Why I Decided to Go Gluten-Free
I’ve always loved bread. My mother was a housewife in the
old sense of the word—she stayed home while my dad went off to work, she cooked
and she baked. Boy, how she baked: Vienna tortes, chocolate chip cookies,
applesauce cake, chocolate éclairs, and, last but not least, homemade bread! I’ve grown up loving the smell of the yeast cake dissolving
in water, the dough rising, and the warm comforting aroma of the bread just hot
from the oven. Let’s face it, I was hooked.
Throughout my life, though, I’d had issues. Nothing too out
of the ordinary—a little sluggishness, bouts of constipation—until I reached
middle age, when my magic charm ran out and I gained a lot of weight. For my
milestone birthday (the big 5-0), I had planned a big party to celebrate and to
numb the pain of going “over the hill.” So—six months before, I embarked on the
Atkins diet to get rid of those extra pounds once and for all. I did so well on
that diet (I happen to love bacon and cheese!), that I went from a size 14 to a
size 6 in six months.
Never did I exclude vegetables from my eating regimen—the
only changes I made to were to eliminate breads, potatoes, and sugar from my
life. The diet worked so great that I stuck to it more or less religiously for
five years. I maintained a good weight and stayed around a size 7 or 8 during
that time. At the end of five years, I figured I could add back the foods I had
previously denied myself.
Looking back now, I realize that the symptoms that I
experienced then coincided with me falling off the Atkins wagon. I was no
longer able to go hiking anywhere without easy access to a bathroom because I
had urgent (like “right now”) diarrhea. I had to stick close to home, basically
because I was going every half hour.
Of course, I couldn’t live like this! I made an appointment
to get a colonoscopy because I feared the worst—colon cancer. The
gastroenterologist assured me that I did not have cancer and everything looked
ok, except for what he called “micro-bleeds” the entire length of the small
intestine. He couldn’t tell me what caused these bleeds but assured me that I
didn’t have cancer or polyps.
With all this going on, I lost a quick ten pounds from
losing all that fluid which, just as quickly, rebounded up to an extra 15
pounds that I just couldn’t get rid of. The diarrhea eventually stabilized but
the weight did not come off. I never got up to a size 14 again but did feel
bloated and gassy all the time—my stomach at times would look like I was 4
months pregnant.
Meanwhile, my nephew had been running the gauntlet of
doctors trying to get answers for a mysterious illness that he had had since
his mid-30s, 10 years or so. He was always getting sick and when I saw him
during one visit back home, his face looked ashen and gray. I was really scared
we would lose him. I was terrified to think that something could happen to my nephew.
Talking to my sister on the phone one day, she told me that
a doctor had finally figured out what was wrong with my nephew. He had celiac
disease, of all things! I had no idea what that was—I thought it was the same
as Crohn’s disease, which I knew was something bad. However, the only thing
that he had to do to live a normal life was to avoid anything with wheat in it. He was back to normal health and was looking
great!
When I talked to my nephew about his experience with celiac,
he explained to me that he was allergic to gluten, which is
a protein found in wheat. He could not ever have it, but he’d found it fairly
easy to avoid it and still eat well. When I asked him what his symptoms were,
my ears perked up: he had uncontrollable diarrhea and bloating. In fact, he
said once he went off gluten, he lost 20 pounds right away.
Thanks to that chance conversation, I chose to stop eating
wheat. It hasn’t always been easy to know how to avoid gluten, because wheat is
not just in your whole-wheat bread! You can find wheat in soy sauce, even, and
I don’t understand why.
Here’s a partial list of foods where gluten might be hiding:
- Most flours (white or wheat)
- Maltodextrin
- Malt
- Rye
- Spelt
- Soy sauce (tamari is gluten-free, and so I’ve heard is La Choy brand)
- Barley
- Beer
- Hydrolyzed Plant Protein
- Farina
- Barley
- Grain vinegar (apple cider vinegar is ok)
- Grain alcohol
- Durum
- Couscous
- Graham crackers
- Kamut
- Modified food starch
- Olestra
- Packaged puddings
- Semolina
- Orzo
- Flour tortillas
- Cream of wheat cereal
- Croutons
- Most cornbreads (mixed with regular flour)
- Bran
This is by no means a complete list.
If you are concerned that you may have gluten sensitivity,
you can ask your doctor to order a gammaglobulin test. Be aware though that
unless you are actively consuming wheat products, i.e., gluten, the test
usually will turn up negative.
In my opinion, your body will tell you whether or not you
have gluten sensitivity, so I prefer to do my own challenge testing. Watch how
your body responds when you stop eating certain foods for a week or so and then
try and eat them again. You may notice that your tummy puffs up or you feel gassy
and uncomfortable. Oftentimes, the effect will be immediate.
The reason for the puffiness or bloating is that gluten (if
you are sensitive to it) erodes the lining of the intestine and can lead to
“leaky gut,” where the impurities in the intestine lead out to the surrounding
tissues and cause inflammation. This is just my own opinion, but I think that
much of what we call obesity is just inflammation of the tissues as a response
to attack on the immune system by an offending substance in the intestines,
perhaps gluten.
I’ve will be including some resources if you want to learn more about
gluten sensitivity, allergic response, and celiac disease.
Why is Wheat So Bad?
Though I’ve been interested in natural health and nutrition
for many years now, I’ve only recently started learning about GMOs. GMO stands
for “genetically modified organism,” and that means that the genetic structure
of an organism (at the DNA level) has been changed. I’ve read recently that, a
decade or so ago, scientists figured out how to grow a “supergrain” that could
potentially solve world hunger. The idea was to pack even more carbohydrate
into wheat (for example) so that in places like Africa and India, where
harvests were meager, what little bit of grain farmers grew would yield more nutrition.
This is the last thing we needed in this country! Could we
possibly have ended up with some of that carbohydrate-packed grain in our
fields? If that is true, then it’s no wonder that obesity rates have
skyrocketed, and younger and younger people are struggling with weight issues.
Childhood obesity rates in the United States are at record highs.
While I have more reading and study to do on the subject of
GMOs, I have a sneaking suspicion that this “supergrain” has somehow made it
into the Western diet. We would do well to try and avoid GMOs if possible, and
to try to eat food that comes from local and known sources. There are a number
of products you can find that will substitute for mainstream flour and wheat
products and I’ve tried some of them.
Take charge of your own health—after all, you have to live
with yourself for the rest of your life, don’t you?
