Most people have now heard about coeliac disease and gluten intolerance. They may even be aware that it’s about your body having an allergic reaction to wheat,
But the problem is that some people are claiming it’s nothing more than a fad diet. Basically, a choice you make, something that is a fad, something about being trendy, and not something that you do to (in the long term) help your health and save your life.
So it’s being painted as something that paranoid foodies in the modern age do. People who drink green smoothies every day, people who are always looking at diet and exercise.
But it’s not about being trendy. It took me three years to work out what was going on, and in that time I suffered hell.
What’s happening is you’re getting attacked by your own immune system. When you eat wheat, it triggers an autoimmune response that makes your body attack its own tissues. It’s that serious, and over time, if not addressed, it can kill you early.
So I want to talk in detail here about why it’s not a fad. Gluten intolerance, through to full-blown coeliac disease, is like diabetes. It’s that serious in terms of the unaddressed issues it can have. I’ll talk about my story, and what you can do.
Why Has Gluten Intolerance/Coeliac Disease Become More Common?
Right up front here, let’s talk about why gluten intolerance and coeliac disease is becoming more common.
The truth is that nobody actually knows fully. But the scientific consensus so far does point to it being related to environmental factors. In layman’s terms, that means that what we are eating now, is not the same as what we were eating 50 years ago, let alone thousands of years ago.
Food has become more refined, more manufactured. This has had potential knock-on effects to how our body reacts to it. Think about it, we have eaten wheat for thousands of years. But it’s always been fully natural. That’s just not the case anymore. Our bodies are having to react to things they have never experienced before.
Modern wheat strains are mostly hybridized. That’s where different strains have been put together to generate new wheat strains, with stronger characteristics for growth and resilience. So they aren’t natural.
They also continually backcrossed. That’s where there is the continuous crossing of strains to get rid of specific traits and constructions. Basically, to weed out things they don’t want to be in them.
They can also be hybridized with non-wheat species plants as well. This introduces genes that were never in fully natural historical wheat types.
On top of all that, to really turn your stomach, modern wheat also has other stuff fed into the process to improve yields. Chemical, gamma and x-ray mutagenesis processes, known as noxious stimuli are used to induce stronger mutations from this development process.
Think about it this way. We know that interbreeding is bad for humans. Forget the moral point of view, historically Royal families with very small gene pools have suffered from poor health both mentally and physically because lack of diversity and multi-generation development of poor gene pools had led to real problems.
So when you think about the fact in the past 50 years we have done all that on steroids to wheat, and you can see that what our bodies are dealing with is no longer the natural plant that our bodies were used to dealing with for thousands of years since men started farming. Put all that together, and it’s little wonder that gluten intolerance has grown massively in the past few decades.
What Are The Symptoms Of Gluten Intolerance You Should Watch Out For?
The problem with a lot of the symptoms of gluten intolerance is that they are the same sort of symptoms in common with many other ailments, especially irritable bowel syndrome, which is why so many people with gluten intolerance are actually diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome first, and then suffer significant health problems for years before the situation is rectified.
Most people know that the primary symptoms of wheat/gluten intolerance are digestive, and include things like bloating, cramping, flatulence, diarrhea, acid reflux, and nausea. This can even lead to a level of reaction when nausea turns to vomit, almost immediately after food hits your stomach in extreme circumstances. This can lead to dramatic weight loss.
Gluten intolerance can also show up within the context of more general symptoms that you maybe wouldn’t individually link to the condition, but putting them together, can be a sign that you could have a problem with wheat:
- Fatigue and general feelings of lack of energy
- Physical and emotional weakness (can be caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies)
- Mood swings and irritability
- Depression and anxiety
- Headaches get progressively worse
- Poor concentration and brain fog
- Hair loss
- Unexplained weight gain or loss
- Insomnia
- Joint pains
- Fertility problems
- Many neurological issues
- Bruising easily
- Respiratory problems and asthma symptoms
My Personal Gluten Intolerance Journey
My gluten intolerance stories started about three years ago. I was overweight, and tired all the time. My diet wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful. I just can really explain why I was always struggling with weight and energy levels. I also had brain fog and terrible diarrhea and even occasional vomiting after eating.
One of the most normal symptoms for me was a feeling of nausea shortly after eating. It got progressively worse, and I used to feel bloated as well. I would have terrible diarrhea, and it just seemed to escalate no matter what foods I ate or excluded. I actually began to think I might have cancer.
After one particularly strict diet that cut out quite a lot of things, I did notice that I felt better. I didn’t relate it to wheat at that time though. You see, the problem is that you are told whole grains are part of a healthy diet. So I always tried to keep some in my diet.
I went to the doctor, and he was pretty unhelpful. It got to the stage where even when I was showing him literature, he was telling me it was IBS or all in my head.
When my hair started falling out, I got more persistent. There was something badly wrong and I knew it. But I’ve had all the tests for things like cancer and other serious illnesses and they had come back as negative, nothing was found on the scans.
Under extreme pressure, threatening to change doctor, I was given a test to look for antibodies for gluten intolerance, as I was beginning to suspect that was the problem. They came back borderline, and I was told I didn’t a wheat intolerance because I was below the thresholds. It didn’t seem to occur to the doctor I was producing antibodies just below the cut-off point for all the five indicators, surely an obvious sign that something wasn’t right, otherwise why was my body producing antibodies at all?
Rather than spending money on a gastroenterologist, or more doctors, I decided to just follow a coeliac diet for six weeks and see what happened.
To my amazement, my health dramatically improved. My stomach stops hurting as much, I could digest food properly, and I wasn’t bothering the bathroom in the way I used to. The nausea was gone, and my energy level surged. Within six months I’d lost three stone as well.
How To Spot Whether You Have Gluten Intolerance
The problem is that medical training on gluten intolerance is still bad. Although people are aware of coeliac disease, there are so many other things it could be, more common things that are often ruled out.
I’ve actually heard of people being told by their doctor that it’s highly unlikely because it’s rare. But surely just because it is rare, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible, otherwise, nobody would have rare illnesses. It’s almost like professional cognitive dissonance.
So my advice would be to cut out gluten for a month and see how you feel. If things don’t feel 100% better, but they do feel somewhat better, then look at other things as well. Don’t just think that it can’t be a coeliac disease because you don’t feel totally cured.
Gluten is found in many things you wouldn’t realize. For me, I still had a few persistent problems, and it turned out that the bodybuilding supplement I was taking contained gluten in some of its ingredients. It didn’t say it on the ingredients list, but research confirmed it.
Now I’m an advocate of working out and taking supplements to really help. I take SARMs as well, I don’t really want to go into that here only mild ones like Ostarine), but I am passionate about taking good supplements to further your natural development. You have to check the ingredients on this stuff though, as I’ve learned.
For example, if you’re taking a protein supplement for bodybuilding, wheat/gluten can be in that. Check the source of the protein, and also check the other ingredients even if they say that the protein is not from a wheat source.
But many people do not realize how frequently wheat is found in everyday foods, and supplements. Things like multivitamins, over-the-counter supplements, sporting supplements, so many things out there contain wheat, so be ruthless in chasing down absolutely everything you consume to check it out.