An average person and most doctors simply cannot believe that difficulty with the digestion and biochemical or immunological processing of the gluten found in these grains can cause substantial mischief.
Gluten intolerance affects approximately one out of a hundred people; if you look among sick people instead of in the general population, you will find a much higher incidence. If you have problems of just about any combination of symptoms you can name or even if you have been diagnosed with a disease and remain symptomatic, a brief avoidance of gluten in your diet will cover this base.
Gluten sensitivity is the protein in cereal grains such as wheat, rye, and barley. Sensitivity is not the same as an ordinary allergy.
Most sensitivity to foods involves delayed reactions and has to do with IgG antibodies. It is very easy to identify food allergies if you get an immediate reaction to them, for example if you get a rash after eating some strawberries. But it is very tricky to pin down a delayed food allergy because there is no clear-cut cause and effect. You may experience symptoms after two hours, but frequently they don’t show up until one day to three days after you eat the food in question. Further complicating matters, the symptoms wax and wane. You may eat gluten with impunity one day but get diarrhea from it the next three times you indulge. Or your symptoms may be cumulative, occurring only after you’ve eaten gluten a number of times or when you eat a particular combination of foods you’re sensitive to.
Delayed food allergies can cause just about any symptom, and chronic illness often involves a state of inappropriate immune vigilance in which food allergy gets involved even if it is no the cause of the problem. For some reason, your defense immune system can get stuck in a high vigilance alert and response, leading to chronic inflammatory symptoms that persist and even worsen long after the initial trigger has gone. When this happens, your immune system may develop an oddly aggressive attitude toward a variety of antigens or foreign substances in your body, including many found in the foods you eat.
Wheat and other gluten-containing foods and milk products may test positive on IgG food allergy testing but that, in you, produce effects that are not really allergic but are mediated by mechanisms that take weeks or months for alleviation after avoiding the foods.
Autistic children often improve enough on a gluten-free [Psyche: and dairy free diet, it is well documented] diet at to make it worth continuing. The diet avoids wheat, rye, barley, and all products containing even traces of the protein (gluten) found in these grains. Oats are still a matter of controversy; some studies show no negative effect in gluten-sensitive individuals, but other individuals report reactions to them. The majority of psychologists, physicians, teachers, neighbors, and parents reject the idea that anything as completely innocent as bread or spaghetti could make your lose your mind. More practitioners every day prescribe a gluten free diet for individuals with diseases such as schizophrenia and autism as top treatment instead of it being it a last resort. If you have any chronic symptom and you have not tried eliminating gluten from your diet for somewhere between three weeks and three months to see what different it may make.
Doctors are conditioned to think that each disease has a separate cause, and each produces a separate disease, so it is no surprise that they will find it difficult to believe that sensitivity to the protein wheat, rye, barley, and maybe, oats could produce such a diverse list of conditions such as headaches, fatigue, malaise, depression, any sort of chronic digestive problem including difficulty gaining weight, abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation, irritable bowel, undigested food in stools, Sjögren’s syndrome (dry eyes), epilepsy associated with brain calcification, history of migraine headaches, or digestive problems; osteoporosis, infertility, complications of pregnancy such as miscarriage, low-birth-weight infants, intestinal lymphoma, esophageal cancer, diabetes, thyroid problems, schizophrenia, autism, dermatitis herpetiformis (a chronic skin condition with tiny blisters that resemble those of herpes virus infections).
There is substantial evidence of a causative association between gluten intolerance and these problems. And the list grows as case reports of dramatic cures produced by a gluten-free diet attract the attention of researchers.
There are blood tests and urine tests that may predict whether you will feel better by eliminating gluten from your diet, but no blood or urine test is completely decisive. Response to a change in diet will be decisive for you.
The original peoples of Northern Europe, who like the peoples of the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, had not adapted to the consumption of wheat because they were hunter-gatherers or because they practiced agriculture based on corn, millet, or rice, as well as tubers.
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In order to understand gluten sensitivity, we must understand digestion of protein. A protein is an assembly of amino acids. Amino acids joined together are called peptides and when we have 100 or so amino acids joined together, we have a small protein. Most proteins have hundreds or thousands of amino acids, and they are folded into shapes that are kept permanent by bridges, usually made of sulfur. The strength of this assembly is quite strong, and so our digestive tracts are trusted with the task of disassembling the thousands of amino acids from our foods right down to individual amino acids, which then pass int our bloodstream to be then reassembled int our own very proteins. To be more precise, our digestive tracts uses stomach acids, and alkali juices from our intestines, combined with the digestive enzymes to do this job. Specific enzymes disassemble the proteins into peptides. Gluten intolerance has to do with a failure of a particular enzyme, a peptidase called DPP4.
When the same enzyme is sticking out of a lymphocyte, a cell of our immune/defense system and apparently doing a different job within the body, it is called CD26. Because of the failure or insufficiency of DPP4, an undigested fragment of protein, or peptide, survives and it appears to cause mischief in at least two ways. First, this undigested peptide, looks familiar to the immune/defense system, in other words, it produces a mimicry which is based on digestive weakness among the descendants of peoples who have not been eating wheat long enough to adapt. This will cause symptoms caused by the triggering of an immune response against a suspicious-looking peptide which will resemble a virus to our defense/immune system. Because the gluten-derived peptide is similar to various disease-causing virus, it generates a complex defensive response on the part of the immune system, which does not then find a virus to kill. The next step is damage to tissues by the antibodies aimed at the peptide. This triangle of viral stimulus, immune response, and autoimmune damage is suspected to be a common theme in various illnesses, such as type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and autism. The immune response damages different tissues in different people.
The second way that undigested peptides from gluten cause trouble is by entering the bloodstream. Peptides released from gluten when there is a failure of DPP4 possess another kind of mimicry apart from their resemblance to peptides from viruses. These peptides look like opium and the family of drugs derived from opium: heroin, morphine, codeine, and other semisynthetic derivatives. This understanding is based on the finding of opioid peptides in the urine of individuals with autism and schizophrenia, also from the dramatic withdrawal symptoms that occur in some individuals when they come off gluten. The malaise and irritability strongly resemble a mild version of the kinds of symptoms seen in heroin withdrawal.
Most individuals with gluten-related symptoms will begin to experience relief a few days after excluding all gluten. It may take up between 3 weeks and 3 months.
Many doctors define the problem in terms of the lab test, the lab tests are meant to indicate celiac disease, which does not necessarily have a one-to-one correlation with all of the other problems associated with gluten sensitivity. Celiac disease is just one type of a broader spectrum of gluten sensitivity.
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Everything that we had learned about gluten applies to casein, one of the main proteins in milk, the lack of DPP4, thus the peptides pass into the blood where they do harm because the evoke an autoimmune response and/or mimic endorphins to cause changes in perception, mood, and behavior.; but it is to say that milk can cause you problems in other ways as well.
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