Month: September 2013

There are a few disorders aside from celiac disease that seem to improve drastically on a gluten-free diet. One of those disorders is schizophrenia. A new article just published in the World Journal of Biological Psychiatry shows once again that there is a link between reaction to gliadin and schizophrenia. The team from University of Maryland Medical School studied 950 schizophrenics and 1000 controls. They found that the levels of antibodies were about 50% higher in schizophrenics. The implication is that a gluten-free diet may prevent the development of schizophrenia. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23282016 An earlier study done in China contained 473 schizophrenics and 478 controls and got similar results. In the schizophrenic population 27.6% of females had the reaction to gluten vs 13.9% if the controls. For males the numbers were 26.4 of schizophrenics and 19.8 of controls. You can read the Chinese study results here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330001/ And back in 2011 they did another study in the US which compared the level of reactivity in the blood. Again, the numbers are much higher in the schizophrenic population than in the control group and again there were 1400 schizophrenics and 900 controls. Here over 10 times as many celiacs as controls who reacted to the protein. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004201/ I would call this a pattern. But there are even more studies that indicate a strong causal link. Which leads to the really big question...

I recognize that most science reporters are under a deadline. I also understand that sometimes a human interest story is interpreted as a science story (a sample of one is interesting and worth noting but not actually scientifically valid) but every once in a while I read reporting that is misleading and would have required about 20 minutes extra to be complete. It does not bring out the best in me. There is a recent study that states that there is no link between celiac disease and autism. Sort of. But not exactly. What the study actually says is that the number of people with autism who also have a diagnosis of celiac disease is not meaningfully different than the number of people in the general population who also have a diagnosis of celiac disease. OK people, does anyone else see a few obvious problems with this? 1) The study relies on people who already have an ASD to decide to get tested for a second lifestyle challenging disorder – If you know someone with a severely autistic child then you know someone who is pretty much at her limits. She is in no shape to seek out new problems to deal with. Especially if they involve anesthetizing a child who can become hysterical when he does not get grape jelly for lunch. I would entertain the possibility that...

Let me be perfectly clear. I do not eat gluten, dairy and corn because I get sick when I eat gluten, dairy or corn. I try to eat healthy but I do occasionally go on benders where I get gluten-free cookies or dairy-free ice cream or other sugary treats. So I have never really subscribed to the theory that no one should eat gluten. Yeah, its hard to digest and its not a natural part of the diet of any primates, and I don’t think it should be a big part of a human diet, but do I think that most people need to scan every label for trace gluten? No. That said, there was a study that seemed to indicate that gluten can play a role in making mice fat. It’s not quite the role that MSG plays, and its one study, and its mice, but if you are struggling with weight that will not come off, then this might be of interest. You see when they use lab mice they can measure food and calorie intake. The mice cannot run off to the mini-mart and secretly eat a bunch of candy. The mice eat what they are fed and in this case one batch of mice was fed gluten and fatty food and one batch was just fed fatty food, but the calories were the same. The...

When my friends friends are diagnosed they call me and want to know all sorts of things about celiac disease. Can headaches and depression really be symptoms? (they can). What if there are no digestive complaints? (that is very common, many celiacs have only the DH rash) Why did my doctor say I have a mild case (your doctor does not know much about the disease which is alarmingly common). But here is the thing. I am NOT a doctor, or a nurse, or even a CNA. I am a researcher and a writer. So here, for your review are a bunch of videos from actual medical doctors who are licensed to practice medicine and are familiar with the disease and who can communicate about it. You can mess around on YouTube and watch a lot of videos about gluten disorders. The problem is that anyone can upload a video and there are a lot of people with strong opinions, unrelated training, and no research to back it up. The following videos are all from doctors who run clinics for celiac disease. This one is old and a lightweight but it is a good overview of the disease. Its from an old episode of The View. Elizabeth Hasselbeck has the disorder. Peter Green wrote an excellent book on Celiac Disease and runs the celiac center at Columbia University in...

OK so ignore for the moment the rather obvious fact that I cannot ingest a Krispy Kreme Donut. The truth is that I used to love them and I also used to get a lot of grief for eating such an unhealthy food. The funny thing is that its not as loaded with sugar as say Vitamin Water, or a thai chicken salad or a superfood smoothie Confused? Don’t be. Just do the math Now, the donut is not healthy. It is made with white flour and fried and so there is a lot to not love about donuts. The chicken salad does include salad which has fiber, B-vitamins and a bunch of other things that are good for you. Its just that it also has a LOT of sugar. This also gets into the issue that seems to keep coming up with fast food salads where they seem like the best option and then you find out that they have more fat and sugar than what you really wanted to eat anyway. So this is a short post, but the article itself is actually funnier and more disturbing than anything I can tell you. It just gets back to the rule of thumb of just drinking coffee, teas, water (including flavored fizzy water, as long as it only has two ingredients), and maybe some veggie juice. And don’t...

Sunday’s New York Times had an OpEd piece about EpiPens and the need to make them available for every child in every school. Right now each child with known allergies has his or her personal EpiPen and the teachers are, in many places, prohibited from using one child’s EpiPen on a different child. The problem is that in many places there are no “bulk” EpiPens available for the child whose parents haven’t yet refilled the prescription, cannot afford to refill the prescription or who don’t yet know that the child even has life threatening allergies. This to me is a no-brainer. EpiPens are not difficult to administer and although all medications have risks, I can assure you that not being able to breathe is a far greater and more immediate problem and that the other second graders are fully capable of diagnosing that “Timmy can’t breathe”. I have been there myself. There is no time to discuss the situation. There is no time for an ambulance to get there. You have one to two minutes. I am especially sensitive to the need for EpiPens for those children who don’t know they have allergies as the way that I learned that my allergies could cause me to gasp for air was by being exposed to an allergen and then gasping for air. It would be great if I knew well...

Last year I contacted Starbucks about the ingredients in their Via Pumpkin Spice Latte and was assured that the natural flavors do not contain any gluten ingredients. This is good news for me because I personally LOVE the Pumpkin Spice Latte and I stock up each year when the VIA version comes out. Now none of the Via products is certified GF and they make no warrants that the products are gluten free. In theory there might be cross contamination. That said, I have problems with even the slightest cross contamination and yet I have never had an issue with a VIA PS latte Starbucks is quick and wise to point out that nothing prepared in an actual Starbucks retail location can be guaranteed gluten and dairy free. They use the same steamers for dairy and non-dairy. The people may go from handling a perfectly clean pastry to handling your coffee cup. I don’t think that anyone is trying to cross contaminate anyone else, but I do think that cross contamination is a real risk. This product is in a gray area. It reminds me of the little g used at Trader Joe’s whereby they are saying that no gluten containing ingredients were used. They aren’t warranting no cross contamination, just that they didn’t do anything on purpose. So you can read last year’s post on the topic for...

My best friend from high school and I both suffer with allergies. When I was a teen mine were so bad that I used to carry the precursor to the Epipen everywhere I went. Literally everywhere. There are pictures of me somewhere that show me dancing on a tabletop wearing the purse that contained my shot of adrenaline. Because of this we were aware of the “hygiene hypothesis” years ago. We used to joke that we would take clean pacifiers away from our babies and say “No honey, that is sterile, let me put it in the dirt for you”. As it turns out, we probably weren’t going nearly far enough. I became interested again in the hypothesis when a friend of mine who had grown up in India mentioned that there was this odd phenomenon with Indian expats. A family in Bangalore might have 4 children. Two stay in Bangalore, one goes to Australia and one to the US or Canada. They all have their own children. The grandchildren born in Bangalore have no allergies. Those born to their siblings in Australia or Canada meanwhile, have Epipens. As it turns out this is not just limited to my friends. There is a statistical correlation. in the US http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23699865 and in Australia (it bugs me that this is so old. Why has it been 20 years since follow up)...

I was watching a documentary earlier today called “The Disappearing Male” about how endocrine disrupting chemicals are causing many species to become more heavily female. This is most obvious in species of reptiles and frogs, but we already know that human males are already becoming less and less fertile and that we are starting to produce more girl babies than boys. It is less than an hour long and if you are interested you can watch it here Now there are a lot of endocrine disruptors. There are fertilizers, there are pesticides, and there are plastics. There are things you can do to reduce your exposure to these, but unfortunately some level of exposure is inevitable. However endocrine disruptors lurk in a few other areas where you can completely avoid them. Like sunscreens. We don’t use chemical sunscreens. At all. If you see my child at the pool or the beach he is the one with the streaky white stuff on his face and body. I don’t trust the micronized particles and quite honestly I can tell when the white stuff wears off. Also physical sunscreens are still good next summer (minerals do not degrade in one year). My aversion to chemical sunscreens is dual. First of all they only work if you really do reapply them every hour. They work by breaking down in sunlight so after an...