Gluten Intolerance- Part 2

In the previous post, we identified gluten and some of the problems it may cause. Today, we'll talk about the next steps you should take.

Get tested for gluten intolerance.
Even if you don't have symptoms... get tested.
Even if you are abundantly healthy, exercise daily and eat a perfect diet... get tested.

Why? Gluten has a way of wreaking havoc on many systems of the body. When it affects your brain, you won't actually feel anything. Then, one day, you will wake up and feel like your thoughts just don't flow as smoothly as they should. You can chalk it up to "getting older" or realize that years of assault on your brain have finally led to a few symptoms.

Before you were diagnosed with hypertension, you probably felt fine. Before your cholesterol levels came back high, you probably felt fine. 10 years before your family members were diagnosed with Alzheimer disease, they probably felt fine. But the science tells us that damage was being done to their brains long before the diagnosis. The point is; bad things happening to your body may not always feel bad. Even so... they can be very, very bad.

I truly wish that everyone who was gluten intolerant felt terrible after ingesting gluten. That way, all those people would stop any kind of insidious assault on their body long before the damage is done. Unfortunately, you may actually feel fine while your gut and body act as a battlefield.

How many people have gluten intolerance?
Honestly, it's tough to tell. Our understanding of gluten intolerance has come a long way in the past ten years. We're still a long way from understanding exactly how it causes such a variety of symptoms. Nonetheless, here are the numbers we do know.

1 in 133 people have celiac disease; a very aggressive form of gluten intolerance that leads to significant destruction of the gut.

That may seem like a pretty small number but there's more. Approximately 30-40% of the US population carry a gene that predisposes you to developing gluten intolerance! Of course it doesn't guarantee that you will actually react poorly to gluten but keep in mind; genes may express themselves later in life or under periods of physiological stress. That does mean that 30-40% of Americans have at least one major risk factor for developing gluten intolerance.

The 1 in 133 is a statistic for outright celiac disease. But given the recent evidence that gluten may be involved in many other disorders, we're likely to have more reliable numbers for gluten intolerance in the future. Some experts state that approximately 30% of the population are actually gluten intolerant. I'm not willing to hang my hat on those numbers just yet; but it is enough to make me take a serious hard look at gluten in my patient population.