Food is fuel – it’s supposed to give you energy and make you feel good, not make you hurt. But when you eat things that your body doesn’t like for some reason, it has a sometimes not-so-subtle way of telling you to knock it off. Food that your body objects to can cause gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, and nausea – and even symptoms that don’t seem to be associated with the gastrointestinal tract, like headaches, fatigue, depression, joint pain, and respiratory distress.
Luckily, when you figure out which foods your body doesn’t approve of, you can stop eating them, and then your body stops being so pouty. In fact, if you feed it right, your body can make you feel great in lots of different ways.
When gluten is making you sick, nasty battles are going on inside your gut. Hairlike structures called villi line your small intestine. The job of the villi is to increase the surface area of the small intestine so it can absorb more nutrients. Villi protrude (picture fingers sticking up) so that they have more surface area to absorb important nutrients.
For people who have gluten intolerance, the body sees gluten as a toxin and attacks the gluten molecule. In doing so, it also inadvertently attacks the villi, and those villi get blunted and shortened, sometimes to the extreme of becoming completely flat. This attack can reduce their ability to absorb nutrients – sometimes dramatically.
Blunted and flat villi can’t absorb stuff so well, so those good-for-ya nutrients just slide right by and you don’t get enough of the important vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that are vital for good physical and emotional health. You may develop what’s called malabsorption and become poorly nourished.
Don’t worry! This story has a happy ending. Your villi are tenacious little things, and when you quit eating gluten, they begin to heal right away. Before you know it, your villi grow back and absorb nutrients again, and your health is fully restored. In other words, abstinence makes the gut grow stronger.
By the way, lactase, which is the enzyme that breaks down the sugar lactose, is produced in the tip of the villi. When the villi get blunted, sometimes your ability to digest lactose decreases and you become lactose intolerant. When you quit eating gluten and the villi heal, you may be able to tolerate dairy foods again.
Twelfth-century physician Maimonides said, “Man should strive to have his intestines relaxed all the days of his life.” No doubt! When your intestines aren’t relaxed – or when they’re downright edgy or uptight – they affect all your other parts, too. It’s kind of like when you’re in a really good mood and your best friend is grumpy – the situation can make you grumpy, too; one cantankerous intestine can be a buzz-kill for the entire body.
In a way, the body’s reaction to gluten doesn’t compute. For some people, eating gluten can cause headaches, fatigue, joint pain, depression, or infertility; at first, those types of symptoms may seem unrelated to something going on in your gut, much less something you eat – much less something as common in your diet as wheat.
But those problems – and about 250 others – are symptoms of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. People with celiac disease or gluten sensitivity do sometimes have gastrointestinal symptoms, but more often the symptoms are extraintestinal, meaning they take place outside the intestinal tract.
If your body has problems with gluten, the gluten-free diet may help relieve lots of symptoms, such as these:
✔ Fatigue
✔ Gastrointestinal distress (gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, heartburn, and acid reflux)
✔ Headaches (including migraines)
✔ Inability to concentrate
✔ Weight gain or weight loss
✔ Infertility
✔ Joint, bone, or muscle pain
✔ Depression and anxiety
✔ Respiratory problems
The list’s impressive, isn’t it? The idea that eliminating one thing from your diet – gluten – could improve so many different conditions is almost hard to believe. Yet it’s true – and it really makes sense when you realize that if the food you’re eating is toxic to your body, your body’s going to scream in lots of different ways.
In people with gluten intolerance, eating gluten may make the symptoms of some psychiatric conditions worse. Some of the most fascinating findings recently indicate that removing gluten from the diet can improve behaviors of people with these conditions:
✔ Autism
✔ Schizophrenia and other mood disorders
✔ Attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (ADD/ADHD)
Millions of people have wheat allergies, which are different from gluten sensitivity or celiac disease – and they, too, improve dramatically on a wheat-free/gluten-free diet.
But beyond the obvious improvement you enjoy if you have an intolerance, other conditions and symptoms can improve on a wheat-free diet, such as PMS and menopausal symptoms. Eliminating wheat may even slow or reverse the signs of aging, reducing wrinkles and improving the tone and texture of skin.
Deciding Whether You Should Be Gluten'Free
Many people who go gluten-free do so not because they have any of the conditions listed in this section, but because they’re striving for a healthier lifestyle.
The authors of this book believe gluten isn’t good for anyone (more on that in Chapter 2 of Book I), especially in the highly refined form that most people know, like bread, bagels, and pasta. Cutting wheat and other gluten-containing grains out of your diet certainly isn’t a bad thing and can have significant health benefits if you eat a wholesome, diverse diet. Heck, it can even be the key to maintaining your weight!
Maybe you’ll find it compelling to adopt a gluten-free lifestyle when you realize that the gluten-free diet may relieve or even completely alleviate certain health problems. (The earlier section “Making nutrition your mission: Head-to-toe health benefits” lists the conditions exacerbated by gluten.)
This isn’t a diet du jour. We realize that new diets pop up faster than celebrity babies with odd names, and that the diets last about as long as the celebrity marriages do. This is a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle that’s perfectly in sync with the way our bodies were designed to eat – and that’s why it’s so effective in improving our health.
Our bodies weren’t designed to eat that junk listed in the “Common foods that contain gluten” section. Bagels? Cereal? Pasta? We don’t think so! Our bodies can rebel against those foods in ways that can sometimes severely compromise our health, and for many people, the gluten-free diet is the best – sometimes the only – treatment.
Chapter 2 of Book I explains more about gluten’s effect on the body. For extensive, detailed information about the many medical conditions that benefit from a gluten-free diet, see the companion book to this one, Living Gluten-Free For Dummies (Wiley).
Mastering the Meals
This book is about a lifestyle, not a diet. But no matter where that lifestyle takes you – eating in, eating out, attending social events, choosing, planning, shopping, preparing – being gluten-free all comes down to one thing: food.
If you’re a culinary hacker and you’re afraid you’ll have to wake up at 4 a.m. to bake gluten-free bread and make pasta from scratch, turn off the alarm and go back to sleep. Plenty of