subject: Celiac Disease Diet: Is Avoiding Gluten Enough? [print this page] Celiac Disease Diet: Is Avoiding Gluten Enough?
If you or someone you know has Celiac disease, or gluten intolerance, then avoiding any foods or supplements that contain gluten (present in wheat, rye, barley, spelt, triticale and kamut) is the first and most critical requirement for healing and long term health prospects.
But is avoiding gluten enough?
If a person follows the standard recommendations of a celiac disease diet, as described in both mainstream and alternative health, they may continue to have problems. This won't be due to gluten if they strictly avoid it and anything that can be cross contaminated with it. It will come from other components of the diet that are not healing or healthful.
For example, when replacing gluten foods with some of the newer gluten free foods, the problem is clear. Some of the replacement foods are good as "transition" foods so people don't feel deprived. That will help people to stick to being gluten free. But many of those foods should not be staples in one's diet.
For example, instead of traditional wheat pasta, a gluten free pasta made of corn or rice can be used. Corn or rice pasta can be fairly benign for many people, particuarly compared to wheat pasta, but it's quite low in the nutrients, which is of concern for anyone who is healing. Over time, but ideally as quickly as possible, it's important for a person with Celiac disease or gluten intolerance to get most of their calories from tasty and also very nutrient rich foods, so they'll heal and improve health overall.
Nutrient rich tasty foods are useful for everyone. But they can be of particular importance to anyone with digestive or absorption disorders, as found in Celiac disease and gluten intolerance. Often more nutrients are needed by someone who has been ill because they are deficient and need to rebuild. Many excellent foods that will help people do just that have been wrongfully made into villains thanks to poor science in the last century, and conflicted interests.
Perhaps the most damaging change is the switch from healthy natural fats like butter and non-hydrogenated coconut oil, both very healing, nutrient rich and easy to digest, to processed vegetable oils like soy and canola.
Why is it that health problems that are supposedly from animal fats like butter and tropical plant fats like coconut oil increased during the time when their intake went down, not up, and the intake of soy and canola went up in their place? It's time to question what we've been led to believe about which fats are healthy.
Whether one needs to follow a Celiac disease diet or not, some foods are both delicious and healthy, and should be standard fare again, just as they were before human health declined thanks to the reduction, rather than inclusion, of them in the daily diet.
