people have become allergic or intolerant to gluten or to other wheat proteins , there is convincing and repeated evidence that dietary self-diagnoses are almost always wrong, particularly when the diagnosis extends to most of society.

We still feel more comfortable relying on anecdotes and intuition than on statistics or data. Since the nineteen-sixties, for example, monosodium glutamate, or MSG, has been vilified. Yet, after decades of study, there is no evidence that MSG causes those symptoms or any others. This should surprise no one, since there are no chemical differences between the naturally occurring glutamate ions in our bodies and those present in the MSG we eat.

Our abject fear of eating fat has long been among the more egregious examples of the lack of connection between nutritional facts and the powerful myths that govern our eating habits. For decades, low-fat diets have been recommended for weight loss and to prevent heart disease.

Food companies have altered thousands of products so that they can be labelled as low in fat, but replacing those fats with sugars, salt, and refined carbohydrates makes the food even less healthy. What matters is the type of fat and the total calories you consume.

Margarine is a bad fat. Yet for decades doctors encouraged consumers to eat it, instead of butter, because butter is laden with saturated fat, which was considered even more dangerous than the fat in margarine. The study showed that women who ate four teaspoons of margarine a day had a fifty per cent greater risk of heart disease than those who rarely or never ate margarine. Yet again, the intuitive advice followed by so many people had been wrong.

Peter H. This is becoming one of the most difficult problems that I face in my daily practice. 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. And one of the first things the psychiatrist did was to put her on a gluten-free diet.

This is getting out of hand. Then corn. Then soy. Then tomatoes. Then milk. Worse is what parents are doing to their children. The initial appeal, and potential success, of a gluten-free diet is not hard to understand, particularly for people with genuine stomach ailments.

Cutting back on foods that contain gluten often helps people reduce their consumption of refined carbohydrates, bread, beer, and other highly caloric foods. When followed carefully, those restrictions help people lose weight, particularly if they substitute foods like quinoa and lentils for the starches they had been eating. The diet can also be unhealthy. That becomes clear after a cursory glance at the labels of many gluten-free products.

Ingredients like rice starch, cornstarch, tapioca starch, and potato starch are often used as replacements for white flour. But they are highly refined carbohydrates, and release at least as much sugar into the bloodstream as the foods that people have forsaken. And when I eat them I regret it.

I get heartburn. I feel nauseous. Because what are the things that sell food? Salt, sugar, fat, and gluten. If the makers take one away, then they add more of another to keep it attractive to people. I have been baking bread for more than thirty years, and there are few things I find more satisfying than turning a pound of wheat into something that I can feed to my friends. A couple of years ago, having learned that the nutrients and vitamins in wheat berries begin to degrade soon after they are processed, I bought a home mill and began to make my own flour.

I started ordering wheat, in fifty-pound buckets, from places in Montana and South Dakota. I bought books that explained the differences between hard red winter wheat, which is good for whole-grain bread, and soft white wheat, which has a lower protein content and is used mostly for cookies, cakes, and pastries. I acquired sourdough starter from a friend, and treat it like a pet. I have run into a couple of problems, however. The bread often looked like brown matzoh, so I began to root around the Internet, and soon stumbled on the solution: vital wheat gluten.

It was like pumping air into a flat tire. A few tablespoons mixed into my flour, and the bread became elastic and chewy, and it looked like a normal loaf of bread; vital wheat gluten became my magic wand.

I told Jonathan Bethony, the baker at the Bread Lab, about my gluten issue. Then he told me about his. How gluten was so dangerous, and it was really getting me down in my heart. I started to ask myself, Am I making people sick? Have I become this spear of death? The doctor said that I am gluten intolerant.

I had brought a loaf home with me, and I went charging up the stairs as fast as I could and launched that loaf from the balcony like a football. But a famous baker lived nearby, and encouraged him to stick with it. He taught him to bake with nothing but whole grains and lots of water, and to leave plenty of time for the bread to ferment. The results have been sublime. Later that week, I flew back to New York, went home, and dumped my vital wheat gluten in the trash.

I have returned to baking whole-wheat bread the way it is supposed to be made: water, yeast, flour, and salt. I will try to live without the magic wand. But I am certainly not going to live without gluten. That just seems silly.