The video at the end of this post is from the celiac disease expert at the Mayo Clinic. Not exactly a hack. What they found, which is fascinating, is that people with celiac disease who know that they have it are getting LESS heart disease than the controls.

The key word is KNOW.

You see untreated celiacs clearly have more heart disease. We have known for years that people with UNTREATED celiac disease die younger. The Warren Air Force Base study showed that without the diet the odds of premature death are unpleasantly high with most of the celiacs never living to see 65.

Sure a lot of that is because we get more cancer but we also have more A-fib
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21653560
and a 50% higher incidence of COPD even though we are less likely to smoke
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21880073

So we should be dropping dead much faster than the controls.

However this new study seems to show that celiacs who know that they have the disease tend not to get heart disease or diabetes at the same rate as the general population. They are LESS vulnerable.

Yes, when they checked this out, the celiacs had fewer blockages, were thinner and were healthier than the controls.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23451861

How does this happen? Well I tend to agree with the doctor from Mayo on this one.

Processed gluten-free food is really expensive. I just tested out some new gluten-free ramen noodles. They were delicious. They were also $2 a pack. The regular kind cost 30 cents. This seems about right. Once my relatives asked me how much more gluten-free processed foods costs. Was it about 20% more? How about 50% more?

Of course the reality is that its closer to 400% more.

So guess what. We do not eat much processed food. When I want a cake, I bake it. I don’t do that often. We can eat only potato chips and Plentils. This gets really boring. And expensive. I never just decide it was a hard day and I am going to order a pizza. I can’t. I can’t eat wings or really any fast food without thinking about it and most chain food I cannot eat at all.

By default we eat more fruits and vegetables. When I am going someplace I throw fruit in a cooler and if we can’t eat what is being served, we eat the fruit.

Long story short if your family is not interested in coming along for the gluten-free journey you may want to point out to them that your gain is also theirs, because its not that having celiac disease promotes heart health.

It is that the diet promotes it. And the diet is so important that it plays a bigger role than the disease does.

Here is the video from Mayo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv89GIREH_E