
A Food Shortage Revealed the Cause of Celiac Disease - DoreenMichele
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-celiac-disease
======
zaroth
Stunning it was this hard to pin down an autoimmune disorder which is
effectively a food allergy.

My daughter has celiac which we caught early (concomitant with T1D) although
she is not as hypersensitive as some people I have met, it is still crucial to
avoid all gluten as even without overt symptoms it effects overall growth and
nutrition.

But some of our friends are so sensitive that even minuscule levels of gluten
exposure cause intense distress within an hour.

You have a “wasting” disease which is clearly non-contagious. Is it not
obvious to test various strict diets? I guess in advanced cases it takes
months of a gluten-free diet for the intestine to start healing (years for
full recovery) so short-term test diets would not have led to full recovery,
but even if you just experiment with carb-free that would reduce gluten so
much I would think someone would have caught onto this sooner!

~~~
erikpukinskis
In the beginning, nothing was obvious. New things become obvious every day.

~~~
zaroth
Definitely it’s not obvious that gluten specifically would be the cause, but
seemingly obvious to test specialized diets?

So I guess I’m surprised people didn’t discover “avoid wheat” a lot sooner
even if it took until the late 20th century to actually understand the
mechanism.

~~~
megaman22
Wheat was such a fundamental part of European diets until relatively recently
that I suspect most serious celiacs died in childhood in earlier times.

~~~
toyg
Or just lived with minor discomfort, as plant strains were different and were
consumed in much lower quantities anyway.

~~~
mirimir
Celiac disease is _far more severe_ than what's now called "gluten
intolerance". But maybe they're related.

I get that "Celiac disease results from genetic abnormal immune response to
gluten."[0] I'm not sure what that means, in detail. Perhaps there's a
particular allele of one of the immunoglobulin genes. But whatever it is,
perhaps other alleles cause "gluten intolerance" of varying severity.

0)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16095159](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16095159)

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kgwgk
Original title of the submission (which corresponds to the title of the
article): “How Famine Under the Nazis Revealed the Cause of Celiac Disease”

More about this “food shortage”:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944–45](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944–45)

~~~
sincerely
Why was the title changed?

~~~
mirimir
Maybe because involvement of Germany is irrelevant to the article's main
point. And could generate boring conversation.

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TACIXAT
Cutting out gluten really changed my life. I went through a phase where I was
only eating every other day because I felt so shitty when I did eat.

When you end up with a disease like this it really exposes our blind spots in
medicine. I even somewhat resent that doctors didn't identify this in me when
I was young. It was 23 years of sinus headaches until a girlfriend did the
research and told me to do an elimination diet.

While I had some digestion issues (high fructose foods, probably fructose
malabsorption from my small intestine being wrecked) my main problem was sinus
headaches. There seems to be an association between chronic sinusitis and
celiac, but no studies backing that up. [1]

At the end of the day I've cut out gluten, sugar, caffeine, msg, and sodium
nitrites as triggers to my sinus headaches. I went back and forth on a lot of
these so I am quite sure of the relationship. I really did love bread, sugar,
and caffeine and went back to them more than a few times.

The best I can describe the symptoms related to the sinus stuff is a
withdrawal. For example, I feel OK when eating sugar regularly, maybe a medium
bad headache here or there, but when I stop fully I get a horrible one,
sometimes accompanied by throwing up, cold sweats, shaking, etc.

There is some research into opioid like effects of gluten. [2] I originally
came across the concept on some fringe science about the bodies of people with
autism treating gluten as an opioid (and advocating a gf diet for them). It
resonated with me because the symptoms I experience are very much like a
withdrawal. It's hard to talk about though because there isn't research
backing it up.

If any medical students are reading this and want to study it, it's a pretty
undiscovered field.

1\. [http://www.aaaai.org/ask-the-expert/coeliac-disease-
sinusiti...](http://www.aaaai.org/ask-the-expert/coeliac-disease-sinusitis)

2\.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025969/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025969/)

~~~
thrwaway109
I had the exact same issue and solution. I don't think I am celiac and I ate
gluten for over 20+ years. I used to get 3+ major sinus infections a year and
doctors wanted to perform nasal surgery on me.

After having cut out dairy a few years earlier due to realizing I was lactose
intolerant, I then experimented with cutting out wheat. All my sinus issues
went away, my headaches went away, my depression went away, my brain fog went
away.

I suggested this to a few family members, and it had the same affect when they
cut the things out.

It is crazy that I did not have any doctors ever suggest this to me, and it
was just a result of the food I was eating.

I wish there was more research and education that went into this, as I imagine
it might be affecting quite a few people.

~~~
has2k1
Medicine 200 years from now will be different. Doctors are largely ignorant of
nutrition. When you go to the doctor, how often do they ask about the what you
eat? Unless you really look unhealthy or you mention some correlation between
the symptoms and a specific food, your diet is a lowly weighted factor in your
unwell being. I think that will change, and many of the catalysts will be from
patients who teased out the effects of nutrition on what ails them.

There is also a significant leakage of nutritional advise from sports science,
and all this information is finding adherents/testers in the regular world and
will eventually (after the pseudoscience is sorted out) have a corrective
influence on medicine.

I think at some point Medical nutrition therapy (MNT) will be a lot more
common and maybe even have specific practitioners, (like physical therapists)
instead of being a doctor-nutritionist partnership. The practice will evolve
and it will get standardised and taught to "specialists".

------
blixt
As someone with diagnosed celiac disease, it took a very long amount of time
for me to get diagnosed.

Already when I was around 10 years old I would go to the doctor and he'd say I
might have irritated bowel syndrome but really, no treatment would help. I
have memories of stomach pains so severe I'd bend over in pain.

It got better in my teens, or I got used to the pain, I can't really tell
which. Many years later, when I was 25, I got internal bleeding and a pain so
severe my doctor sent me to the ER for suspected appendicitis. However, after
an MRI revealed nothing I was sent home without diagnosis.

My doctor finally sent me to get a biopsy to figure out what caused this and
it showed that I had celiac disease. I've since followed a gluten free diet
quite strictly, but I never get immediate or obvious symptoms so it's very
hard for me to tell how well I'm doing. Some times I feel an unexplained
tiredness or stomach pain, which probably means I did somehow eat gluten.

This is all to say that celiac disease is a very "murky" condition. Doctors
don't always seem to know how or when to test for it (I suspect it's getting
much better than 20 years ago). The actual test is quite invasive (again, I've
seen there's headway in this space). And even if you confirm that you have
celiac disease, it's not always easy to monitor your track record because the
damage to your insides is long term and at least in my case I only seem to be
able to sense it in more severe transgressions.

The scariest part of it all is the long-term dangers of celiac disease. Eating
gluten with celiac disease is linked to a long list of deficiencies and other
issues, leading to fragile bones, tiredness and even nervous system disorders
(numbness, seizures, headaches, anxiety, etc).

I hope we get better at diagnosing this, it might turn out to not be as rare
as we thought!

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dominotw
I can't seem to tell the difference between Celiac and gluten sensitivity.
They are supposed to be different but I can't tell how. I've asked my GP and
GI but they seem to think they are exactly the same.

Anyone following any specific diet for one vs the other. Its all very
confusing.

~~~
megaman22
One is definitely a real condition. The other... well, there's reason to be
skeptical - whether it is actually gluten or whether it is psychosomatic. I'm
more than half suspicious that most of the self-reported benefits of avoiding
gluten are really benefits of also slashing carb intake.

~~~
cpuguy83
Gluten free does not mean carb free or even carb reduced. What it does tend to
mean is less processed food and more whole foods.

~~~
stephen_g
Both my father and my sister are coeliac, and find a lot of packaged gluten
free foods (biscuits, breads, cakes, etc) have more sugar than the normal
versions to compensate for frankly generally tasting worse...

Fresh food is fine, but in general people deciding to go gluten free because
it's trendy and "healthy", without having done a proper elimination trial or
having coeliac disease, aren't actually making a good choice.

~~~
ryanmerket
You forgot having active anti-bodies in their feces. I don’t have celiacs but
I have done a fecal test and it showed sensitivity to gluten, oat, potato, and
bean.

