Gluten discussion

garylouisville: what are your current symptoms?

Gary - the "how" of eliminating gluten is pretty obvious. If you would like to explore this a little further, give us an idea of your daily meals and we can brainstorm along some solutions for you.

To up the "cool" factor, you can tell everyone you're going Paleo. ;-)

No, not give us a list of your meals so we can help you remove things that bother you. Give us a list of meals so we can help you devise a GF menu.

For example, before I went GF I had the same breakfast every day for...10 years? Kellogg's Raisin Bran and OJ. I love Raisin Bran. Clearly that was not going to be GF. I thought for many days about what would be a good breakfast for me. It had to be easy. It had to be filling and nutritious. Even when I was ready to start my GF diet I was not sure but I had a few options (GF oatmeal, eggs, GF waffles). I really didn't want all those GF cereals (they are mostly targeted at kids and are super sweet). The eggs and oatmeal worked well for the first couple of months and then I felt ready to experiment. Now I have GF granola & OJ almost every day, or GF cornflakes with a banana. It's working fine.

i_love_coffee, FYI, coffee can be cross reactive with gluten. I react to it just like I would gluten.

Sucks. because I truly do love coffee.

garylouisville said...
You may have misunderstood my thought process when I said I don't know how to go gluten free or don't even know how to eat more gluten. I have a fairly good idea and am intelligent enough to figure it out if I really wanted to. I don't. Just about everything has gluten in it and I refuse to eliminate hundreds of food choices for what easily could be no reason. Many have gone GF and found it to be of no benefit. Like I said, I went lactose free for 3 full weeks (doctor wanted 6) before figuring out that I didn't even have a lactose problem. To me that was ridiculous and I don't intend on going on any kind of restrictive diet of any kind ever again without any solid evidence that it would actually CURE me, since I am close to remission anyway.

I'm kind of confused. You posted your current issues and referred to them as NOT being symptoms, when you are going to the bathroom 4-6 times a day, with urgency and some gas. Do you attribute the above as IBS related symptoms? Or not symptoms at all?

garylouisville said...
If eating more gluten determined that I indeed did have a gluten problem then I would have to consider actually going through with it. I think this is just one of those Mars/Venus things or Liberal/Conservative things where one side doesn't ever comprehend the thought processes of the other.

I understand your theory, but I myself am not sure if it would have the type of effect you're thinking of. Same goes for any allergen food. It seems that most people with food allergies can only have a taste of a food to make themselves sick.

I would say that by consuming loads of gluten, you would probably have an insane amount of gas depending on how much fermentation is going on there, as well as having an insulin spike -- because I believe grains have a +gylcemic index over sugar...

Bottom line is, you'll never know unless you stop consuming gluten for a while. Was troubling at first, but I mean most of us find that getting used to it is kind of like losing a ring finger. It's just as important as the others, no doubt, but its possible to work around it.

Tonight I just made almond-flour-blueberry muffins. They tasted like complete sh!t. So what? Tomorrow i'll go to the local bakery and get my own muffin.

Post Edited (stereofidelic89) : 2/1/2013 7:42:32 PM (GMT-7)

Stereo: I do call those UC symptoms but those are the only symptoms I have. I have formed stools, no blood, no pains, no diarrhea, no weight loss, no fevers, no bloating, no hospitalizations, no nothing except frequency and urgency. As I just stated in my last post I am beginning to wonder if my doctor was right when he thinks my current symptoms are actually due to IBS.

Even though I eat a well rounded diet there are things which, if eaten in excess, give me troubles. Things such as fruits, vegetables, and dairy. Most meat doesn't bother me. Sometimes processed meat does but sometimes not. I don't eat restaurant food much, don't eat most frozen stuff except vegetables, and don't eat most canned stuff either. I do eat healthy cereals of all kinds on occasion, most breads, and quite a few baked goods. I do eat rice from time to time, usually brown rice, but white rice to. As I mentioned, the only things that really give me problems if I eat too much are the fruits, vegetables (especially uncooked) and dairy, even though I am not lactose intolerant. If I were to eliminate gluten and eat more fruits, vegetables, and dairy I'm pretty sure I would get worse.

P.S. I do have a histamine intolerance and most fruits and several veggies and some dairy are high in histamines.

gary -

i spent a few minutes trying to think of a nice way to say this, but alas, i failed ................ so ............

you're a lazy (your assessment) dope (my assessment) -

pull your head out of your grits and man up -

and that goes for all you other wimpy anti-gluten-free egg heads

peace baby !

@Gary - So what specific foods do you avoid or limit due to your histamine intolerance? What symptoms do you get if you eat them? My dad has been a strict wheat (not gluten) free diet for an itching problem, which has plagued him off and on for decades. (It hasn't worked, but then again, I'm not surprised, since if wheat was the culprit surely it would cause itching all the time?)

Re your original idea of eating extra gluten for a few days to provoke a reaction. My opinion is that wouldn't work. As far as I know, gluten is not dose-dependent unless you have a confirmed gluten sensitivity: that is, a little or a lot of it won't make any difference. If you go out of your way to stuff yourself with gluten products, you are more likely to feel crap from the extra fat, sugar, etc. rather than the gluten itself, particularly if you eat more than you would normally. Personally, for me, gluten seems to make no difference whatsoever: I had two croissants for lunch today and feel no worse after them than if I'd had two bowls of gluten-free cereal (which I do sometimes have).

For those who would say I can't possibly tell after one meal, well, you are probably right, but I did go on a gluten-diet for 6 weeks a few years ago and that also made no difference to my symptoms. I categorically refuse to believe that 6 months would have made a difference where 6 weeks didn't. It's also worth mentioning that the main reason I went on a gluten-free diet in the first place was because my GP was convinced I almost certainly had coeliac disease on the basis of a blood test result! (When I later on said this to the IBD nurse at the hospital I was then at, she checked my records and said I'd already been screed for CD and tested negative. The moral of this particular little story is that false positives are evidently possible - that, or my GP doesn't know how to interpret blood tests.)

To finish off this meandering ramble that nobody will probably read: Having done a gluten-free diet, I would say it's restrictive but bearable. I have no doubt I would follow a gluten-free diet if it made my Crohn's go into remission, for example. Where I draw the line is at anything more restrictive than that, eg a diet which cuts out multiple food groups, such as gluten, dairy, and the majority of carbs. Even if such a diet were guaranteed to put my Crohn's into remission, the honest truth is I'm not sure I could do it, not for the rest of my life. I wonder every day at how people are able to follow diets like the SCD, I really do.

garylouisville said...
kazbern has finally convinced me! After thinking about it I realized that if I were to cut out gluten, and have to limit my eating of fruits, vegetables, and dairy, due to my histamine intolerance, there would be nothing left for me to eat. I would literally go from being able to eat thousands of food items (including small to moderate amounts of fruit, veggies, and dairy) down to just a handful of things, maybe two handfuls - exactly what I don't want to do. Since I am doing quite well now, close to remission and a lot better than most, I refuse to go gluten free just to join a cult. I also don't agree that if a person who did not have a gluten problem were to eat a bunch of gluten that it would make them feel like "crap". That sounds like the cult propaganda talking. To throw a little religion into the discussion I find it hard to believe that God put wheat on the earth but didn't want us to eat it. That makes no sense at all.

Huh?? Cult? LOL gary. I'm doing this for my health are you kidding me? I didn't do this to join anything, life is already sour enough with IBD issues.

There is a lot of research out there on gluten being problematic to the gut, and this may be because

1. Grains, like wheat flours and gluten are no longer soaked before cooking, like they once were for better digestion.
2. More gluten content is being used and consumed than ever in our Western diet. To make breads and doughs more fluffy and light and durable. My mom's explains that people didn't eat out heavily 3-4 times a week some people do now, where every meal is crafted with a bun on top or bread crumbs, croutons, and wheat-based dressings on the side.

I think you're confusing some people that do GF with the 'riches' of the world choosing to make it a fad, like Gwenneth Paltrow, Paris Hilton, etc... although even then, I can't be sure whether or not they actually do it for their health.

I respect your decision. You are close to remission, and have a restricted diet as is, so that's great. At least you have the option to consider GF in the future.

NicecupofTea: Since I discovered my histamine intolerance problem I have been taking the digestive enzyme DAO at meals, which breaks down dietary histamines. Since doing that I have been able to eat anything I want again without any problems but I do limit high histamine foods, mainly by not eating them in excess since there is no real formula or dosage guidlines as to how much DAO you need to take compared to how much histamine you ingest, mainly because histamine content in foods is not calculated and put on labels. Pretty much all fruits are high in histamines. The more ripe they are the more histamine there is. Drinking fruit juices has to be watched carefully. Tomato products, yeasts, and aged cheeses are also high in histamine. Those are the main things I eat containing high amounts of histamine. There are other things. I can eat all of them while on DAO but the more I eat the more DAO I would have to take. If I "overdose" on histamine I get bloody diarrhea and sever gas shortly afterward and it can last several hours until there is no longer that overdose in my system. If I take the correct amount of DAO (which has to be guessed) I do not get these symptoms at all. You may very well be correct that adding additional gluten wouldn't determine if I had a gluten problem or not.

Kazbern: I actually disagree with you that I get most of my calories from a wheat based diet. I eat a well rounded diet that includes "healthy" cereals (on occasion) and eat breads and baked goods in moderation. They are far from being a staple. Some days I don't even eat one of these things. Since I do have the histamine intolerance problem eliminating gluten would cause me to eat a higher percentage of the things I know can give me a problem. Even if I don't eat one eyota more of those things just the fact of eliminating gluten would cause the percentage of histamine related foods ingested to go up. And, since I would have to eat more of something when cutting out gluten, that would cause an even greater percentage of my diet to be histamine associated. Once I realized that it made sense to me to not even consider going gluten free.

Bananagirl: I didn't mean to offend anyone who does go gluten free. As you pointed out yourself, there are those that do make it like a cult. I think anyone who does gluten free who does it far beyond the reasons of UC and preaches that a gluten free diet would be of benefit to everyone is in the cult.

Gary have you looked into ketotofen for the histamine issue? It's an old drug which stabilizes the mast cells to control the histamine release/response? Might be worth looking into?

That's good. I just thought if you don't want to play around with dosages/ take it throughout the day it might be another option. It's pretty benign.