Gluten: worth avoiding?

Valentinjin - your bread looks yummy, and am wondering how much you would charge to come organize my pantry, lol.

I am very seriously trying to research recipes like these as well. My good ME/CFS doc has been pushing me to do a no gluten, no sugar diet for about a year now. It just seems so difficult in my mind.

I saw this episode of Dr. Oz about a week ago, on leaky gut, and am thinking about doing the recommended diet. I'd like to get the test for it first though.

http://www.doctoroz.com/episode/disease-your-doctor-cant-diagnose

I want to weigh in on this. A long time ago I tested allergic to wheat via skin prick test. I ignored it because no one told me what the symptoms were and frankly I have a lot of allergies to airborne things that distract me from lesser things. (I ignore a lot of allergies). One day I noticed that the joint pain I was experiencing was not there when I woke up but came on right after I ate a bowl of cereal. I determined it was not caused by the milk and that it was caused by the cereal. I tried avoiding wheat. I read up and found as SickofSickness said, you can't avoid it 95%, has to be 100% and wheat gluten is in everything. I began to wonder if I was celiac and I sent in for their book listing brands with and without gluten, I joined a local celiac club, and avoided wheat 100%. It did take care of joint pain, brain fog, mood problems, and to some extent inflammation. But invariably a little gluten would squeak in and I found I had become EXTREMELY sensitive to the least shred of wheat. The joint pain for the least of it - I could not go out with friends and eat or drink anything at all or it would completely destroy my mood to the point that I could not even fake having a good time. Huh. So I decided to get tested for celiac disease. I do not have it.

So then I decided it was not helping me to avoid wheat as I was becoming hypersensitive to it. It was about this time that the studies were coming out saying that zinc protects against the common cold and that the way it did so was the barrier method -- zinc "fills in the pores in the nose through which the rhino virus gets in". In other words, if you are short of zinc, your body tries to make do with the zinc you've got by stretching it via making larger pores. I reasoned that blood vessels are skin, thus the reason that zinc helps the capillaries in the eyes against macular degeneration, and that the intestines are skin, thus protecting against absorption of undigested food. It turns out that partially digested wheat that is absorbed into the blood stream is nasty stuff and known to cause brain allergies and joint pain. So I decided to go ahead and eat wheat but to supplement zinc and I did so at a high dose. Bam. The wheat intolerance went away.

However I would like to show you something I also consider very off about wheat. The Life Extension doctors say that they can keep all their patients' blodo pressures normal simply by having them avoid wheat: http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2010...01.htm?source=search&key=wheat blood pressure

I think wheat is not at all as healthy as we have been led to believe growing up. However I have no wish to be unusually intolerant to it so I do not avoid it anymore. I take quite a lot of zinc as my allergic rhinitis damages mucous membranes which it then takes quite a lot of zinc to repair. So I have to constantly guard against going wheat intolerant...I have to take a lot of zinc.

interesting discussion. I also suspect that the reason avoiding gluten helps is the avoidance of inflammation. I have become very sensitive to traces and eating out is tricky. When I think I may be exposed to gluten I take Peptizyde enzymes to reduce the damage. Perhaps these would be a help for those who can't face gluten free.

In the uk we can get Doves gluten free flour easily, different flours are harder to come by. Doves makes a decent loaf that tends to dry out quickly. I slice and freeze half the loaf on the second day, it's good toasted. Tends to crumble a bit more than ordinary bread.

Xanthum gum is the ingredient you must have for gluten free baking and recipes need a little more liquid.

That's interesting. I wonder if there are more gluten intolerant people in Great Britain? Because THIS IS WHAT I FOUND TODAY: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2222.2009.03234.x/abstract
This study shows that maternal intake of Vitamin D during pregnancy prevents allergy! Which ties in to the studies showing birth order affects allergies (such as this one: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091674911013960) in this way: JUNE is the most common month that couples get married and if they get pregnant soon after they have a winter pregnancy (no sun) and so people born in the spring (like me) have a greater chance of allergies! (So now what do we do about it? Allergies use up zinc which leads to wheat insensitivity due to absorbing undigested wheat)

I had slightly positive gluten blood tests and was advised by my doctor to cut gluten out of my diet. It was a mistake though, as I've had no benefit whatsoever from doing this--ten years gluten free now. I did try to reintroduce it, but it didn't go well.

I think if you tend to be allergic to lots of things, you should be wary about cutting anything major out of your diet. Having said that, I do know people whose allergic tendencies have subsided when they've cut one food out, so it gets tricky. That just didn't happen for me.

I over produce antibodies to gluten so I can't have it. All of my CDSAs, except my last one, showed high gluten antibodies even from eating a couple of GF snacks prior to doing the test. Once, at the same time as I did the CDSA which came back high, I also did a serum test that came back negative. I was told that the stool tests are more sensitive to picking up antibodies than serum tests. On my last CDSA, I decided not to eat gluten free goodies prior to the test to see if I was ever going to get a low antibody result and I did ...

FWIW, I've found that after 8 years of being GF, I'm less sensitive than I was when I first went gf. Actually, I was super sensitive for about 5 years post gf. I'm only basing this on gluten cross contamination reactions tho. My reactions are ataxia and myoclonus. I can eat at Whole Foods or other places with GF menus without reacting now. I'd never eat gluten intentionally because I'm a celiac who had gluten ataxia.

The recipe link I gave earlier contains the best bread any of the celiacs I know have ever had. It's the only one that stays moist for ever.

I'm on zinc but I've never taken more than 50 mg. I notice that I get less post nasal drip if I use it. Thanks for posting about this tho. I'll look at taking more.

tc ... x