Tag: gluten-free

Thanksgiving and Black Friday News Chum

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Ah, Thanksgiving is over. People can start putting up their holiday decorations, and oh the shopping at those Black Friday sales. Have we got a bargain for you here on this blog: A sale on some slightly used news chum, cleaning out the inventory with a Thanksgiving and Black Friday theme. Shall we start?

Thanksgiving Music

Reading the social networks yesterday, the music of choice is that classic about T-Day Turkeys: Alice’s Restaurant. Here’s an interesting article on the Jewish connections of the song,  including the connections between Alice’s Restaurant, Meir Kahane, and Donald Trump.

The Stuffing

Stuffing is typically made from bread, so here are two interesting articles related to the Gluten-Free lifestyle. The first talks about the increasing growth in people going gluten free, when in reality the problem might not be gluten — it might be fructans instead. The second looks at some recent genetic engineering that aims at developing a gluten-free from of wheat.  I’d be too worried about cross-contamination in that case.

The Dessert

Ah, the dessert. A sugar high from all those pies. But we now know that the real culprits in our diets might not be the fat, but all that sugar. Further, we’re just learning that the sugar industry took lessons from big tobacco, and tried to hide the truth from us.

Cleaning Up Afterwards

Three articles related to cleaning up after that big dinner:

Going Shopping

Going shopping afterwards? Here is some useful information:

 

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Something to Chew On

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Time for some more food related news items to chew upon:

  • Best Oils for Frying. Here’s something you don’t see everyday: Me using a link that someone sends me in email based on an old post. But this link was sufficiently interesting to pass on, and I thank Sebastian Beaton of Two Kitchen Junkies for doing so. It concerns the best and healthiest oils for frying, listing their pros and cons. The site itself looks interesting: a father-daughter duo looking into cooking and cookware.
  • Demonization of Gluten. My wife is gluten-free. She has to be for medical reasons; she has celiac. But there are many many others for whom this is the fad of the day, and they have gone on gluten free diets for no discernible benefit other than the placebo effect.  Freakonomics, a podcast I used to subscribe to but didn’t have the time to listen to, had a recent episode on this subject. By the way, it turns out there is also a Celiac Project Podcast.
  • Food Waste. One of the reasons I could never run a restaurant is all the food waste. But households waste even more; the amount is staggering. Much is perfectly good, more would have been good had we not forgotten about it in the back of the refrigerator. Here’s an article that puts a number to just how much food Americans waste, including what type of food is most wasted where.
  • Less Nutritious Food. When you think about climate change, what worries you? Rising sea levels. More intense weather. How about less nutritious food. It seems that the increase in carbon dioxide is making our food have less nutrients.  From the article: “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

P.S.: I also have a fascinating post on the history of Cinnabon that I thought about including, but decided to save it for an origins post, combining it with a post on the history of Powerpoint and a yet undiscovered origin post.

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Survey Sez….

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When you read the news for fun, you run across a lot of surveys. Some are good science and good statistics, some are good science and blow the statistics, some get the stats right and blow the science, and some, well, just blow. Here are some articles about surveys I’ve seen of late — let’s figure out what blows, what sucks, and what is the truth:

  • Gluten-Free and Diabetes. The Telegraph in the UK is reporting on a Harvard study that appears to suggests that ingesting only small amounts of gluten, or avoiding it altogether, increases the danger of diabetes by as much as 13 per cent. The study seems to be aimed at the growing number of people who have gone on gluten-free diets because they believe it is better for their health, as opposed to the small percentage that have Celiac (or as they spell it in the UK, Coeliac) Disease or a true sensitivity.  The study was observational, and examined 30 years of medical data from nearly 200,000 patients. They found that most participants had a gluten intake of below 12g a day, which is roughly the equivalent to two or three slices of wholemeal bread. Within this range, those eating the highest 20 per cent of gluten had a 13 per cent lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes compared with those eating up to 4g a day. So what’s the problem? First it is observational, not rigorous. Secondly, they didn’t tightly control the factors, for the study also showed that those who eat less gluten also tended to eat less cereal fibre, a substance known to protect against diabetes. So is the finding really that if you go on a gluten-free diet, you need to eat more fibre?
  • Exercise and Weight Loss. We’ve all been through the drill: you want to lose weight, you need to eat less and exercise. But is that true. Vox undertook a review of over 60 studies on the subject, and discovered that exercise isn’t  a significant factor. What you eat is important, how much you eat is important, when you eat is important, and even the biome that digests your food is important. But if you think you can eat loads of junk and then burn it off exercising, you’re wrong. This doesn’t mean that exercise doesn’t have health benefits — it does; however, it isn’t a significant factor in weight loss. The article is long and goes through 10 key points, and is difficult to summarize here. But it is an interesting read.
  • Chemtrails and Vaccines. I linked to this yesterday, but I like it so much I’ll include it in again (until my sister-in-law believes it 😉). In a new study coming out of Brown University, researchers concluded that being sprayed with chemtrails actually has a positive effect when it comes to vaccine injuries. While not all the data are available from the study just yet, it appears as though only 20% of the children who were severely sprayed with chemtrails ended up developing autism after their vaccines; a much lower rate than the 80% who normally get autism from vaccines. Correlation? Causation? Or just a fake study?
  • Depression and Food. You are what you eat — or to be more precise, you are what the bacteria in your gut eat. We are increasingly finding out that our antibacterial environment and our fear of germs is a bad thing. Some bacteria are good for us — they manipulate our metabolism in a myriad of ways, from determining how we put on weight and influencing our moods. The latter is the topic of this Mental Floss link.  A study published this week in Nature Scientific Reports finds that beneficial bacteria commonly found in yogurt can help relieve depression-like symptoms in mice. The scientists began by collecting a group of unlucky mice and subjecting them to a variety of intense stressors. Some were kept in crowded cages; others had to sit under strobe lights or listen to loud noises. Predictably, the stressful situations took a toll, and the mice began exhibiting what the researchers called “despair behavior.” The researchers collected poop samples from the mice before and after the stress sessions, then ran genetic analyses to determine the species and quantities of bacteria living in each mouse’s gut. The results showed that the stress resulted in a pretty significant drop in a microbe called Lactobacillus—the same type of so-called “good” bacteria found in yogurt. But the rodents’ despair would not prove permanent. The researchers began giving the mice small doses of Lactobacillus with their meals, and, over time, their symptoms resolved.
  • Napping and Mental Awareness. We all like to doze off at work, but our bosses tend not to like to see us doing it. Perhaps this study will change their mind.  Studies have shown that short naps can improve awareness and productivity. You don’t need much; just 15 to 20 minutes can make a world of difference. According to a study from the University of Colorado Boulder, children who didn’t take their afternoon nap didn’t display much joy and interest, had a higher level of anxiety, and lower problem solving skills compared to other children who napped regularly. The same goes for adults as well. Researchers with Berkeley found that adults who regularly take advantage of an afternoon nap have a better learning ability and improved memory function.

 

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Good Food, Bad Food, Healthy Food, Not

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Let’s move away from the Trump posts for a bit, to something else that might make us feel good, or make us sick. Food. Glorious Food. Hot Sausage and Mustard. I’d go on, but I’d walk into a copyright lawsuit…

  • Getting Glazed. I have a friend of mine who posts this incredible porn on Facebook, uhh, I mean food porn of these incredible meals that he and his daughter prepare. One such meal was a maple-glazed salmon. So when I saw this recipe for a Maple-Dijon Glaze for Salmon, I just had to save it for future reference.
  • Turning Yellow. Turmeric is an amazing substance. It can have incredible anti-inflammatory effects, and can bring significant relief for arthritis sufferers (by the way, so can cactus, especially tuna roja juice). So when I saw that the LA Times had a whole article devoted to Turmeric, again, I had to save it for future reference.
  • Buttering You Up. When it comes to fats, the choice is wide and varied, and we often don’t pick the best. Olive oil is wonderful, but butter can add a great flavor to things. Did you ever wonder who first came up with the idea for butter? NPR did, and they recently posted a very interesting history of butter.
  • UnGlutenAted. There are those who avoid gluten out as the fad-diet-of-the-week, and those who are gluten-free for other, more serious reasons. Here’s a fascinating article on the completion of a first phase 1b trial of Nexvax2, a biologic drug designed to protect celiac sufferers from the effects of exposure to gluten and the gastrointestinal symptoms that can result such as diarrhea, abdominal pain and bloating. The big idea behind this drug is to use a trio of three peptides as an immunotherapy that it hopes will encourage the T cells involved in the inflammatory reaction in celiac disease to become tolerant to gluten. After a first course to induce tolerance, the company hopes that it can be maintained by periodic re-injection with the vaccine.
  • Allergic to Meat. The  other day, we listened to a fascinating episode of The Sporkful, a podcast not for foodies, but for eaters. The episode we listened to was about a woman who loved meat, but suddenly was deathly allergic to it. The culprit was a sudden allergy to a sugar that was found in all animal products, and what triggered that allergy was even more fascinating. Well worth listening to.
  • Allergic to Modern Society. In a larger sense, however, we may increasingly be dealing with allergies and reactions to modern society. Spending large amounts of time indoors under artificial light and staring at computer screens has helped produce a “myopia epidemic” with as many as 90 per cent of people in some parts of the world needing glasses. Industrial food production has also turned primates’ taste for sugar — which evolved to persuade us to gorge on healthy fruit when it was ripe — into one of the main causes of the soaring rates of obesity in the Western world. And our sense of smell is under attack from air pollution, producing an array of different effects, including depression and anxiety.  In addition to what is discussed in the article, I’ll opine that many more problems (I believe) arise from the damage we’ve done to our internal biomes through germ-o-phobia and overuse of antibiotics, and that this eventually will be discovered to be responsible for many of our immunity-compromised diseases, food sensitivity, obesity, addiction, and yes, even the increase in autism spectrum disorder and similar issues (i.e., not vaccines).

 

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Election-Free News Chum Stew

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Observation StewTake a deep breath. Three days and the national nightmare begins — but at least we won’t have the ads, the fake news stories, and the FB battles. To hold you over, here’s a bit of news chum I’ve accumulated over the last few weeks:

  • Math and Knitting. Two articles related to mathematics and knitting. The first article is about a couple that have focused on knitting mathematical objects: Together they have knitted and crocheted about 90 mathematical afghans, as well as other mathematical objects. The other article is on illusion knitting: Knitting that takes advantage of the 3-D nature of knitting to show different images depending on how the knit object is viewed. The simplest kind of illusion knitting uses one color of yarn. From the front, you see a swath of, say, green. From the side, you see an alternating checkerboard of green squares. Or take the knit below, which appears to be a multicolored grid straight-on but from an angle reveals circles within the grid.
  • Food Triggers. Two articles related to food that can trigger medical problems. The first looks at a group of proteins that have  been identified as the possible cause of non-gluten wheat sensitivity. This group, called amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATIs)  are a small group, representing about 4 percent of wheat proteins, but they’re powerful. The scientists found that consuming pure ATIs can cause all manner of nasty reactions throughout the body, triggering inflammation not just in the gut but also in the lymph nodes, kidneys, spleen, and brain. That same inflammation can exacerbate autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, asthma, lupus, and inflammatory bowel disease. The second article looks at why some foods trigger migraines. It turns out it isn’t only the food, but the microbes in the mouth. The research team analyzed 172 oral samples and nearly 2,000 fecal samples taken from the American Gut Project, and sequenced which bacteria species were found in participants who suffered migraines versus those who did not. And it turns out, the migraineurs have significantly more nitrate-reducing bacteria in their saliva than those who don’t suffer these headaches.
  • Paying Rent. This went around a few weeks ago, but its still fun: London is still paying rent to the Queen on property rented in 1211 (it seems they didn’t know about “lease-to-buy”). The rent? A knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails. Further, no one knows where the property is anymore. Each fall, usually in October, the city and the crown perform the same exchange, for no particular reason other than that they always have. You have to admire the Brits.
  • Popcorn. Here’s another interesting piece of history: why do we have movie popcorn? One didn’t always eat popcorn at movies, but it came into vogue during the depression. At that point, people began to expect it, and theatres realized they had a moneymaker.
  • Internet Problems. Have you found the internet harder to read of late? Even after you take out the election posts, is it hard to read? There could be an answer. Scientists believe that what is making the Internet harder to read is a trend towards lighter and thinner fonts. Where text used to be bold and dark, which contrasted well with predominantly white backgrounds, now many websites are switching to light greys or blues for their type. “If the web is relayed through text that’s difficult to read, it curtails the open access by excluding large swaths of people such as the elderly, the visually impaired, or those retrieving websites through low quality screens.”
  • New Cars and Car Washes. Have you bought a new car of late? Ever take it to the car wash? Many new cars won’t work in car washes because the additional safety equipment locks the wheels even when the car is in neutral. Those cars need special configuration to go through a car wash, and it isn’t just a “car wash” button — but it is buried in the manuals. The issue is automatic parking brakes, which put on the brakes, even if in neutral, to prevent the car from rolling into people or things. It does this if it detects things near the car.
  • Homelessness and Cars. Sigh. The city has passed an ordinance to prevent people from sleeping in cars or RVs in residential districts. This is an example of a law that the privileged pass against the unprivileged, instead of helping.
  • Jacob Neusner Z”L. A passing you may have missed: Jacob Neusner, one of the top Jewish scholars of our generation. Neusner almost singlehandedly created the modern study of Judaism. In doing so, he revolutionized our understanding of the history of Judaism and our perception of what Judaism can mean to Jews today. I know I was reading Neusner’s books when I was at UCLA in the 1980s.
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Gluten-Free: Growing Faster than Bread Rises. But is it (insert word)?

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userpic=gluten-freeThis week, a large number of articles related to food and gluten-free diets have come across my RSS and news feeds. These articles are of interest because my wife is celiac and gluten-free, and we know a number of friends and relatives that need to be gluten-free for similar reasons. We’ve often discussed the growing “gluten-free fad” (which has now become the butt of comics), and whether it is good for Celiacs — on the one hand, there may be more places where it is safe to eat; but on the other hand, if they view it as a fad and not a medical necessity, they may not be as clean in their handling and true Celiacs will get poisoned.

Let’s start with the grown of gluten-free. An article came out this week on Vox looking at the growth of the number of Americans who say they are gluten-free vs. the number that are actually Celiac. The article noted:

The number of Americans who say they are gluten-free has more than tripled from 2009 to 2014.

But the number of Americans who have celiac disease, or the inability to digest gluten, has stayed pretty much same.

This means more people are simply choosing not to eat gluten, even when there is no good scientific evidence to support cutting grains from their diets.

New research in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that the percentage of Americans practicing a gluten-free diet rose from 0.52 percent in 2009 to 1.69 percent in 2014. But the percentage of Americans with celiac disease actually declined slightly from 0.70 percent in 2009 to 0.58 percent in 2014 (although the study said this decline wasn’t statistically significant).

USA Today had a similar report, derived from the same research:

About 2.7 million Americans avoid gluten in their diet, but 1.76 million have celiac disease, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week.

Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys showed from 2009 to 2014, participants who reported having celiac didn’t exceed 0.77%. During the same period, participants who didn’t have the disease, but avoided gluten more than tripled.

A study released in July, said those without celiac who experience abdominal pain, bloating and fatigue after eating wheat and related products could have a weakened intestinal barrier, another reason they might go gluten-free.

Why could this be? Why are people who don’t have Celiac seemingly feeling better off gluten? Here are two more articles that might bring the pieces together. First, there is a report that birth by Ceasarian section appears to increase obesity risks, seemingly because such newborns are not exposed to bacteria in the vaginal tract. Next, there is a report that a common bacteria is showing promise for treating Celiac disease. Now, add into that mix the info in my previous post about soap — namely, that the FDA is requiring manufactures to pull common anti-bacterial agents out of soap — and you might have the answer.

Our Microbiome, and more specifically, how we are screwing it up.

Consider this: There has already been research showing how the intestinal microbiome can influence our mood and our tendancy to obesity (or our ability to lose weight). We’ve also seen the growing use of antibiotics everywhere — not just as prescribed medicine, but in soaps and animal feed. We’ve seen more and more people trying to correct things with pro-biotics. I think it is conceivable that we’ve mucked up our guts, and created — through damage of the microbiome — guts that do better on a no gluten or low gluten diet.  This would explain why more and more Americans are going gluten-free and feeling better while doing so, while those diagnosed with an actual disease haven’t increased.

How is society reacting to the increased desire for gluten free? Not always in the right way — no big surprise there.

As I said: a collection of GF related articles. Something to certainly chew on (unless you’re sensitive to the subject).

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Swabbing the Rest of the Deck

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userpic=pirateNow, mates, time to swab the rest of the deck. The cookee said that he couldn’t use these tasty chunks in the stew — they just didn’t blend right. He says we should throw them overboard:

Music: Ghost Brothers Of Darkland County (2010 Studio Cast): “Brotherly Love” (Ryan Bingham and Will Dailey)

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Gluten Free Goodies

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userpic=gluten-freeWhile I’m on vacation, I’m attempting to clear out the backlogs of links accumulated over the past few weeks of work-crazy. This first post is a collection of articles related to gluten-free and celiac, and it focuses on the problems that the gluten-free diet faddists have created for the truly Celiac and those with true non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

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In “The Celiac’s (Gluten-Free) Lament” (if you’re caught by the WSJ paywall, do this search and click on the WSJ link), Thomas Swift relates his wife (Hania)’s relationship with gluten-free food since her diagnosis in 2002. He talks about how the food landscape has changed:

But gradually we discovered gluten-free versions of almost everything—except pierogies and Chinese food. Some substitutes were better than others; we got hooked on corn penne and brown rice fusilli. A friend, having discovered the latter, served them to her healthy teenage sons, who never suspected they weren’t devouring Italian wheat. Tasty gluten-free cookies and crackers also appeared, first in health-food stores, then on supermarket shelves, while flourless chocolate cakes became de rigueur on dessert menus. Breads popped up, usually frozen and sliced.

He also makes an important point about how the faddists have made life more dangerous for those with medical needs for eating gluten free:

Not long ago, we visited a restaurant known for its gluten-free fried chicken. Our waiter, on hearing of Hania’s disease, explained that, while technically gluten-free, the chicken was fried in the same oil as all the other chickens. That meant it was contaminated. This would be fine for most of the restaurant’s diners—the fashionably gluten-free—but not for celiacs. Without a knowledgeable waiter, we wouldn’t have known.

The gluten-free fad has corroded the meaning of the phrase, creating a playground for dabblers and a minefield for the minority of strict doctrinarians. Not only has the label become spurious, but many food-service workers have understandably grown lax, seeing the demands for gluten-free food as a passing fancy and not the requirements of a serious medical condition.

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In “I Was Gluten-Free Before It Was Cool“, Laura Bennett expresses some similar points. Diagnosed with celiac about the same time as my wife (1990s), she talks about how eating gluten free has moved from a niche diet to a fad to a punchline:

In two decades since I first heard the word gluten, it’s evolved from the obscure scourge of the small population of people with celiac disease into a fad-diet obsession for carb-phobics. Along the way, it’s become a nutritional bogeyman, a shorthand for a kind of phony asceticism, a pop-cultural joke. It started with a few scattered articles about “gluten sensitivity” and some scientific papers speculating about whether American wheat had become less digestible. Then there was the surest sign of mass-cultural anointment: Gluten coverage migrated from the health and science pages to the style section. With growing awareness of gluten came a surge in self-diagnosed allergies to it. South Park skewered the alarmism of the anti-gluten set by devoting an entire 2014 episode to the imaginary plague of Gluten Free Ebola. A Tumblr called Gluten Free Museum went viral by Photoshopping out the wheat products from famous works of art. A real dating website launched called glutenfreesingles.com.

We are now in a golden age of glutenlessness. Gluten-free food sales grew by more than 60 percent from 2012 to 2014, and by 2019 the number is projected to increase by 140 percent. A 2013 study claimed that only 2 percent of shoppers who buy gluten-free goods do so because they have been diagnosed with celiac disease, while 59 percent buy them because they think gluten is unhealthy. That’s 59 percent of gluten-free shoppers who are willingly subjecting themselves to rock-hard bagels and cookies that—in the absence of the springiness that characterizes normal dough—crumble to nothingness when touched by a breeze.

She talks about those who have to eat GF have formed a community, bound together by the days of styrofoam bread. The early adopters have to clearly distinguish themselves from the faddists, as she writes:

I imagine that being an ur-gluten-intolerant is a bit like loving a band no one has heard of and then watching it climb the Billboard Hot 100: the mix of puzzlement (“how did everyone find out about it?”) and possessiveness (“they don’t even really get it”), the slight internal reshuffling required to disentangle it from your self-image, the chip that materializes on your shoulder whenever you hear its name. For most of my life, though, being allergic to gluten had been a quirk that was at once specific to me and, unlike most quirks, safely meaningless—in no way a symptom of my character or my tastes or my brain. Now, when I turn down a beer at a party, I try to arrange my face in a way that says “I know, right.” When I ask a waiter if there’s gluten-free pasta in the kitchen, I offer a sympathetic little grimace.

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One problem, of course, is that eating gluten free isn’t necessarily more healthy. You’re just replacing the wheat with other starch, and adding more fats and sugars to make up for it. This article from the Daily Mail highlights this: “Doughnuts and pizzas on the NHS: £116million of food for special diets including junk food was handed out in prescriptions in the past year” . Evidently in the UK, the health service covers the food for special diets (unlike the Affordable Care Act). According to the article:

The NHS is handing out tens of thousands of prescriptions every year for custard creams, doughnuts and pizzas. Other calorie-rich treats issued to patients on special diets include Italian-style biscotti, cake bars and muffin mixes. The Health Service spent almost £116million last year on gluten-free products and other foods – twice as much as a decade ago.

This reflects the growth of the awareness of medically-necessary GF diets, but the growth of the GF junk food market. If you walk through a supermarked, you’ll see (if they have GF at all) loads of GF cakes, muffins, and cookies — but little awareness of whether the food in their prepared meal sections are gluten free. The problem for GF eaters is not the junk food, but finding safe healthy food that hasn’t had a bit of soy sauce for seasoning, or wasn’t cross contaminated.

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The last article was posted by a Facebook friend, and it questions the existence of non-celiac gluten sensitivity:

For a follow-up paper, 37 self-identified gluten-sensitive patients were tested. According to Real Clear Science’s Newton Blog, here’s how the experiment went:

Subjects would be provided with every single meal for the duration of the trial. Any and all potential dietary triggers for gastrointestinal symptoms would be removed, including lactose (from milk products), certain preservatives like benzoates, propionate, sulfites, and nitrites, and fermentable, poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates, also known as FODMAPs. And last, but not least, nine days worth of urine and fecal matter would be collected. With this new study, Gibson wasn’t messing around.

The subjects cycled through high-gluten, low-gluten, and no-gluten (placebo) diets, without knowing which diet plan they were on at any given time. In the end, all of the treatment diets — even the placebo diet — caused pain, bloating, nausea, and gas to a similar degree. It didn’t matter if the diet contained gluten. (Read more about the study.)

The key things, to me, in the above was “self-identified gluten-sensitive” and the size of the sample. Other research has shown that while there might be a tiny, tiny, proportion of people who are non-celiac but sensitive to gluten, it is not nearly as wide-spread as the claims make it out to be:

But if only a tiny number of patients who report NCGS have a gluten-related condition, what’s going on with everybody else who complains of digestive woes?

They probably fall into several groups. Some may be in the early stages of celiac disease and the disease hasn’t yet produced any of its telltale signs, Guandalini said. Others are likely allergic to wheat.

Many may be sensitive to FODMAPs, or fermentable oligo-, di-, and monosaccharides and polyols, which are certain types of carbohydrates including wheat, lentils, and mushrooms that can draw water into the intestine and potentially ferment, causing digestive problems for some people.

This is what the second influential study on gluten sensitivity found. The 2013 study suggested that intolerance to the carbohydrates in wheat might account for what many believe is a bad reaction to gluten.

The Australian research team behind the study had previously shown that patients who self-identified as having NCGS did better on a gluten-free diet even when they didn’t know if they were eating gluten or not. When they launched a second study, they expected to confirm these results.

But they didn’t. This time around, the researchers first reduced FODMAPs from the participants’ diets. Then they reintroduced gluten or a placebo. There was absolutely no difference in participants’ reactions.

The Australian team concluded that most patients who thought they couldn’t tolerate gluten were in reality sensitive to FODMAPs. Once they had cut consumption of these carbohydrates below a certain threshold, gluten posed no problem for them.

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So where does this leave us? I think it makes it clear that diagnosing food sensitivities is difficult, misleading and tricky. It also makes clear that if someone says they cannot eat a particular food, play it safe and keep the dish clean. It might not make a difference to a large number of faddists, but if it significantly hurts one person, is it worth it?

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