I understand that there's an unseemly faddish element to the gluten free thing, but I think it's unfair to say that your acquaintances suddenly "developed" gluten problems. More likely, they just hadn't been announcing their chronic bowel problems to you all along and suddenly found that their symptoms improved when they tried out this new diet they'd heard of.
My son has medically diagnosed gluten sensitivity or whatever Celiac is officially called, and he loves the recent fad because there's tons of junk food he can buy at the store, at least as long as the fad lasts. He was diagnosed many years ago and back then, there were not many artificial GF products out there to buy...
It would be interesting to compare results over time, my son was diagnosed quite awhile ago and it was cheap and easy to go cold turkey WRT grains, whereas I think paradoxically it might be harder today for people recently (self?) diagnosed because there so many "here's a GF sorta-cookie-like object for a mere $6.95" products in stores. Or the GF pancake mix that tastes good even to me, but is about $10/box. Its a lot cheaper, and arguably easier, to eat naturally GF products than artificially GF products, what I'm getting at is its a lot cheaper and easier to make a GF omelet for breakfast than to go thru what you need to do to make (or buy) GF french toast. Its easier and cheaper to make your own taco meat seasoning than to try and buy a packaged envelope that doesn't use wheat flour as a thickener, for example.
I have the Real Deal of Celiac too, and my advice to anyone else is really to just drop the wheat entirely. A lot of those Gluten-Free substitutes seem to have sky-high glycemic indexes, which is really not good.
(Glycemic indexes are notoriously hard to directly measure; even the numbers you may scare up on the Internet are often only approximations. So I can't prove my statement. All I can say is that when I eat many of those products, I get the same essential reactions to them I do when I eat candy. Which I don't do anymore, either. Of course, in some cases, it simply is sugar... for instance, look at [1] . 18 grams of sugar in 28 grams of cake = 64% sugar! I went to substantiate a claim I wrote here that some of the things were 50% sugar and did more than that. Of course, compare with [2], non-gluten free, 16g sugar in 26g product) for 62% sugar.)
One of the enduring problems with various specialized diets is the desire to make substitutes for the food that was left behind. Nobody really wants to give up a food if they don't have to and we end up with all kinds of terrible substitutes when folks should probably just make the entire paradigm shift into whatever their new food style is.
I think if you have to change foods because of a debilitating issue like Celiac, getting rid of whatever is making you feel like you're about to die isn't all that hard and thus you don't really want to terrible substitute. It's the folks who are induced into the fad who don't really feel all that different one way or the other outside of some kind of placebo effect who still desire the foods that "were making them sick".
I think it's a particular kind of disgusting to convince people who are otherwise healthy that eating certain foods is making them sick when it isn't, it's infantilizing them and I think it takes away from the seriousness of the real disease and the people who really suffer from what's a very painful and often socially crippling issue.
Yes $8 GF cupcakes with weird taste and texture are ridiculous but when all the other kids are having tasty $0.50 cupcakes at the birthday party my son wants one anyway, so on rare occasion we buy one of the mostly awful and expensive substitute products.
The other is that X% of the celiacs are asymptomatic. Till they bleed out of an ulcer, or die at a ridiculously high and young rate from stomach cancer. If your allergen blood test measures off the charts, and the gastroenterologist does a biopsy and its all inflamed, even if you claim to "feel fine" it would be dumb to keep eating wheat. With my son it was a little more obvious as wheat products made him explode out both ends, eventually resulting in the two medical tests above. As advice its along the lines of, if you feel OK, then no need to take your blood pressure meds, or if you feel OK then no need to take your psych meds that day, or if you feel OK then no need to finish your course of antibiotics. I wouldn't really go there, even as satire.
Farmers use grains to fatten mammal livestock, about 2/3 the human mammal population in the USA could stand to lose a bit of weight, and wheat is a grain, so cutting grains is a truly great idea for about 2/3 the population regardless of allergy. I'm perfectly fine with gluten but I lost some excess weight anyway when we went mostly GF at home.
Gluten is not an essential nutrient. You'll be perfectly healthy without it. Now I suppose some flake out there could propose a diet where you consume zero vitamin C until you're admitted into a hospital with scurvy... Although that kind of flakiness does exist in other situations, its perfectly safe not to eat gluten containing foods. The only real danger is wasting lots of money on expense artificially GF foods, which I advise against doing other than for social situations, and the danger of losing some weight.
One point where I agree totally with you in fact, but not in outlook, is the infantilizing subject. Infants are going to be infants. Can't be bothered to take chemistry because you'd like someone else to do your thinking for you, thats called being an infant. Can't be bothered to learn anything about nutrition other than directly or indirectly paid advertisements, thats called infantile behavior. Babies are going to be babies, thats just what they do. No point blaming the messenger or the topic, a moron is quite capable of finding another way to do something moronic without anyone's encouragement. So getting nutritional advice from Hollywood stars is just what infants naturally do; after all they learned about vaccines and autism from the same folks. Normal behavior is not a problem. That behavior being normal for lazy/dumb people is the problem.
There has been a lot of issues with storing commodities such as grains in massive piles in open air (for futures trading) and fungal blooms. I wonder how much "gluten sensitivity" is actually vomitoxin* sensitivity, from a food industry that has had most regulational oversight removed.
As someone who has seen the inside of a QA lab at ADM, I think this is a much more likely scenario. The technicians either give good tests that pass the already loosened standards, or they get fired. There was a big problem with Vomitoxin in 2010, due to a lot of wet weather, but that has subsided with this year's drought in the midwest, but many coastal areas which also farm are seeing much more rain this year.
Combine this uncertainy or "back scratching" quality issues, with typical industrial food practices such as fumigating with phosphene and Sulfuryl fluoride, using more insecticide than recommended and all the fun and exciting stuff coming down the GMO pipe, it's no wonder consumers have lost their appetite for American commodities. They're getting sick from them. All these techniques are tested to have "minimal" impact on the health of consumers, but combine them all, and who knows, certainly not scientists, but people do from first hand experience. How many food recalls have already happened this year? Compare that with other years.. These recalls are not from better testing and transparency because these recalls are for food already in the market and sickening people.
