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Is Gluten that bad for your health?

Why would the 1944 and 45 Winter of Starvation at the end of World War 2 improve the health of sick children in the Netherlands? For Dutch Pediatrician Dr. Willem Dicke, this actually made plenty of sense.

Dr. Dicke had been pursuing a way to treat Gee-Herter’s disease, a disease that damages the intestine leading to serious complications and a lack of treatment usually meant death. During the winter of starvation, normal food like bread became very scarce. Then, the children with this disease suddenly started to get much better.

Later, when Swedish relief efforts made bread available again, the children’s health got worse. You might have guessed, but Gee Herter’s disease was another name for celiac disease and while celiac disease can cause terrible distress, it has a cure: a gluten free diet.

Gluten free has been a big buzzword lately that’s swept through supermarkets putting all kinds of gluten-free products on the shelves. Interestingly enough, there are all kinds of stories about people who have healed some ailment or another by eliminating all wheat and gluten containing products from their diet.

The book Toxic Staple by Anne Sarkisian is packed full of personal stories of people who, on a gluten free diet, healed various ailments like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Acid Reflux, Skin Rashes, Allergies, and even neurological issues like depression, migraines, ADHD and brain fog.

One reason people clear up so many issues by cutting out gluten, is that over 95% of people with celiac disease remain undiagnosed. As Medical Doctor Alessio Fasano puts it, celiac disease is a “clinical chameleon” that “can range from chronic diarrhea, weight loss, and abdominal distention to symptoms and conditions that can affect any organ system.”

But celiac disease is not the only gluten related disorder. While the global incidence of celiac disease ranges from .5% to 1% , it’s estimated that 18 million Americans, about 6% of the population, have a condition called gluten sensitivity according to Dr. Fasano. Dr. Kenneth Fine of EnteroLab, a testing laboratory for non-celiac gluten sensitivity, asserts that the number of people with this disorder could be as high as 30 to 40 percent.

While in Croatia in the summer of 2010, tennis player Novak Đoković was having a consultation with Dr. Igor Cetojevic. The doctor quickly confirmed that Djokovic’s left arm was noticeably weaker than his right.

Actually, doctor Cetojevic was curious about Djokovic’s health back when he was watching the Australian open and saw that Djokovic was having trouble breathing during a match. He apparently had also vomited violently during a toilet break.

Doctor Cetojevic explained to Djokovic that he was likely sensitive to gluten. Looking back, this revelation explained to Djokovic why he had collapsed from exhaustion during several matches. Even though he wasn’t diagnosed with celiac disease, Djokovic started a gluten free diet and drastically improved his health very quickly.

You might be thinking “OK, so what if I’m not gluten sensitive or celiac? is there any point to specifically removing wheat and gluten from my diet?” Well, high carbohydrate foods like grains in general spike your blood sugar, leading to various problems with weight and insulin resistance.

So a grain free diet in general has various benefits, but what is unique about wheat and gluten? First off, even people without a proven sensitivity to gluten claim to have easily lost plenty of weight by cutting out wheat specifically. And, a 2012 study from Brazil found that a gluten free diet reduces body fat, inflammation and insulin resistance.

In the study, they gave two different groups of mice free access to food and water. The diets were exactly the same except one group’s diet contained 4.5% wheat gluten. The mice with the gluten gained more body weight and much more fat.

Specifically, the mice eating the gluten had higher fasting insulin and glucose, and had much more fat in the muscle and liver. This points the finger at gluten as an exacerbator of insulin resistance, diabetes and fatty liver.

Actually, when I was doing research for my previous video on why the obesity rate in Japan is only 3.5% compared to America’s 30%, I noticed there’s a big difference in wheat consumption between the two countries.

Rice and Wheat combined, people ate 112.5 kilograms of these two grains in America in the year 2017. But, they ate 117 kg in Japan. So Japanese people are actually eating more of these two grains combined, but they’re eating almost half as much wheat as Americans.

This drastic difference in wheat consumption could be a big factor in the drastic difference in obesity rates in these two countries. However, there’s more than just weight gain happening when you consume gluten.

Wheat gluten is actually a combination of two proteins called gliadin and glutenin. The thing about gluten is that although many people can eat it without any obvious problems, no one is able to completely digest it.

According to Dr. Alessio Fasano, “all of the proteins we ingest can be completely dismantled with the exception of one strange, unusual protein. …” Of course, “That protein is gluten and, more specifically, its components gliadins and glutenins.”

So after eating something like bread, these undigested gluten peptides floating around in the upper small intestine, and your gut, perceives them as a potential enemy. Dr. Fasano says that based on studies from the Center for Celiac Research and his colleagues worldwide, “it seems that the body’s immune system mistakenly interprets gluten as a component of a dangerous bacterium or bacteria.”

This causes the body to unleash an immune response to fight against and rid the body of the perceived attacker. Dr. Fasano says that “this response is elicited in everyone. It is not exclusive to people affected by gluten-related disorders.” And, this immune response provokes inflammation.

Inflammation is a natural response to infections or injuries, but it’s supposed to be temporary, not something you want happening every time you eat. A 2011 article by Dr. James Oschman explores the link between inflammation and chronic disease.

He lists massive numbers of studies documenting relationships between inflammation and conditions like alzheimer’s, bowel disorders, cancer, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. David Perlmutter says that “there’s no part of the body that is immune from the damaging effects of gluten and the reason being that there’s no part of the body that is excluded from the mechanism of inflammation.”

Now, there’s another component to how gluten affects the the lining of the gut. To explain, take a look at this diagram. As you know, The skin, acts as a barrier to prevent unwanted things from getting inside the body. Similarly, the epithelium of your gut, its lining, acts as a barrier to prevent unwanted gut contents from leaking into other parts of the body.

Now on the lining of the gut are spaces between cells called “tight junctions” that act like gates. If they remain open at inappropriate times, it can cause a lot of problems - just like walking around with open wounds on the skin can cause a lot of problems, you don’t want open spaces in the lining of your gut leaking things in and out of the gut.

To put it another way, our body is like a fortress, and our gut is trying to protect us. In the year 2000, it was discovered by Dr. Fasano and his team at the University of Maryland that there is a protein called Zonulin that allows the opening and closing of these draw bridges in the gut.

The gene that encodes this molecule is sitting on this teeny tiny chromosome that is chromosome 16. But it’s packed with genes that’ve been associated to some important disease in humankind.

Autoimmune diseases, cancer, and disease of the nervous system are sitting here. When the gene for Zonulin was cloned, a series of scientists worldwide to look at this gene to see if it was linked to any disease and sure enough, the same three categories showed up. Here’s Dr. Fasano explaining how Gluten relates to all of this.

On this slide, he has the pearl necklace that is the gliadin protein of gluten. “Ssome of the fragments that cannot be digested are color coded here. These two blue guys here, they communicate with the fortress, and say please release zonulin, open that drawbridge because I need to come in.”

So, gliadin uses Zonulin, the key to the drawbridge, to allow gliadin peptides to leak through the gut and get into the bloodstream, and then get where they don’t belong and cause problems. “This is purported to allow macromolecules to leak from the bowel and increase inflammation, and the risk of autoimmune diseases.”

So the human body isn’t properly equipped to deal with eating massive amounts of gluten in general, and it seems to be taking its toll on more and more people. Celiac disease is on the rise, increasing fourfold over the past fifty years. And, It was found that in a group of 3000 people, celiac disease was doubling every 15 years.

Some of these people, after being able to eat gluten without complaint for 70 years, suddenly developed celiac disease. So what’s going on here? First of all, we’re consuming way more wheat products and gluten nowadays.

We’ve been admonished to eat more “whole grains” with the food pyramid illustrating that the bedrock of our diet should be grains. Not only that, a majority of food products in the supermarket contain gluten or some component of wheat. Gluten has useful properties for making all kinds of foods, and it’s a good stabilizing agent so it’s found itself in many other products like ketchup, soy sauce, cold cuts and even lipstick.

Secondly, wheat has changed quite a bit over time. Wheat was pretty much the same for the past 10 thousand years or so that we have been eating it… until the second half of the twentieth century when hybridization techniques transformed the grain.

In fact, this study found that compared to ancient strains of wheat, modern wheat expresses a higher quantity of genes for gluten proteins that are associated with celiac disease. Another culprit is The modern preparation methods of wheat. It used to be that making bread required a long fermentation process that required a couple days.

Now, you can go from flour to loaf of bread in two hours. In any case, it appears that most anyone could benefit in some way from eating less wheat and gluten. Depending on who you are, you can obviously tolerate more or less.

Celiacs and gluten sensitive people obviously have to be very careful with their diet. In other people, constant consumption of wheat can slowly chip away at their health with persistent inflammation. And other people can seemingly eat all the bread they want and not have any problems, at least no obvious problems.

At the very least, if you have some ever present stomach issues or other chronic issues like brain fog, fatigue or skin conditions, it’s worth trying a gluten free or grain free diet for a couple weeks. Worst case scenario is you lose a couple pounds in the process.

One last thing I should add is that just because something is gluten free does not mean it’s healthier. Gluten free products often add more sugar, more refined unhealthy fats and other questionable substitutes to make up for the palatability lost from taking the gluten out.

Unless you’re celiac or gluten sensitivie, going from processed food to gluten free processed food is hardly an improvement in health.