Is there any proof that it does affect your health in any way? I thought the consensus was that in people who do not suffer from Colic disease, there is absolutely no impact of gluten on anything, none whatsoever. Am I wrong?
There are plenty of articles from respectable sources saying there's no reason to limit gluten in the diet, and doing so can cause problems if it means other nutrients are omitted (e.g. vitamins, by switching from whole wheat to white rice).
Anybody with any of the IBS diseases (colitis, Crohn's, etc.) is advised to be consider some moderation in their wheat consumption, I think.
Having said that, it is regrettable that so many Americans have decided to "cure" a host of physical and pshychological maladies with the "gluten-free" diet. Every moment you spend chasing a figment is a moment you don't spend fixing a real problem.
In your expert opinion, what is the real problem ?
The symptoms of gluten intolerance are not serious enough for a doctor to be interested, it is also easy enough to try changing your diet for a week or two in order to see if it makes a difference.
And if you get a doctor who listens, they... tell you to do an elimination diet for a month, keep a food journal, and reintroduce foods slowly while taking notes on what happens!
A good doc would tell you to consider testing your way through FODMAPS since there have been a bunch of recent publications about them in major medical journals. As the GP poster points out, though, many people might take the idea of an elimination diet and figure they can eat all the gluten-free toaster waffles they want, which would continue to cause all the same problems if FODMAPS rather than gluten were the problem. Most starch-filled gluten free replacement foods are not good for your health anyway.
Your understanding is correct. Gluten-free diets for those who don't suffer from celiac are just another fad diet like atkins or paleo. I'm eager for it to fade away, although I admit I'll miss laughing at the "gluten free" label on my 10 lb bags of pure sugar.
Atkins may have been a fad but at least for me it actually worked (I lost 18 kg/40 lbs). Gluten-free seems to be totally without merit for those without gluten sensitivity.
I do honestly have kind of a hard time making fun of fad diets. I don't want to discourage people who are concerned about their health and are trying to improve it. Gluten-free in particular is difficult because for most Americans, decreasing your carb intake is a really good way to improve your health, and going gluten-free means you'll skip that morning bagel. But at the same time it's frustrating because it's the wrong target, which means they skip out on good foods due to a misguided, but still helpful, goal.
On the other hand, paleo is an actively harmful diet[1], so I want to encourage a scientific approach to nutrition. But I don't want to discourage people who are more interested in fads than science from being concerned about health, either. Argh.
The marketing is endlessly hilarious, though. My cat's food has a gluten-free label, no joke.
There is also an actual gluten allergy that a few people have (much more rare than Celiac), which would be a good reason to avoid gluten. Of course, like Celiac, it's the kind of thing where the symptoms are really obvious and you know if you have it (e.g. anaphylaxis last time you had a piece of bread).
Sensitivity to gluten-containing foods has been documented in lots of people without celiac. However...
* People with IBS may find their symptoms improved by going on a low-FODMAP diet. That does take out bread, but it also might involve taking out onions because of their sugar content. Doesn't have anything to do with gluten per se.
* People with digestive problems may find that alcohol is an irritant. But then tequila should also be dropped or moderated; doesn't have to do with gluten.
* People who do an elimination diet and find that standard American bread upsets their stomach may also find that more fermented items, in moderation, aren't a problem. American bread will cause me embarrassing borborygmus and other digestive problems, but moderate consumption of beer or northern european sourdough rye is not bad. Someone once told me this was a difference in reaction to the glutenin vs gliadin proteins that make up gluten, but who knows. No one knows the science yet, but bread sure does give me non-celiac trouble!
For beer and wine, it's really useful and interesting to consider the effects of the processing and fermentation. Malted barley is used in most beers: you sprout and then roast the barley, releasing and cooking all kinds of sugars that you would not find in beef-barley soup. Barley has hordein instead of gliadin (rye has secalin, oats have avenin). Then the yeast crunches through those sugars to create alcohol and carbon dioxide and who knows what else. Fermentation often does have an effect on these proteins and can in fact have an effect on the amino acids that people with celiac are sensitive to, but we don't really know what's going on entirely. There are some Italians who can make gluten-free sourdough wheat bread in a lab just through getting the right yeasts going.
Beer, wine, pickles, yogurts, sausages, fermented shark... With all we are finding out about microbiomes inside our guts, there is going to be an explosion of commercialization of these traditional fermented foods. Start your own now so that you don't have to be reliant on corporate mega-strains in the future! Microbiome independence now! :)
We don't need to bring hakarl into this. Or into anything else, really. And this is from someone who has enjoyed homemade kefir (until killing the culture).
Starting your own fermentation culture is dead simple. The problem is that your local strains of dust-borne microbes are not likely to be very tasty, or as useful as a more domesticated culture. So just like there are companies who make money on open-source software, there will be companies that make money on particular freely-available fermentation cultures. There already are such companies.[0] There are also informal networks of people who trade cultures through the mail. That's how I got my kefir culture.
I have some sympathy with the disdain shown towards bandwagon-jumpers. However gluten has turned out to be a real problem in my own family. There seems to be a range of problems that gluten sensitivity can be linked with, even while traditional coeliac tests return negative. Our own research suggests this can sometimes mean "not yet bad enough to show positive" and that things need to get really bad for that to finally register.
There seems to be a term NCGS emerging - Non Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity. It's somewhat at the not-yet-proven-to-exist stage. For us though, we're in no doubt: given a regular gluten-containing morsel, my wife's face next day will show swelling and she'll be fatigued for days, plus be hit by abdominal cramps and various other things. Since she cut out gluten this has only ever happened "blind" btw, i.e. waking up with symptoms then figuring "ah that piece of XYZ must have had gluten" after the fact. She never eats gluten intentionally.
It's been interesting - she was all set to go onto thyroid medication for life, and had really quite severe symptoms, sometimes requiring hospitalisation. Cutting out gluten fixed them all within weeks.
We've seen it suggested that gluten proteins resemble thyroid molecules, hence the immune system's attack on gluten leading to those symptoms indicating thyroid dysfunction.
It makes you wonder: how many people with low level health complaints could do better by just trying a gluten free diet for a couple of weeks.
> Since she cut out gluten this has only ever happened "blind" btw, i.e. waking up with symptoms then figuring "ah that piece of XYZ must have had gluten" after the fact.
We've not cut anything else: dairy, nuts, alcohol, eggs, carbs, fats, proteins, sugar. Not sure what else it could be. For example, turns out malted vinegar causes a reaction, the sole "trigger" ingredient in it is barley.
6 months of no-symptoms-barring-accidental-gluten is proving somewhat compelling, after 5 years of mounting health issues.
This is an article we came across that was quite a eureka moment, my wife was a classic Hashimoto's case hence our initial route with endochrinology specialists:
The article refers to a "British unit", which is 1mL of pure alcohol. This is supposed to make it easier for people to know how much they're drinking, most bottles and cans state how many "units" are in a serving / the whole bottle.
To get the unit content of a drink you multiply the serving size in litres by the ABV value.
125 ml of wine at 8% is one British unit.
So when people say "one glass of wine is one unit" they're often under-estimating how much they're drinking. Most wine will be sold in 175 ml servings (called a small glass) and at much stronger than 8% ABV. 12% is normal. 175 ml of 12% is just over 2 units. A more normal 250 ml serving would be 3 units.
Increased risk drinking is a significant cost to Public Health and the NHS.
From the creators of the British Thermal Unit comes the streamlined British Unit? For a country with such a long and gloried history of interesting and curious names, these two really stand out :)
Anyway, here in the antipodes, we refer to 'standard drinks', which is both better and worse than 'units'. Better, because it's more accessible to the layperson, and worse, because most normal volumes that one drinks is more than one 'standard drink' - a can of 'normal' beer is 1.4, and a glass of wine is 1.5 (certain servings of these equal 1 standard drink - it really depends on your drinking pattern)
It's not called a 'British Unit'. You've mischievously added a capital letter there as if the whole thing is a proper name when the article didn't do that. It's just called 'a unit of alcohol' which isn't as silly as you're pretending. 'British' in the original article was just an adjective, not part of the noun, and the context of unit being alcohol was implicit so it was left off.
It's supposed to be in order of decreasing ABV, "beer before liquor, never been sicker" is how I know it. The point being, as your inhibitions decrease, your willingness to drink things quickly increases, but lower ABV drinks--especially carbonated ones--have a functional limit on how much can be consumed in a short period of time: stomach capacity.
O' the demon of rum is abroad in the land.
His victims are falling on every hand,
The wise and the sinful, the brave and the fair.
No station too high for his vengeance to spare.
O woman, the sorrow and pain is with you.
And so be the joy and the victory too ;
With this for your motto and succor divine :
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine!
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine!
To spin a hypothesis into this as to why this is possibly true, think of beer as a walk, wine as a jog and spirits as a sprint. It will take you longer (generally!) to drink the same alcohol content from a pint of beer than it would from a shot of spirits. It can be inferred that one probably consumes alcohol at a faster rate in shot form than in pint form.
I would draw the opposite conclusion from the first factoid. If it takes longer for beer to affect you, that can lead you to drinking too much because you don't yet feel drunk.
I think that would be true if you waited an hour for your next drink. However you're more than likely to have another glass of wine < 54mins, hence stock piling future booze in the pipe and making you more drunk than perhaps you'd anticipated.
This was actually the topic of the closing address at the Master Brewers Association of America (basically a modern guild meeting + trade show).
The main thrust of the talk was that nutritionally, beer and wine should be about equal, but everyone believes that wine is healthy and beer isn't - which is not scientifically accurate.
A more nuanced view: ethanol (alcohol) accounts for nearly all of the cardio-vascular benefits, and thus, beer and wine are equal. Wine contains more anti-oxidants and anti-aging properties, but you would need to get very (very) drunk to get those benefits (well past the Ballmer Peak). Beer, specifically craft beers, have great phytonutrients and macronutrients - and you can get those benefits from a single bottle.
Some people are trying to make a lower-alcohol, salty beer that would be a real sports-recovery drink.
Anyone here have experience with old-country low-alcohol everyday beverages like sima, kotikalja, kvass, etc? Europe used to have a grand tradition of these low-alcohol "near-beers" or "malt beverages" that people would drink on the farm. They were hydrating and had a lot of the health benefits of above, but since the ethanol was low I'm not sure what effect they had on cardiovascular health.
Also, the Romans and others down south in Europe used to water their wine heavily -- they drank a larger volume through the day but kept ethanol ingestion moderate. I wonder what the health ramifications were.
Oh yes, I used to love drinking kvass as a kid in Moscow. (I have no idea what the alcohol percentage was.)
I don't know if it's possible to get an equivalent here in the United States - I've tried bottled and other varieties, and they all tasted like crap-flavored soda. Went back to Moscow last summer, and got the good stuff - just like I remember.
>Anyone here have experience with old-country low-alcohol everyday beverages like sima, kotikalja, kvass, etc? Europe used to have a grand tradition of these low-alcohol "near-beers" or "malt beverages" that people would drink on the farm. They were hydrating and had a lot of the health benefits of above, but since the ethanol was low I'm not sure what effect they had on cardiovascular health.
When I was in high school my dad came back from a trip with a taste for traditional kefir, and brought with him some of the yeast 'grains' that are used to make it. He stuck with it for a few months, enjoying a couple of glasses a day, a jug continuously fermenting in the pantry.
After a while he began to realize that he was more tired than usual in the afternoons and felt like taking a nap almost every day. As it turns out, the fermented kefir contains a small amount of alcohol–seemingly just enough to make him a bit drowsy. Maybe not even enough to be noticeable if you're doing something physical, but only if you're focused and working at a desk.
The salty beer you're referring to is called Gose. It's a salty sour (lemony tart) ale of low alcohol that was brewed in the summertime, starting in the early 16th century. Along with the electrolytes that plants crave, the brewing process and low ph insured it was a pathogen free source of hydration.
Leipziger is the standard bearer, imo; most American versions don't add enough salt.
A theory I have heard in the UK is that brewers put chemicals in beer specifically to give you a hangover, so you think you must have had a good night.
Whilst I think that is, ahem, unlikely, the monopolisation of beer production by a shrinking cabal of vested interests is hammering beer quality here. And the evidence certainly suggests that unwanted chemicals - either in the product itself or introduced through badly maintained pipes in pubs - have a significant part to play. The article references 'congeners' as the culprits here, but it is noticeable that, eg, one can go on a significant bender in Germany and come up fresh as a daisy the next day, presumably thanks to that nation's enlightened beer purity laws.
Should almost certainly depend on the type of beer, the ingredients, and its manufacture.
Some types of beer (specifically some types of bottle fermented) tend to lead towards leaving unfermented sugars in the bottle. Sugar can cause hangovers on its own, so combined with alcohol and fusel oils, could contribute extra towards a hangover beyond just the general dehydration.
I had a friend of mine complaining once that Belgian-style beers tended to cause more powerful hangovers, and halfway through telling him it was all in his head, I was interrupted by a more experienced craft brewer who interjected that it may well not be.
47 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadExample: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/going-gluten-free-just-be...
Anyway, yes, that's what I've read as well.
Having said that, it is regrettable that so many Americans have decided to "cure" a host of physical and pshychological maladies with the "gluten-free" diet. Every moment you spend chasing a figment is a moment you don't spend fixing a real problem.
The symptoms of gluten intolerance are not serious enough for a doctor to be interested, it is also easy enough to try changing your diet for a week or two in order to see if it makes a difference.
A good doc would tell you to consider testing your way through FODMAPS since there have been a bunch of recent publications about them in major medical journals. As the GP poster points out, though, many people might take the idea of an elimination diet and figure they can eat all the gluten-free toaster waffles they want, which would continue to cause all the same problems if FODMAPS rather than gluten were the problem. Most starch-filled gluten free replacement foods are not good for your health anyway.
On the other hand, paleo is an actively harmful diet[1], so I want to encourage a scientific approach to nutrition. But I don't want to discourage people who are more interested in fads than science from being concerned about health, either. Argh.
The marketing is endlessly hilarious, though. My cat's food has a gluten-free label, no joke.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/09/10/3842158.ht...
Pet homeopathy also makes me laugh.
* People with IBS may find their symptoms improved by going on a low-FODMAP diet. That does take out bread, but it also might involve taking out onions because of their sugar content. Doesn't have anything to do with gluten per se.
* People with digestive problems may find that alcohol is an irritant. But then tequila should also be dropped or moderated; doesn't have to do with gluten.
* People who do an elimination diet and find that standard American bread upsets their stomach may also find that more fermented items, in moderation, aren't a problem. American bread will cause me embarrassing borborygmus and other digestive problems, but moderate consumption of beer or northern european sourdough rye is not bad. Someone once told me this was a difference in reaction to the glutenin vs gliadin proteins that make up gluten, but who knows. No one knows the science yet, but bread sure does give me non-celiac trouble!
For beer and wine, it's really useful and interesting to consider the effects of the processing and fermentation. Malted barley is used in most beers: you sprout and then roast the barley, releasing and cooking all kinds of sugars that you would not find in beef-barley soup. Barley has hordein instead of gliadin (rye has secalin, oats have avenin). Then the yeast crunches through those sugars to create alcohol and carbon dioxide and who knows what else. Fermentation often does have an effect on these proteins and can in fact have an effect on the amino acids that people with celiac are sensitive to, but we don't really know what's going on entirely. There are some Italians who can make gluten-free sourdough wheat bread in a lab just through getting the right yeasts going.
Beer, wine, pickles, yogurts, sausages, fermented shark... With all we are finding out about microbiomes inside our guts, there is going to be an explosion of commercialization of these traditional fermented foods. Start your own now so that you don't have to be reliant on corporate mega-strains in the future! Microbiome independence now! :)
Starting your own fermentation culture is dead simple. The problem is that your local strains of dust-borne microbes are not likely to be very tasty, or as useful as a more domesticated culture. So just like there are companies who make money on open-source software, there will be companies that make money on particular freely-available fermentation cultures. There already are such companies.[0] There are also informal networks of people who trade cultures through the mail. That's how I got my kefir culture.
[0] http://www.sourdo.com/our-sourdough-cultures-2/
There seems to be a term NCGS emerging - Non Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity. It's somewhat at the not-yet-proven-to-exist stage. For us though, we're in no doubt: given a regular gluten-containing morsel, my wife's face next day will show swelling and she'll be fatigued for days, plus be hit by abdominal cramps and various other things. Since she cut out gluten this has only ever happened "blind" btw, i.e. waking up with symptoms then figuring "ah that piece of XYZ must have had gluten" after the fact. She never eats gluten intentionally.
It's been interesting - she was all set to go onto thyroid medication for life, and had really quite severe symptoms, sometimes requiring hospitalisation. Cutting out gluten fixed them all within weeks.
We've seen it suggested that gluten proteins resemble thyroid molecules, hence the immune system's attack on gluten leading to those symptoms indicating thyroid dysfunction.
It makes you wonder: how many people with low level health complaints could do better by just trying a gluten free diet for a couple of weeks.
Or she's allergic to something else.
6 months of no-symptoms-barring-accidental-gluten is proving somewhat compelling, after 5 years of mounting health issues.
This is an article we came across that was quite a eureka moment, my wife was a classic Hashimoto's case hence our initial route with endochrinology specialists:
http://chriskresser.com/the-gluten-thyroid-connection/
Shots are also 25ml, so one shot is usually one unit.
125 ml of wine at 8% is one British unit.
So when people say "one glass of wine is one unit" they're often under-estimating how much they're drinking. Most wine will be sold in 175 ml servings (called a small glass) and at much stronger than 8% ABV. 12% is normal. 175 ml of 12% is just over 2 units. A more normal 250 ml serving would be 3 units.
Increased risk drinking is a significant cost to Public Health and the NHS.
Anyway, here in the antipodes, we refer to 'standard drinks', which is both better and worse than 'units'. Better, because it's more accessible to the layperson, and worse, because most normal volumes that one drinks is more than one 'standard drink' - a can of 'normal' beer is 1.4, and a glass of wine is 1.5 (certain servings of these equal 1 standard drink - it really depends on your drinking pattern)
http://www.alcohol.gov.au/internet/alcohol/publishing.nsf/co...
http://www.drinkaware.co.uk/
Statistics: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/ras51-re...
(It's also just a "unit".)
"beer before wine, fine
wine before beer, queer"
*Not scientifically proven
Sing it with me!
The main thrust of the talk was that nutritionally, beer and wine should be about equal, but everyone believes that wine is healthy and beer isn't - which is not scientifically accurate.
A more nuanced view: ethanol (alcohol) accounts for nearly all of the cardio-vascular benefits, and thus, beer and wine are equal. Wine contains more anti-oxidants and anti-aging properties, but you would need to get very (very) drunk to get those benefits (well past the Ballmer Peak). Beer, specifically craft beers, have great phytonutrients and macronutrients - and you can get those benefits from a single bottle.
In my opinion: advantage beer.
Some people are trying to make a lower-alcohol, salty beer that would be a real sports-recovery drink.
Anyone here have experience with old-country low-alcohol everyday beverages like sima, kotikalja, kvass, etc? Europe used to have a grand tradition of these low-alcohol "near-beers" or "malt beverages" that people would drink on the farm. They were hydrating and had a lot of the health benefits of above, but since the ethanol was low I'm not sure what effect they had on cardiovascular health.
Also, the Romans and others down south in Europe used to water their wine heavily -- they drank a larger volume through the day but kept ethanol ingestion moderate. I wonder what the health ramifications were.
I don't know if it's possible to get an equivalent here in the United States - I've tried bottled and other varieties, and they all tasted like crap-flavored soda. Went back to Moscow last summer, and got the good stuff - just like I remember.
When I was in high school my dad came back from a trip with a taste for traditional kefir, and brought with him some of the yeast 'grains' that are used to make it. He stuck with it for a few months, enjoying a couple of glasses a day, a jug continuously fermenting in the pantry.
After a while he began to realize that he was more tired than usual in the afternoons and felt like taking a nap almost every day. As it turns out, the fermented kefir contains a small amount of alcohol–seemingly just enough to make him a bit drowsy. Maybe not even enough to be noticeable if you're doing something physical, but only if you're focused and working at a desk.
Leipziger is the standard bearer, imo; most American versions don't add enough salt.
Whilst I think that is, ahem, unlikely, the monopolisation of beer production by a shrinking cabal of vested interests is hammering beer quality here. And the evidence certainly suggests that unwanted chemicals - either in the product itself or introduced through badly maintained pipes in pubs - have a significant part to play. The article references 'congeners' as the culprits here, but it is noticeable that, eg, one can go on a significant bender in Germany and come up fresh as a daisy the next day, presumably thanks to that nation's enlightened beer purity laws.
You can avoid the worst of that if you drink a lot of water at the end of the night.
Some types of beer (specifically some types of bottle fermented) tend to lead towards leaving unfermented sugars in the bottle. Sugar can cause hangovers on its own, so combined with alcohol and fusel oils, could contribute extra towards a hangover beyond just the general dehydration.
I had a friend of mine complaining once that Belgian-style beers tended to cause more powerful hangovers, and halfway through telling him it was all in his head, I was interrupted by a more experienced craft brewer who interjected that it may well not be.
The science of it is pretty interesting. http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/1080019/Chemistr...