A family member of mine has celiacs and we get this BS all the time. If her food is even prepared next to gluten, she gets sick. Often the waiter will say it is gluten free and then she begins to break out in a rash and has to go to the bathroom to throw it all up. This annoys her when we go out with friends who are "gluten free," ask all over the menu for gluten free options, don't like them, and then order beer and a burger instead.
Gluten free diet is a fad, much like many diets. I am grateful for the increased selection though, as I am not a celiac and the more gluten free food there is, the less often we need to buy two sets of groceries.
Yes. My 6 y/o son has celiac and this is by far the biggest issue now. The awareness of what gluten actually is is nice, but the default assumption is now that it's someone who's voluntarily dieting, which can create some bad situations. We always make it a point at restaurants to not simply inquire about GF, but emphasize that our son has celiac in the hopes that they think, "Oh, this isn't some lame fad dieter, I need to really ask the chef about this."
I've had a waiter bring my celiac wife the same salad back after obviously simply picking out the explicitly declined croutons (evident by the particularly hideous looking radicchio in that particular salad) instead of making a new salad as required. It's one of the few times I've exploded in public.
The anti-gluten free diet people drive me nuts! No one is forcing anyone to go gluten free.
I had dinner last night with friends, one of who has had really bad allergies for many years. Really bad. Starting a year ago, her doctor started removing things from her environment to see what might be causing the problem. You guessed it: when gluten was removed from her diet her allergies cleared up within a month.
My wife and I eat mostly gluten free because we believe that modern wheat (which is really a different food now) causes inflammation in some people. I spend zero time trying to get anyone else to go gluten free, because except for my family I don't much care what other people eat.
So, if you like wheat products, enjoy!
BTW, you have not seen the new documentary "Fed Up" about the food industry then please do so. This is the movie the food industry (super powerful lobby in the USA, probably even more clout than the defense industry) does not want to see, so you may have to exert extra effort to find it playing.
BTW, one of the things that I was the most pissed off about after watching the movie is the shameful targeted advertising to toddlers, young children, pre-teens, and teens. This targeted advertising at children is illegal in almost all of the developed world, except the USA.
The other big take away from the movie is to not eat sugar, which also means avoiding almost all processed foods. When food became low-fat, the food industrial complex started adding sugar, lots of it.
That said, if you like sugar and processed food, then enjoy :-)
"Processed food" is such an obnoxious phrase. The popular meaning is clear enough, but it ignores the fact that a modern grocer more or less exists because everything there goes through processing (trimming, washing, butchering, baking, blah blah blah).
I don't think that you understand what "processed food" means.
Trimming the fat from meat or washing fresh vegetables is not making "processed food." Seriously, watch the movie. One of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Now, for people who work in the food industry, I understand why people buying fresh food and cooking it themselves is disturbing to them (less profit for the food industry).
Another trick for buying food: use local farmer's markets. A lot of "fresh produce" sold in grocery store chains has been trucked many hundreds or thousands of miles. Buying local is better, in my opinion.
Read what I said. The popular meaning is clear enough.
My point was that implying that butchery is not processing food is asinine.
It's like the mantra that some water has "chemicals" in it. It's useful to say that some water has potentially harmful chemicals in it. It's mindless to say that it has chemicals in it.
It is a true statement, though. Water does have chemicals in it. So does your totally-organic no-sugar-added Chia Cherry Lime Naked smoothie (one of which I just drank, actually; they're quite yummy, albeit a bit overpriced). So does literally everything anyone has ever come in contact with. The whole world is chemicals.
This whole "chemical free" mantra should be nonsensical to anyone who has even cursory understanding of chemistry.
The "food industry"? You mean the same one that's slapping "gluten free" labels on anything and everything, while upping the price to take advantage of all these fad followers?
Yeah, I'm sure they are devastated. This is a food marketers dream.
The way to go gluten free is to make your own food, mainly fresh vegetables, fruit, and some high quality meat. Maybe it is just my tastes, but getting carbohydrates from cauliflower, carrots, yams, etc. is just tastier.
But yes, I agree with you that the food industrial complex has jumped all over the gluten free trend.
That's because "the food industry" is a ridiculously-nebulous term, kind of like "terrorism". It's vague to the point of being misleading, since it ends up including big and small players alike without further qualification (and at that point, you might as well be picking a more descriptive term).
> when gluten was removed from her diet her allergies cleared up within a month.
If I was your friend and noticed this change I would also go gluten-free immediately, but I think this sentence really highlights the central problem with the gluten-free fad: This is completely anecdotal evidence and I would be embarrassed to tell everyone "hey I'm gluten free and it works!" just because of a month of lower symptoms that could probably be explained by twenty other things that happened that month.
Call me back after she's spent two years randomizing month-to-month plus/minus gluten and tracking her daily symptoms in a log book, then her opinion about the benefits of being gluten free might be interesting to others.
Well, she was acting under her doctor's supervision :-)
You are correct about this being anecdotal. BTW, a friend of mine has developed a system for tracking health data and securely sharing it: https://personalexperiments.org You might like that.
My wife and I eat mostly gluten free because we believe that modern wheat (which is really a different food now) causes inflammation in some people. I spend zero time trying to get anyone else to go gluten free, because except for my family I don't much care what other people eat.
My family has done the same thing, mostly, and for the same reasons. We are not zealots about it, though, and we don't go crazy when eating out trying to avoid every last grain of flour that might be used to prepare foods.
As others have pointed out, the "fad" nature of GF means that many restaurants list "gluten free" options while not necessarily realizing that for celiacs, "gluten free" generally has to mean "not prepared anywhere near food that may contain gluten."
> I spend zero time trying to get anyone else to go gluten free, because except for my family I don't much care what other people eat.
You aren't the cause of the anti-gluten opinions then. The people who go around touting it in a miracle-drug like manner and constantly tell you that what you eat is wrong, that are the problem. And it is this vocal minority of the group that gets attention and makes it harder on the rest
The rise of gluten-free dieting as a fad has some interesting effects for people who actually have celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. On the one hand, increased awareness has made gluten-free food more available, on the other, the stigma against people eating gluten-free has risen. So people who have an actual medical reason not to eat gluten get lumped into a fad diet group.
I have a friend with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. In recent years several studies have found a potential connection between Hashimoto's and celiac disease (it is still being actively studied, and the link is not conclusive), and so some doctors are beginning to suggest that people with Hashimoto's remove gluten from their diet. My friend did, and sure enough saw some thyroid improvement afterward. She is now entirely gluten free (and has been for over a year), and is often irritated at people judging or questioning her gluten-free diet because they immediately assume it is nothing more than capitulation to an idiotic fad.
>I have a friend with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. In recent years several studies have found a potential connection between Hashimoto's and celiac disease (it is still being actively studied, and the link is not conclusive), and so some doctors are beginning to suggest that people with Hashimoto's remove gluten from their diet.
Do you have any more info on this? I have a friend with Hashimoto's and I'd be curious to find out if this is an approach widespread enough that she might have heard about it/to point her that way if not.
I know that Dr. Tom O'Bryan[0] has mentioned it, and the talk with Suzy Cohen in the recent Gluten Summit[1] he helped host discussed it. There may have been more mentions in the summit, but it's been a little while since I last listened to it.
>She is now entirely gluten free (and has been for over a year), and is often irritated at people judging or questioning her gluten-free diet because they immediately assume it is nothing more than capitulation to an idiotic fad.
She shouldn't be, because 99 times out of 100, it is nothing more than that. It's a fine fad, though, because it doesn't harm the sensitive dears who have taken it up, and it brings a massive array of options for people whose diets were extremely limited before.
If somebody can come up with an anti-peanut dust fad, I'd support that too.
The issue, though, is when restaurants, grocers, etc. mistake a legitimate medical condition with a trendy fad diet and not take one's gluten-free requirements seriously (e.g. not paying attention to sources of gluten cross-contamination, or not paying attention to which ingredients actually have gluten). They should be erring on the safe side and assuming that all requests for gluten-free are due to a medical condition requiring it, but when the number of gluten-free fad dieters vastly exceeds the number of people who actually need a gluten-free diet, the likelihood of safe-side erring decreases without some other reason (like stronger requirements for "gluten-free" foods, including both ingredient and preparation standards).
Came here to make a very similar comment: I have a friend with Celiac's disease. Wish the fad dieters would stop ruining things for people with actual adverse reactions. That, and people shouldn't be so quick to judge.
Tell your friend that there will always be (a) people with legitimate medical issues, (b) people who are fad dieters, and (c) people who judge. She cannot control any of those things, so she should not let those things irritate her. She's improving her life in one way, and letting it stress her in another. Tell her that I said it's okay for her to do whatever she wants for whatever reason she wants to, and it's no on else's business. Also, tell her I said to have a fantastic day!
> On the one hand, increased awareness has made gluten-free food more available, on the other, the stigma against people eating gluten-free has risen.
I have a friend who was diagnosed with celiac disease in high school and remember how hard it was for her to find more than a few things she could eat at the time (this was around 2006-2007). Now she has very little issue walking into a store or restaurant and ordering something that won't give her severe pain and require some vicodin for a bit. She's said that she is happy that gluten-free diets became a fad and would rather be lumped into this group of fad dieters, than have hard time surviving on the smaller selection of things that were available for her to eat previously. The only difference now is that she really has to make sure that the people taking her food orders at restaurants really know she is severely allergic (clean cooking surface, check the dressings/glazes/etc... to make sure they are GF, etc...). All in all, a fair trade off for those that didn't choose this diet.
I have hashimotos and celiac disease. So there's n=1. The worst part about having celiac disease is that I do not have any symptoms whatsoever but am forced to eat this way so that ten years down the road, maybe kinda sorta, I wont get cancer. Also having to explain it to people sucks. Eating meat rice and potatoes is fine by me, explaining why I don't want a beer sucks.
Gluten free hasn't really hit Europe in the same way so I was really amazed when I tried a gluten free pizza for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Eating half a pizza and not having a dough-baby afterwards was quite a revelation. Can't say I'll be going gluten free but I can see how it would be a nice option to have on the menu.
oh but it has. in spain and italy, for example, they test kids in school for gluten because so much of their regular diet contains gluten. this mandatory testing has been going on for many years. even the mcdonalds in those countries have gluten free options. we are not at that point yet, here in the us.
what we have going on that europe doesn't are the growing number of people doing it voluntarily/for fun.
In the months since I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I have almost eliminated restaurant meals from my lifestyle. Regardless of whether the wait staff are visibly hostile toward my request for gluten-free food, I usually become sick after the rare occasion when I do eat out. I know that I should eliminate restaurants entirely but it's difficult to wholly pull away from the shared experience of food with friends.
Far more frustrating is the experience of shopping in the grocery store. Though I've been told by a dozen people that I have it so good since there are so many gluten-free foods, easily 4 out of every 5 foods labeled as gluten-free also mention in fine print that they are manufactured in a facility that processes wheat, which is unsafe for celiac sufferers. Even the upcoming FDA standard of <20 ppm may be enough to cause problems in those with celiac disease.
It is a wonderful thing that strictly avoiding gluten has mostly ended the constant migraines of the past 15 years that inspired my username here. Though it's a surprise whenever I get glutened and the migraine returns with a vengeance.
"I have almost eliminated restaurant meals from my lifestyle"
My son has medically diagnosed celiac and we've had excellent luck at salad bars and grilled food (steak dinner hold the garlic bread) and also buffets.
The, uh, explosive effect out both ends, often simultaneously, is rather noticeable so we're pretty confident the food is "clean" and have had pretty good results.
Avoiding soy sauce seems harder than avoiding wheat. You know whats in soy sauce other than soy, right?
On one hand, the fad is cool because there's megatons of doubly fake food available at high expense, where its fake processed food to begin with, then fake - fake food because they took the wheat out. So its a fake version of fake food. The problem is lets be blunt here, it tastes pretty awful and its not good for you anyway. You wanna go GF my advice is eat a salad or a steak not an awful simulation of fake wonder bread that tastes like compressed sawdust mixed with potato peelings. I don't even have words to describe the fake GF brownie mix my wife made one time, warm road tar mixed with sand and dog droppings? You wanna eat something unhealthy for desert get a quart of organic fruit juice and a home ice cream maker and make a slushy, if you're going to eat something unhealthy at least let it taste good.
I've had this argument quite a few times with my son which when paraphrased is something like, dad why do we have to eat this icky fake lasagna with icky fake garlic bread and then have icky fake apple pie when I loved the grilled homemade honey mustard chicken breasts and a light salad from last night, dad? Dad's homemade stir fries are awesome how come we're stuck eating burgers on icky fake buns tonight? (you can make stir fries without soy sauce...)
Maybe once I've had more time post-diagnosis, I'll trust salad bars again, but shortly after my biopsy confirmed that I have celiac, I ate at a salad bar and was sick for days.
Far more insidious and scary are lentils, which should be fine, but are often processed with barley, or anything in the bulk section of the grocery store. My wallet certainly wishes that I could buy from bulk bins again.
Interestingly all the latest research has been pointing to another culprit (FODMAPs) in those claiming non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Some relevant links:
Non specific lower back pain used to be treated with bed rest and firmer mattresses.
Now we know those are both bad things. When you lie on your bed you want to be able to slide your hand, with a little bit of effort, under your spine at your lower back.
We also know that carefully taking pain relief and keeping the back moving helps, as does specific exercise to strengthen the muscles.
Plenty of white collar workers have non specific lower back pain and spending hundreds of dollars on chairs may help, but exercise will help more.
TL;DR - The baking industry is using techniques which cause bread to rise so fast that the yeast does not have time to process the gluten. Slower/traditional techniques & rise-times do. The apparent rise in "gluten sensitivity" is consequential to the change from reducing bread rise times from hours to minutes; those who were sensitive (not to the degree of Celiac sufferers) were not exposed to gluten so much in the past because rise times gave yeast a chance to eliminate the problem. Those who are now "gluten sensitive" should try the very slow bread recipe in the article (and everyone else too, it's delicious).
> Those who are now "gluten sensitive" should try the very slow bread recipe in the article (and everyone else too, it's delicious).
This is a bad idea. If the gluten sensitive individual, which you obviously don't believe in, is having an autoimmune reaction the immune system will kick in. IIRC, it can kick in for 5ng of active material, roughly the same amount of active agent in a vaccine, and will remain active for months.
Gluten sensitive != celiac disease. He's referring to the people who just feel blarghy after eating gluten; some of them posted elsewhere on this article, talking about reduced energy and stomach upset. You probably already know the extent to which gluten affects you, if risking those symptoms is worth it to eat bread again it might be worth trying this.
Huh? I'm relaying a way for the gluten sensitive to remove gluten using classic methods to avoid the autoimmune reaction, observing that modern rapid-rise baking leaves an overwhelming amount of gluten intact. Hardly a statement of "I don't believe in it". The information may be imperfect as I'm presenting it; I'm presenting suggestions & insights, not peer-reviewed research of encyclopedic depth.
Its not the only thing that changed over time.
The variety of wheat used nowadays have more gluten than the ones that were used historically.
It doesn't mean it "caused" this rise in celiac disease cases or sensitive people.
A hypothesis I saw on HN a while ago about the rise in gluten intolerance(+) was that it was actually something else: some other change in the protein composition of wheat (due to GM or hybridization) or its chemical composition after processing is what people are allergic to.
(+)Or at least people reporting health benefits after cutting gluten, and therefore wheat, out of their diet.
There's not enough science to support either side in this debate. My guess is that a small percentage of people actually have a gluten intolerance. I also think that modern wheat can cause inflammation and gut problems. Mostly I think that reducing carbohydrates benefits anyone that isn't very active (which includes most Americans). The unfortunate truth is that the food industry is now producing more gluten-free alternatives (breads, beers, etc.), and these alternatives create a bigger insulin response than the originals.
My roommate called gluten free food "liberal bullshit" when he saw me eating (corn) tortilla chips marked as gluten free. He said his bag of chips tastes better, even though his was gluten free too!
There is a convergence of fad diets - gluten free and no carb. Going gluten free is also very compatible with a paleo diet. You can do two or three fad diets at the same time! Was there this much backlash to other fad diets like south beach or Atkins? I really can't recall...
Looking back at what I eat all week, outside of beer and the odd slice of pizza here and there. My diet is basically gluten free and I'm not even trying. Many "gluten free" bashers might be surprised to learn the same thing!
Personally? Yes, fad diets have always been this annoying. I admittedly have some... interesting extended family who decides that each fad diet/medical practice is EXACTLY what applies to their children at that moment, and with a doctor in my part of the family, we get to hear _all_ about it. (before long I'm half expecting her to call up ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that they all have dysentery after a bad evening of taco bell.)
Should "the fandom ruin it for everyone"? No, probably not. But they certainly make it hard not not want to bang your head against something really hard. I don't care about liberal bullshit, conservative bullshit, I just care about bullshit. And if your best reason for being sure that you have something is "my symptoms match what the man on fox news told me about so I self diagnosed"... When I figure out how to type out the teeth grinding noise that sentence just made me create, I'll update this.
All I know is, my acne went away when I stopped eating wheat.
Correlation != causation and all that but I aint going back because clear skin > bread. (I do miss pizza once in a while)
I find this suspicion suspicious. I know that some people are melodramatic about it, but why can't people just have their food without gluten if they don't want it? Nobody ever backlashed against the anti-MSG thing, and that was arguably way dumber.
On the other hand, I have heard that this has resulted in lowering of standards for handling gluten, and people who are severely allergic are being exposed to small amounts, while people without celiac don't notice those small amounts. So, that's bad.
Yes, these lowering standards cause by people not really allergic is a problem.
I have the same problem with my son having multiple allergies (real severe ones) is that the employees think when you say you're allergic that your just being fussy and that just removing something from the top of the dish is OK.
But in any case, it hard to trust restaurants at all on these matters.
Don't lump all the "me too" gluten-free'ers together. Yes, some are glomming on to a fad, but just because you are not a cileac dosen't mean you're silly for going gluten-free (GF).
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) -- a common functional gastrointestinal disorder (FGID) affecting one in seven -- has been shown to be exacerbated by FODMAPs[1][2] in wheat. It's easy to avoid FODMAPs by going GF and thus suffer less from IBS.
A lot of IBS suffers are just not explaining that they are avoiding FODMAPs by going GF.
Much of the "increased energy levels" that people report from excluding gluten probably has to do with the fact that gluten elimination diets often end up having a lower glycemic index. Most gluten sources are high in carbohydrates, specifically processed carbohydrates. Eating lots of processed carbohydrates spikes your blood sugar giving you short-term energy, but makes you tired once the sugar is removed from your blood stream.
Gluten free diets often end up being higher in raw foods simply out of convenience, since most of the gluten free food items you can buy at the store are things like nuts, vegetables and the like. While gluten free dieting may be a fad that is annoying to your friends, the end result is that the majority of food people avoid is stuff they probably shouldn't eat that much of in the first place.
I think the effect you describe is the primary reason why gluten-free is so effective for most (but definitely not all) people. Replacing a cookie with a piece of fruit is a good idea no matter what diet you're on.
The gluten free fad has made it so easy to find gluten-free cookies et al that the effect you describe much less significant.
It's just a matter of time, the nice thing about fads is that they disappear even faster than they appear in the first place. Ten years ago 'atkins' vanished overnight and it looks like 'gluten free' has already peaked [1].
Also, while were on the topic of diet gripes - mine is vegetarianism. I've been a vegetarian my entire life and faced all the same sort of nonsense as it has risen in popularity. Thankfully, I can pretty easily smell meats and wouldn't face anything worst than indigestion for accidentally eating some.
What is more strange is actually having other food allergies. I have bad Oral Allergy Syndrome, and eating various things like cantaloupe, bananas, avocado, grapes (and wine), among other things, make me sick, some worse than others. Included with that is a mild latex allergy.
So people, especially health food nuts,tend to thing I'm a weird, unhealthy bitch when I tell them I can't eat banana or fruit salad. I sucked it up recently and ate a few bananas and two days in a row had to keep myself from vomiting. Same with wine: I've had a single glass of wine before and vomited later that night. Avocado doesn't give me the indigestion but it does make my mouth and throat very itchy, but I still tend to eat it.
1) Popular science & media don't understand how the gut works enough to actually give beneficial advice en-masse.
2) The 'Fad' is the food industry selling even more processed junk under the moniker of 'Gluten Free' in the same way that 'Low Fat' and 'Sugar Free' foods are often worse overall nutritionally than those they replace.
As usual, the elephant in the room is how there's no real downside to a sugar-free diet, but the food industry don't want that as food isn't as addictive.
No spectrum discussion? At all? Just stereotypical hacker news pure binary 1 and 0 thinking? That's so sad.
There are people who get sick if you share gluten contaminated dishes or practically even just sniff the stuff. Toward the other end of the spectrum my medically diagnosed son doesn't explode out both ends unless he eats at least a visible amount like about a bite, kids will be kids and a stolen classmates cookie will make him puke if he eats the whole thing maybe half the time, maybe a little more, but sometimes especially when he was little he would shock us, swap sandwiches with some kid and only have diarrhea the next day no puking. Anyway, further along I feel seriously uncomfortably "blah" from too much bread or beer or pizza or baked stuff in general although I'm not diagnosed and being mostly paleo I rarely eat that junk anyway, and then there's the unaffected people.
The backlash against people who don't like feeling "blah" but can eat an oreo without vomiting is pretty annoying. So I'll eat GF with my son, in familial solidarity if nothing else, but if I see a really tasty piece of cake and my son doesn't mind if I eat it in front of him ... it would be cruel if he wanted to eat it too, but if he is full and doesn't care, he's about as libertarian as his dad, so no problemo, I'll eat the cake. So here I am, everyone dogpile on VLM because I'm (sorta) GF but I'm "that guy" who will sometimes eat a slice of cake or drink A beer, despite being GF. If that gives some 3rd party, whom I do not care about, a sad panda face, well, I can't say as I feel responsible for their feelings or really care at all beyond "too bad for them" or "hope you enjoy your pout and crying fit as much as I'm enjoying my annual slice of garlic bread".
Its like the backlash against people who eat fast food with a diet coke. Hey, if I don't want to drink any more corn syrup than necessary, so I don't, that's just too bad for you if you don't like what I'm doing. Have a nice pout while the adults eat, that's about all I can say. Try not to dehydrate yourself too severely by all the crying.
I'm about the same WRT my diet also being about 95% or so paleo. So I almost never eat cookies but I did eat a few at that 4th of July party. If what I ate rabidly infuriates you, I'm sad to report I don't give a F, hope you enjoy your rage because I don't care about your rage. I've got a little troll in me and next time I eat a cookie will probably be at a Christmas party, and I'll be sure to eat it right in front of you, I admit I'm not perfect and it is kind of funny to watch. I suspect this trolling is a large part of gluten-sorta-tolerant people eating gluten food in front of arrogant people just to make their brains explode in rage.
Some business or life advice that goes far beyond diet, is if you decide you will let other people take control of you, don't be surprised if they pull your chain a bit for fun as a semi-polite reminder that's a pretty stupid way to go thru life.
Forget about words like "fad" and "backlash". Data. That's all that matters. I am not up on the research, but I would at least like to see articles like this talk to people who are, instead of talking to random people who have no fucking clue what they're talking about :)
(Edit: and by "data", I mean things like, does reducing/eliminating gluten, or more likely, all sugar/carbs, from a diet, actually reduce productivity-sapping drowsiness? does it actually reduce weight by not stimulating insulin, etc.)
My house would welcome a new fad for soy-free foods. But nobody gives a crap about soy being in everything. EVERYTHING. Of course, we often get handed the gluten-free menu when we ask about soy-free options. And I suspect that is because of the gluten-free fad.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadIt means that people become careless - when they encounter someone who actually has celiac disease, they are less likely to treat it seriously.
(Case in point: the guy at the grocer's who repeatedly insisted to a celiac friend of mine that durum semolina pasta was gluten-free.)
Gluten free diet is a fad, much like many diets. I am grateful for the increased selection though, as I am not a celiac and the more gluten free food there is, the less often we need to buy two sets of groceries.
I had dinner last night with friends, one of who has had really bad allergies for many years. Really bad. Starting a year ago, her doctor started removing things from her environment to see what might be causing the problem. You guessed it: when gluten was removed from her diet her allergies cleared up within a month.
My wife and I eat mostly gluten free because we believe that modern wheat (which is really a different food now) causes inflammation in some people. I spend zero time trying to get anyone else to go gluten free, because except for my family I don't much care what other people eat.
So, if you like wheat products, enjoy!
BTW, you have not seen the new documentary "Fed Up" about the food industry then please do so. This is the movie the food industry (super powerful lobby in the USA, probably even more clout than the defense industry) does not want to see, so you may have to exert extra effort to find it playing.
http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/see-the-film
The film the food industry doesn’t want you to see branding seems rather successful.
BTW, one of the things that I was the most pissed off about after watching the movie is the shameful targeted advertising to toddlers, young children, pre-teens, and teens. This targeted advertising at children is illegal in almost all of the developed world, except the USA.
The other big take away from the movie is to not eat sugar, which also means avoiding almost all processed foods. When food became low-fat, the food industrial complex started adding sugar, lots of it.
That said, if you like sugar and processed food, then enjoy :-)
Trimming the fat from meat or washing fresh vegetables is not making "processed food." Seriously, watch the movie. One of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Now, for people who work in the food industry, I understand why people buying fresh food and cooking it themselves is disturbing to them (less profit for the food industry).
Another trick for buying food: use local farmer's markets. A lot of "fresh produce" sold in grocery store chains has been trucked many hundreds or thousands of miles. Buying local is better, in my opinion.
My point was that implying that butchery is not processing food is asinine.
It's like the mantra that some water has "chemicals" in it. It's useful to say that some water has potentially harmful chemicals in it. It's mindless to say that it has chemicals in it.
This whole "chemical free" mantra should be nonsensical to anyone who has even cursory understanding of chemistry.
What did you understand that to mean?
(I hope the above isn't overly blunt, I'm genuinely curious, motivated by a sense that I have many opportunities to improve my communication)
The "food industry"? You mean the same one that's slapping "gluten free" labels on anything and everything, while upping the price to take advantage of all these fad followers?
Yeah, I'm sure they are devastated. This is a food marketers dream.
But yes, I agree with you that the food industrial complex has jumped all over the gluten free trend.
the food industry sells you all of those things...
If I was your friend and noticed this change I would also go gluten-free immediately, but I think this sentence really highlights the central problem with the gluten-free fad: This is completely anecdotal evidence and I would be embarrassed to tell everyone "hey I'm gluten free and it works!" just because of a month of lower symptoms that could probably be explained by twenty other things that happened that month.
Call me back after she's spent two years randomizing month-to-month plus/minus gluten and tracking her daily symptoms in a log book, then her opinion about the benefits of being gluten free might be interesting to others.
You are correct about this being anecdotal. BTW, a friend of mine has developed a system for tracking health data and securely sharing it: https://personalexperiments.org You might like that.
My family has done the same thing, mostly, and for the same reasons. We are not zealots about it, though, and we don't go crazy when eating out trying to avoid every last grain of flour that might be used to prepare foods.
As others have pointed out, the "fad" nature of GF means that many restaurants list "gluten free" options while not necessarily realizing that for celiacs, "gluten free" generally has to mean "not prepared anywhere near food that may contain gluten."
You aren't the cause of the anti-gluten opinions then. The people who go around touting it in a miracle-drug like manner and constantly tell you that what you eat is wrong, that are the problem. And it is this vocal minority of the group that gets attention and makes it harder on the rest
I have a friend with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. In recent years several studies have found a potential connection between Hashimoto's and celiac disease (it is still being actively studied, and the link is not conclusive), and so some doctors are beginning to suggest that people with Hashimoto's remove gluten from their diet. My friend did, and sure enough saw some thyroid improvement afterward. She is now entirely gluten free (and has been for over a year), and is often irritated at people judging or questioning her gluten-free diet because they immediately assume it is nothing more than capitulation to an idiotic fad.
http://guardianlv.com/2014/05/gluten-sensitivity-does-not-ex...
The above link is linked to in the article.
Do you have any more info on this? I have a friend with Hashimoto's and I'd be curious to find out if this is an approach widespread enough that she might have heard about it/to point her that way if not.
[0]: http://thedr.com/ [1]: http://theglutensummit.com/
She shouldn't be, because 99 times out of 100, it is nothing more than that. It's a fine fad, though, because it doesn't harm the sensitive dears who have taken it up, and it brings a massive array of options for people whose diets were extremely limited before.
If somebody can come up with an anti-peanut dust fad, I'd support that too.
I have a friend who was diagnosed with celiac disease in high school and remember how hard it was for her to find more than a few things she could eat at the time (this was around 2006-2007). Now she has very little issue walking into a store or restaurant and ordering something that won't give her severe pain and require some vicodin for a bit. She's said that she is happy that gluten-free diets became a fad and would rather be lumped into this group of fad dieters, than have hard time surviving on the smaller selection of things that were available for her to eat previously. The only difference now is that she really has to make sure that the people taking her food orders at restaurants really know she is severely allergic (clean cooking surface, check the dressings/glazes/etc... to make sure they are GF, etc...). All in all, a fair trade off for those that didn't choose this diet.
what we have going on that europe doesn't are the growing number of people doing it voluntarily/for fun.
Far more frustrating is the experience of shopping in the grocery store. Though I've been told by a dozen people that I have it so good since there are so many gluten-free foods, easily 4 out of every 5 foods labeled as gluten-free also mention in fine print that they are manufactured in a facility that processes wheat, which is unsafe for celiac sufferers. Even the upcoming FDA standard of <20 ppm may be enough to cause problems in those with celiac disease.
It is a wonderful thing that strictly avoiding gluten has mostly ended the constant migraines of the past 15 years that inspired my username here. Though it's a surprise whenever I get glutened and the migraine returns with a vengeance.
My son has medically diagnosed celiac and we've had excellent luck at salad bars and grilled food (steak dinner hold the garlic bread) and also buffets.
The, uh, explosive effect out both ends, often simultaneously, is rather noticeable so we're pretty confident the food is "clean" and have had pretty good results.
Avoiding soy sauce seems harder than avoiding wheat. You know whats in soy sauce other than soy, right?
On one hand, the fad is cool because there's megatons of doubly fake food available at high expense, where its fake processed food to begin with, then fake - fake food because they took the wheat out. So its a fake version of fake food. The problem is lets be blunt here, it tastes pretty awful and its not good for you anyway. You wanna go GF my advice is eat a salad or a steak not an awful simulation of fake wonder bread that tastes like compressed sawdust mixed with potato peelings. I don't even have words to describe the fake GF brownie mix my wife made one time, warm road tar mixed with sand and dog droppings? You wanna eat something unhealthy for desert get a quart of organic fruit juice and a home ice cream maker and make a slushy, if you're going to eat something unhealthy at least let it taste good.
I've had this argument quite a few times with my son which when paraphrased is something like, dad why do we have to eat this icky fake lasagna with icky fake garlic bread and then have icky fake apple pie when I loved the grilled homemade honey mustard chicken breasts and a light salad from last night, dad? Dad's homemade stir fries are awesome how come we're stuck eating burgers on icky fake buns tonight? (you can make stir fries without soy sauce...)
Maybe once I've had more time post-diagnosis, I'll trust salad bars again, but shortly after my biopsy confirmed that I have celiac, I ate at a salad bar and was sick for days.
Far more insidious and scary are lentils, which should be fine, but are often processed with barley, or anything in the bulk section of the grocery store. My wallet certainly wishes that I could buy from bulk bins again.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23648697
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/05/gluten_sensitiv...
Yeah, because we hadn't discovered H Pylori as a causative agent and developed treatments.
> "Then, it was back problems"
Because manual labor in blue collar work was a lot more common back then.
Now we know those are both bad things. When you lie on your bed you want to be able to slide your hand, with a little bit of effort, under your spine at your lower back.
We also know that carefully taking pain relief and keeping the back moving helps, as does specific exercise to strengthen the muscles.
Plenty of white collar workers have non specific lower back pain and spending hundreds of dollars on chairs may help, but exercise will help more.
TL;DR - The baking industry is using techniques which cause bread to rise so fast that the yeast does not have time to process the gluten. Slower/traditional techniques & rise-times do. The apparent rise in "gluten sensitivity" is consequential to the change from reducing bread rise times from hours to minutes; those who were sensitive (not to the degree of Celiac sufferers) were not exposed to gluten so much in the past because rise times gave yeast a chance to eliminate the problem. Those who are now "gluten sensitive" should try the very slow bread recipe in the article (and everyone else too, it's delicious).
This is a bad idea. If the gluten sensitive individual, which you obviously don't believe in, is having an autoimmune reaction the immune system will kick in. IIRC, it can kick in for 5ng of active material, roughly the same amount of active agent in a vaccine, and will remain active for months.
Huh? I'm relaying a way for the gluten sensitive to remove gluten using classic methods to avoid the autoimmune reaction, observing that modern rapid-rise baking leaves an overwhelming amount of gluten intact. Hardly a statement of "I don't believe in it". The information may be imperfect as I'm presenting it; I'm presenting suggestions & insights, not peer-reviewed research of encyclopedic depth.
(+)Or at least people reporting health benefits after cutting gluten, and therefore wheat, out of their diet.
Edit: meanwhile someone has posted it to this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009766
There is a convergence of fad diets - gluten free and no carb. Going gluten free is also very compatible with a paleo diet. You can do two or three fad diets at the same time! Was there this much backlash to other fad diets like south beach or Atkins? I really can't recall...
Looking back at what I eat all week, outside of beer and the odd slice of pizza here and there. My diet is basically gluten free and I'm not even trying. Many "gluten free" bashers might be surprised to learn the same thing!
Should "the fandom ruin it for everyone"? No, probably not. But they certainly make it hard not not want to bang your head against something really hard. I don't care about liberal bullshit, conservative bullshit, I just care about bullshit. And if your best reason for being sure that you have something is "my symptoms match what the man on fox news told me about so I self diagnosed"... When I figure out how to type out the teeth grinding noise that sentence just made me create, I'll update this.
On the other hand, I have heard that this has resulted in lowering of standards for handling gluten, and people who are severely allergic are being exposed to small amounts, while people without celiac don't notice those small amounts. So, that's bad.
I have the same problem with my son having multiple allergies (real severe ones) is that the employees think when you say you're allergic that your just being fussy and that just removing something from the top of the dish is OK.
But in any case, it hard to trust restaurants at all on these matters.
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) -- a common functional gastrointestinal disorder (FGID) affecting one in seven -- has been shown to be exacerbated by FODMAPs[1][2] in wheat. It's easy to avoid FODMAPs by going GF and thus suffer less from IBS.
A lot of IBS suffers are just not explaining that they are avoiding FODMAPs by going GF.
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[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP
[2]: http://www.med.monash.edu/cecs/gastro/fodmap/
Gluten free diets often end up being higher in raw foods simply out of convenience, since most of the gluten free food items you can buy at the store are things like nuts, vegetables and the like. While gluten free dieting may be a fad that is annoying to your friends, the end result is that the majority of food people avoid is stuff they probably shouldn't eat that much of in the first place.
The gluten free fad has made it so easy to find gluten-free cookies et al that the effect you describe much less significant.
It's just a matter of time, the nice thing about fads is that they disappear even faster than they appear in the first place. Ten years ago 'atkins' vanished overnight and it looks like 'gluten free' has already peaked [1].
Also, while were on the topic of diet gripes - mine is vegetarianism. I've been a vegetarian my entire life and faced all the same sort of nonsense as it has risen in popularity. Thankfully, I can pretty easily smell meats and wouldn't face anything worst than indigestion for accidentally eating some.
1: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q='gluten%20free'%2C%20...
So people, especially health food nuts,tend to thing I'm a weird, unhealthy bitch when I tell them I can't eat banana or fruit salad. I sucked it up recently and ate a few bananas and two days in a row had to keep myself from vomiting. Same with wine: I've had a single glass of wine before and vomited later that night. Avocado doesn't give me the indigestion but it does make my mouth and throat very itchy, but I still tend to eat it.
The two main problems are:
1) Popular science & media don't understand how the gut works enough to actually give beneficial advice en-masse.
2) The 'Fad' is the food industry selling even more processed junk under the moniker of 'Gluten Free' in the same way that 'Low Fat' and 'Sugar Free' foods are often worse overall nutritionally than those they replace.
As usual, the elephant in the room is how there's no real downside to a sugar-free diet, but the food industry don't want that as food isn't as addictive.
There are people who get sick if you share gluten contaminated dishes or practically even just sniff the stuff. Toward the other end of the spectrum my medically diagnosed son doesn't explode out both ends unless he eats at least a visible amount like about a bite, kids will be kids and a stolen classmates cookie will make him puke if he eats the whole thing maybe half the time, maybe a little more, but sometimes especially when he was little he would shock us, swap sandwiches with some kid and only have diarrhea the next day no puking. Anyway, further along I feel seriously uncomfortably "blah" from too much bread or beer or pizza or baked stuff in general although I'm not diagnosed and being mostly paleo I rarely eat that junk anyway, and then there's the unaffected people.
The backlash against people who don't like feeling "blah" but can eat an oreo without vomiting is pretty annoying. So I'll eat GF with my son, in familial solidarity if nothing else, but if I see a really tasty piece of cake and my son doesn't mind if I eat it in front of him ... it would be cruel if he wanted to eat it too, but if he is full and doesn't care, he's about as libertarian as his dad, so no problemo, I'll eat the cake. So here I am, everyone dogpile on VLM because I'm (sorta) GF but I'm "that guy" who will sometimes eat a slice of cake or drink A beer, despite being GF. If that gives some 3rd party, whom I do not care about, a sad panda face, well, I can't say as I feel responsible for their feelings or really care at all beyond "too bad for them" or "hope you enjoy your pout and crying fit as much as I'm enjoying my annual slice of garlic bread".
Its like the backlash against people who eat fast food with a diet coke. Hey, if I don't want to drink any more corn syrup than necessary, so I don't, that's just too bad for you if you don't like what I'm doing. Have a nice pout while the adults eat, that's about all I can say. Try not to dehydrate yourself too severely by all the crying.
I'm about the same WRT my diet also being about 95% or so paleo. So I almost never eat cookies but I did eat a few at that 4th of July party. If what I ate rabidly infuriates you, I'm sad to report I don't give a F, hope you enjoy your rage because I don't care about your rage. I've got a little troll in me and next time I eat a cookie will probably be at a Christmas party, and I'll be sure to eat it right in front of you, I admit I'm not perfect and it is kind of funny to watch. I suspect this trolling is a large part of gluten-sorta-tolerant people eating gluten food in front of arrogant people just to make their brains explode in rage.
Some business or life advice that goes far beyond diet, is if you decide you will let other people take control of you, don't be surprised if they pull your chain a bit for fun as a semi-polite reminder that's a pretty stupid way to go thru life.
(Edit: and by "data", I mean things like, does reducing/eliminating gluten, or more likely, all sugar/carbs, from a diet, actually reduce productivity-sapping drowsiness? does it actually reduce weight by not stimulating insulin, etc.)