This past Christmas I was, as usual, half-unwillingly roped into making 14 dozen cookies for a baking exchange. Before I’d even had a chance to browse Epicurious.com for a deceptively simple recipe that would make me come off like a way-less-sexy Nigella, I received an e-mail from one of the other participants announcing she was backing out.
Her alibi, I must admit, was more airtight than the ones I’d been contemplating.
“Sorry,” she wrote, “I can’t participate this year because of the gluten thing. I’m experimenting with gluten-free shortbread (wish me luck!) and am not eating ‘normal’ baking right now.”
Who can argue with dietary constraints, I thought at the time. Then our cookie exchange took another TSX-sized hit when similarly worded e-mails from two other rogue bakers appeared in my inbox. After that, those of us left holding the empty cookie jar decided to call off the event.
Perhaps we should have stepped up, in the spirit of the season, with a flexible, “Heck, let’s make it a gluten-free Christmas!” But, to be honest, I was a tad put out. If I was going to go to the trouble of producing my share of the holiday bounty, then traditional baking — based on good old-fashioned unbleached wheat flour — was what I wanted in return for my labour. “Quinoa” and “xanthan gum” gingerbread sounded to me about as festive as rum-less nog.
So, is it just my Scroogey self or does anyone else feel the staff of life has unfairly been given the kiss of death recently?
The wildly successful Dr. Atkins appears to have initiated this demise, scything grain from our plates (and fat from our hips), to the great joy, not only of the overweight, but of the purely carnivorous among us, who suddenly found official sanction for their distaste of all things plant. More recently, a less cosmetically motivated (and thus harder to dismiss) ban on wheat has charged the much-maligned grain with many of our internal ills, as well.
Granted, there are, and probably always have been, some people who do not thrive on wheat, but one must still ask whether the current extent of the gluten-free lifestyle isn’t largely the effect of the hand of the market, ever eager to spoonfeed consumers as much of their latest fear as they can stomach.
A Big Market for Gluten Free
Indeed, there’s a veritable glut of gluten-free products on the shelves right now: consumer goods market researcher Packaged Facts reports sales of gluten-free products in the U.S. and Canada have surged over the past year, and growth in that food category will likely reach US $1.7 billion by the end of 2010.
A cruise through local natural food stores such as Sunnyside Market and Planet Organic reveals entire shelves dedicated to wheat-free bread, banana loaves and sweet-potato cookies. (Safeway, Co-op and Superstore are also devoting more shelf space to sans-gluten products.)
All about Gluten
So, what exactly is gluten, and what is it about the stuff that apparently makes so many people — upward of 90 million in North America alone, according to the book Dangerous Grains by Dr. James Braly — feel bad enough to consider giving up their daily bread, not to mention their daily pasta, pizza, beer, cookies and myriad other consumables?
To take the former, and simpler, question first, gluten is the protein found in wheat, rye, barley, kamut and other cereal grains. Sounds innocent enough, right? Well, for the approximately one in 133 Canadians affected by celiac disease, gluten grains are anything but innocuous. A hereditary predisposition to chronic damage of the small intestine by gluten proteins, celiac disease can cause a range of health problems including abdominal bloating and all-around intestinal badness (use your imagination), headaches, fatigue, anemia, osteoporosis and infertility. The only “cure” for celiac disease is the lifelong avoidance of gluten.
But true celiacs account for less than one percent of the population, so how could three out of seven of my cookie-exchange friends suffer from gluten intolerance? Was probability skewed in my vicinity, or did I manage to hook up with a bunch of hypochondriacs? No and no — after all, who in their right mind would give up vanilla shortbread or penne puttanesca unless they were actually told to?
Far more common than celiac disease, it seems, are ailments relating to a widespread sensitivity to gluten — a largely undiagnosed affliction that, according to Braly, was the “plague of the 20th Century.” Caused by what Braly calls “gluten gluttony,” this plague is, “an insidious one that should have been recognized and treated long ago, but wasn’t . . . It remains poised, ready to harm many unwary victims.”
Sounds like a script for an especially low-budget B-movie: Cereal Killer, bowl of Wheaties plots to annihilate its unsuspecting diner. For undiagnosed sufferers like 22-year-old Gary MacLellan, however, the negative side effects of consuming gluten are truly scary.
After years of being underweight and feeling sick “pretty much all the time,” MacLellan, who lives in Calgary with his parents and six of his younger siblings, gave up gluten five years ago along with the rest of his family. The MacLellans’ self-imposed diet consists of “a lot of organic meat and vegetables — we don’t eat any grains at all, not even rice.”
Since becoming gluten-free, MacLellan has managed to gain a healthy amount of weight and claims to have more energy now. None of the MacLellans have ever been tested for celiac disease, but, says MacLellan, who admits to missing sandwiches and can’t remember the last time he dined in a restaurant, “I know I feel better eating cleanly; it seems more natural to me.”
One could, of course, argue that eating grains is natural — after all, haven’t humans been breaking bread for millennia? Well, yes and no. No, because thanks to “advances” in agricultural technology, the bread we break has been transformed dramatically in recent decades. Gluten content is greater in today’s grains because of the way those grains are selectively bred, ripened and stored — a good thing in terms of culinary malleability, elasticity and heat resistance, but a bad thing in terms of human health.
That said, lest you wake up tomorrow unjustly blaming your morning crumpet for your lifelong malaise, you should know not every expert believes gluten is guilty as charged.
Leaky Gut Syndrome
For instance, Dr. Terry Willard, clinical herbalist and founder of Calgary’s Wild Rose Wholistic Clinic and College, believes the growing concern over grains in our diets may be more than a little overblown. He regularly sees patients who have diagnosed themselves as celiac or gluten intolerant and who have come to him looking for confirmation or a cure.
“If a person is truly celiac, they usually know it by the time they are four years old because they’re malnourished, throwing up whenever they have a flour product — meaning it is a genetic disease,” he says. “Some people can have mild cases later in life, but it’s rare to have it badly late in life.” In his clinical experience, Willard has found that “about 50 percent of people who think they have celiac actually have leaky gut syndrome.”
While this theory ain’t a pretty one (“leaky” and “gut” should never appear in the same
sentence), it does offer hope for deprived gluten-lovers. The syndrome is an unpleasant state of intestinal turmoil caused by damage to the bowel lining, and exhibits symptoms similar to celiac disease. But, according to Willard, it is “almost always caused by yeast — specifically, Candida — in the digestive tract.”
Since it doesn’t have a genetic origin like celiac, leaky gut is potentially only a temporary situation; it can be relieved by changing one’s diet in a variety of ways, including staying off the flour for three to nine months in order to rebuild intestinal flora. And, unlike celiac sufferers, “many people who turn this problem around,” says Willard, “can go back to eating gluten.” Unfortunately, Willard’s position doesn’t seem to have become part of the mainstream conversation about gluten yet.
As a result, “a lot of people will go a lifetime without knowing about the Candida connection, so they don’t do anything about it,” he says.
Regardless of whose theory turns out to be right, it looks like the debate over celiac will rage (quietly) on for some time. Dang, I was hoping it would be resolved by next Christmas.
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