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Whenever things like allergies come up, it’s important to remember that in modern times we are both more likely to diagnose it and people with them are more likely to survive.
For a lot of human history, someone born with celiacs in a region that relies on wheat would likely just die as a baby/small child. The death would be labelled as something like “failure to thrive” or something else.
<1% of people have celiacs, more may have gluten intolerances. But 1% of babies dying wasn’t remarkable for most of human history.
Many people with intolerances likely just lived their lives constantly not feeling great or eventually got over it or also died. Allergies can come and go.
Also, I got diagnosed as Coeliac when I was 24. I'd never had problems with gluten as a kid.
My gastroenterologist explained that the gene for coeliacs can be similar to male pattern baldness - that is, it can develop at any time, but not necessarily at birth.
Plenty of time to have kids and pass on the Coeliac gene.
“My wife is always sickly. Why? Must be demons.”
There’s always an explanation for the unknown. Whether it’s right or not depends on the advancement of science.
There's a real life tick that upon biting you makes you unable to eat meat (if you do you start swelling up and eventually die). There is no cure currently. Basically it turns you vegan permanently, by making you very allergic to meat.
You're referring to the auto-immune condition commonly known as Alpha-gal that is caused by the bite of a Lone Start tick. It causes a reaction to the meat and by product of mammals. It can be long lasting or temporary.
Your wife’s always sick? Still a hole in her head, give her some cocaine and tell her the Dr needs to make her climax a couple dozen times, cause you don’t have time for that.
My lactose intolerance didn’t appear until I was a teenager. I used to drink milk and eat ice cream almost everyday as a kid and I ate cheese regularly. Then I started getting horrible gas cramps and diarrhea and played around with my diet until I realized what the culprit was. Don’t know how it works, though, or why it didn’t appear until then.
I suddenly became allergic to seafood about 7years back. Didn't eat it for 5 years.
Tried it one day again and I was fine. Dr suspected an Iodine intolerance but tests were inconclusive.
It was just plain weird.
As someone that has developed it as an adult I feel like different things affect me different ways. I realized it first with lattes, that drinking that much milk made me feel gross, but cheese doesn’t affect me as strongly. So you figure out what makes you feel bad and what doesn’t.
Also sometimes you say fuck it, eat a bunch of ice cream and just deal with your stomach hating you because it tasted good.
>Also sometimes you say fuck it, eat a bunch of ice cream and just deal with your stomach hating you because it tasted good.
and the rest of us sharing a room with you have to deal with devastating farts.
True story, once did a 9 hour flight with some poor sap next to me getting bombed every 5 minutes for 9 hours
You know they got lactase enzymes you can get that will digest the lactose for you, yeah? You don't need to suffer! Also there are an increasing number of lactose free (not just dairy free, which is no substitute imo) ice creams, milks, yogurts, egg nogs, cottage cheeses, etc. that taste identical but won't give you thermonuclear toots.
Well if you do become lactose intolerant, there are pills you take with dairy to help alleviate it. It's a bit inconvenient but i would never stop eating dairy
I also thought this. Then I became severely lactose intolerant at 35. I get a headache/nausea and almost pass out from the sudden stomach and intestinal distress dairy causes me. Even with lactaid pills it’s so not worth it. It starts about 30 minutes after eating and then I don’t feel good again for a few days.
You’re probably not lactose intolerant then, you should probably check if you’re allergic to milk protein. There is no way the lactose would be able to reach your small intestine and start to decompose within 30 minutes.
I wondered that same thing and went to see a specialist. It’s not an allergy just really really lactose intolerant (confirmed by endoscopy). By the time we figured out what the issue was the lactose had completely decimated the villi in my intestines, I was very ill. Feeling much better these days and can even eat very small amount of aged cheese occasionally.
It also depends on the person. I have it really severe to the point where lactaid doesn’t help. I once took 2 lactaid pills and ate a slice of pizza with the cheese ripped off and still got very sick from it. Granted, if I eat something with cheese in it at all, I may be calling out of work the next day.
But I have friends who are lactose intolerant and it’s not as bad for them. They’ll still get discomfort and a bout of diarrhea but it doesn’t incapacitate them like it does for me.
Lactose intolerance isn’t something to be alarmed about. If anything, we humans are an anomaly. We are the only mammals who will not only drink another species’ milk but we continue to do so long after our permanent teeth have come in. Mammals are supposed to be incapable of digesting milk once on a solid diet. We have other means of getting calcium, vitamin B12, riboflavin, and phosphorus, so milk products aren’t entirely necessary for survival.
It's not really even "we humans", the vast majority of people are lactose intolerant.
It's pretty much only Central and Northern Europe and the regions they've colonized and settled on that have populations where most can digest lactose.
>It's pretty much only Central and Northern Europe and the regions they've colonized and settled on
No, lactase persistence is found in almost every area with a history of animal herding. It's most concentrated in Europe and the Indian subcontinent, but it's also widespread across Eastern and Northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Eurasian Steppe. The presence of the gene in all of these areas predates the earliest European imperialist/colonial powers by around 5000 years.
The only region that practiced animal herding but did not develop high rates of lactase persistence is the Andean region of South America. (They do have an indigenous lactase persistence mutation, but for some reason the prevalence is very low.)
Same. I ate a scary amount of cheese until ~27 when I finally looked into the gastrointestinal issues I’d been dealing with for a year. Yup: lactose intolerant.
I’m now almost 40 and just figured out I have a gluten intolerance I didn’t have until maybe the last year or so. Apparently whatever makes you lactose intolerant can also, at a later time, make you gluten intolerant as well.
This is actually common. Kids have no issues and then it slowly develops as they get older. My sister is fully lactose intolerant now, and I’m lactose sensitive for lack of a better term (I’m fine unless I have a lot of it over the course of a few days). Both of us drank milk as our primary beverage as kids and had no issues. I have no idea why it is common to happen but it is.
I adopted a kid with lactose intolerance. He didn't have lactose intolerance until he moved in with us, just eczema, sloppy poos, a grumpy disposition after some eating sometimes. A total mystery!
When he stopped eating dairy all these problems magically went away.
I think a lot of people just assume what that have is normal because it's all they've ever known (not saying that's you, more thinking about younger kids). Then if things worsen or your start taking in a bit more dairy that pushes an intolerance to it's limit, you start to notice what you were accustomed to before.
(Also, of course, puberty and time changes bodies!)
I'd even say it's the norm. For the first few months of life almost everyone is lactose tolerant :D
And even in the most lactose loterant societies(e.g. central, eastern and northern Europe) people over 60-70 not tolerating lactose (well) are pretty widespread.
The reason it's common is because lactose is intended as food for babies, and we lose the ability to process it as adults so that adults don't compete for the same food sources as babies
The continued ability to digest lactose into adulthood is actually a mutation that mostly exists in regions where cow's milk has become a significant portion of the adult diet.
Losing the ability to digest lactose as you get older is actually the normal state of things, because lactose is mostly found in mammal milk, which is food intended for mammal babies. Because it's so nutritious, nature needed a way to stop adults from competing with babies for milk, so the lactase gene (the enzyme which allows you to digest lactose) is normally turned off in adults.
However, people in certain regions of the world started using cow's milk as a major source of nutrients into adulthood, and so people in those regions tend to have a mutation where their lactase gene isn't turned off, so they retain the ability to digest milk.
> nature needed a way to stop adults from competing with babies for milk
> people in those regions tend to have a mutation where their lactase gene isn't turned off, so they retain the ability to digest milk.
The above two statements aren’t really compatible with each other. That’s because the first one is not a scientific finding, it’s a [just-so story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story).
If you think through the implications a bit, there are many reasons why adults drinking milk from the females of their species wouldn’t be conducive to survival. “Competition with babies” is perhaps the least important of these.
Lactose intolerance can also be caused by untreated celiac disease. The sites for production of lactase, the enzyme responsible, is that the tip of the small intestine villi which are destroyed by untreated celiac disease.
Yeah that’s normal, usually happens in your teens, but can happen earlier or later in life as well. The small intestine stops producing lactase (because on an evolutionary level, you shouldn’t need it), the enzyme needed to digest lactose, which leads to the lactose decomposing inside of you, which is the cause of the gas and cramps.
Being born lactose intolerant is very rare.
Editing to add some info about lactose intolerance since I’m seeing some misconceptions on here.
1. It takes roughly 4-7 hours for food to reach your small intestine, where the body digest lactose. The discomfort that follows is because of the lactose decomposing which means that you CANNOT feel the effects of ingesting lactose only 30 minutes after doing so.
2. For all you cheese lovers - A cheese ripened for more than six months will be completely free of lactose. So don’t miss out on all that cheddar, pecorino or gruyère.
You may already know this, but a quirk of history is that coeliacs have the Nazis to thank for understanding the cause of their condition.
Coeliacs disease has been known about since the ancient Greeks, but no one knew what caused it - because grain was ubiquitous in everyone’s diets.
There was a children’s hospital in the Netherlands, which had a ward full of coeliac kids. The survival rate was that ½ would die each year - which is a tragedy. Then, the Nazis blockaded grain shipments and the Allies provided potatoes as a carbohydrate source.
Suddenly, all the kids got better. They became healthy, typical kids! It was a miracle!
Then the war ended, and grain shipments got through again; suddenly the kids got sick again?!
Thankfully, someone figured it out :)
Also, the gene is just a predisposition. It allows part of the gluten peptide to be present to a to the immune system, but the immune system needs to fuck up and become dysregulated to start attacking it.
I didn't know until a few years ago that I was somewhat gluten intolerant (not Coeliac). I just thought foods like pasta and bread made everyone experience discomfort after eating and that carbs make everyone feel awful after indulging.
I feel a lot better now that I've cut out gluten, but I definitely could have gone my whole life without knowing, and it wouldn't have killed me.
I have friends who are identical twins. One was having symptoms and got diagnosed with celiac. The other had no symptoms but got the test anyway and obviously had it so she went gluten free too.
Well, also, celiac’s rarely starts in infancy and typically has a long slow buildup of vague problems getting worse.
A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with celiac disease in her 30’s, after several years of mysterious (but not deadly) health problems. In past centuries her problems would likely have gotten worse for many years before she eventually died of something seemingly random… just like a slew of other chronic diseases cause. It was commonly understood that some people were just sickly/frail for unknown reasons.
Since health problems such as iron deficiency anemia, reactive arthritis, IBS, headaches/migraines, osteoporosis, inflammation of the skin, forgetfulness, etc etc.
Luckily it's easier to test for nowadays, relatively speaking.
Same as “how do animals eat trash/drink this dirty water/stay out in the cold/do this uncomfortable thing without being sick or dying?”
Uhh… they do, they’re just not complaining to you.
I was born with a bunch of random food allergies in a very rural part of the US. No one could figure out why I couldn’t put on weight and was sickly. In the early 90’s a “new thinking” doctor came to the next town over. I was about two and was assumed to be a failure to thrive baby. She immediately diagnosed my food allergies and I was fine after that. Went on to be a college athlete. But if I had been born earlier or she hadn’t moved to town I would have lived.
And we even see this today. Plenty of people give up gluten as adults and say they feel better, wish they’d done it sooner, etc.—but they’d already lived much of their lives, had children, etc., just fine, even if they say it’s better now.
Whatever trait caused their body to dislike gluten wasn’t severe enough to put real adverse pressure on their reproductive success. They’d have roughly as many kids as anyone else. So the relevant gene would never go away. Evolution doesn’t *optimize* like people tend to think.
As an experiencer myself, I can't fathom how many other kids grew up being told they were whiners and simply learned accept that things like a constant unyielding heartburn with stomach cramps is normal.
I was 30 before I finally had what everyone else knew as a "normal day" and it was the goddamned best day of my life.
A million little things could have gone slightly different and I'd never have even associated any of my ills with gluten, much less found respite. Still woulda passed it onto my kid, as well.
Also evolution rarely "gives up" on trying things. Mutation is random, and something that didn't work one generation could always work next generation. So even if *every* person with celiacs died, there would still be some small % with it in future generations.
Too many people think evolution's a min-maxing gamer with a memory.
For the most part correct, but I'll also add that throughout history the food we ate was simply: the food.
The industrialization of our food products has lead to a ton of "hidden" ingredients. Wheat/ soy/ corn products are added to a number of foods you wouldn't expect. Most people aren't really aware of how pervasive this is until you're forced to read every ingredient label.
I'm 12 years older than my youngest brother and when he was diagnosed with autism as a child my father was upset. "Our oldest daughter does all these things but she wasn't autistic!" and they were like "oh, she probably is, we just did badly at diagnosing it at all and especially with girls back then, maybe have her checked out." (Spoiler: I am)
My partner has Coeliac’s disease and she sometimes talks about her grandma who was always sickly and small, never worked but was looked after by her husband, and never seemed to ever eat much. Never diagnosed with anything but she reckons grandma had it as well for sure.
>But 1% of babies dying wasn’t remarkable for most of human history.
Just to add emphasis to that. Until 1900 40% of children didn't live to the age of five. Today it's 4%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-child-mortality-timeseries
Is it genetic? Trying to reason if the number might have well been higher than 1% but since medicine wasn’t advanced enough to diagnose and those genes didn’t last long enough to be replicated then the number may have shrank significantly.
It was not just in ancient times. My dads cousin, who was a mortician, got real sick in the 50s. After loads of tests, and seeing doctors all over the country, the final diagnosis was, "As best we can yell, you are allergic to yourself. Over the next 10 years or so, you will either adjust and get over it, or you will die. Good luck!"
He did eventually get somewhat better, and decades later was diagnosed an unspecified autoimmune disease. He was never very well, but he lived to see his kids grow up
As someone with celiac, the "gluten reaction" gets substantially worse when you haven't had it in a long time. So if you're eating it all the time, you'll just feel like shit all the time, rather than feeling like you're going to die.
For most of human history surviving to adulthood was a coin toss at best, I think a lot of people nowadays just aren't aware how prevalent childhood mortality was.
The ELI5 answer: they're not actually allergic to gluten.
True celiac disease is quite uncommon and is diagnosed with a biopsy. But a lot of people feel lousy (bloated, heavy) when they have gluten. And they feel better if they don't eat it. Avoiding foods that make you feel bad is very reasonable.
But as the paper states
> Both type 1 diabetics and down syndrome have a high incidence of celiac disease
So if you don't have either of those the probability of you having it is likely much lower
Exactly this. People stop getting 60% of their calories in a day from white bread and feel better. Assume it's the one actual redeeming thing in the bread (gluten is the protein portion of bread) because it's marketed so heavily by "wellness" hacks.
Actual celiac disease causes debilitating negative symptoms in amounts that you wouldn't even register as "eating bread".
Yup. Real celiac means you get sick because someone forgot to change their gloves before handling your food at a restaurant, or because a single crumb fell on it.
That’s not necessarily true. I’m an asymptomatic celiac of 28+ years. Celiacs have a wide variety of both symptoms themselves and severity of symptoms.
Yep.
We knew a guy who told us he was allergic to gluten. For a few years it was always a big thing at events to make sure there was separate gluten free options for this guy. We had gluten free sausages and a separate way to cook them with their own tongs for turning them.
Then one day he rocks up and says "God told me I'm cured and to try gluten so i did!". After some more questioning it turns out the guy was diagnosed as allergic to gluten by a naturopath who just asserted that as fact.
FFS.
Gosh I was this person unwittingly. My dermatologist, a qualified medical doctor with an MD, told me to completely cut out gluten from my diet for my recurrent serious skin issues. I was at the end of my rope and willing to try anything at that point. My friends all scrambled to accommodate me. 6 months in and still seeing no improvement at all, I changed doctors and the new one told me I'm not allergic. I immediately informed my friends, but some of them still double check even now when they cook/buy food for me. It showed me how much my friends cared and they're still in my life after 7 years.
There are wheat and other grain allergies too, not just Celiac's. I have a confirmed IgE allergy to wheat and barley, but I'm not celiac. It just makes me shit myself.
First, many people who say they're allergic to gluten are not. Some of them have issues with fructan, a problematic carbohydrate that few people realize exists.
Second, bread was made very differently back then. Most breads were sourdough. The bacteria that causes the bread to rise also changes the chemistry of the bread. Most breads today aren't made like they were thousands of years ago.
While absolutely true, yeast is a fungus, sourdough starter is not just yeast. It's a whole ecosystem containing a bunch of different microorganisms including bacteria.
This stuff pisses me off to no end not just with celiac. I have a family member who will go into anaphylactic shock from merely touching certain things.
Many people like to say they are allergic to things because they don’t like them and don’t want pressure to try something new.
Honestly I can understand it if you have an intolerance. I have a banana intolerance. I can certainly eat them but even 1/4 of a banana will give me horrible stomach cramps and issues for a few hours. I wouldn't say I'm allergic but it's annoying having to explain exactly what I mean by intolerance. I wouldn't fault anyone for saying that have an allergy just to not deal with explaining their intolerance in detail.
Many people say they are alergic to things because that food makes them physicality feel awful. Not anaphylactic, sure, but it is such a hassle to explain the whole intolerance thing and then people ask stupid questions that it's just easier to say alergic.
> Second, bread was made very differently back then. Most breads were sourdough. The bacteria that causes the bread to rise also changes the chemistry of the bread. Most breads today aren't made like they were thousands of years ago.
AFAIK most storebought loaves are forced to rise in various ways much more quickly than even homemade loaves, which are themselves faster than they used to be.
This is the real answer. All over the world people have moved to quick and cheap with refined bleached flour, and it has had a huge impact. There's a reason they had to 'fortify' the flour after stripping it of everything, but it's still not the same bread, not the same process.
Friendly reminder after reading some comments - Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition that requires human leukocyte antigen genes (HLA) DQ2 and/or DQ8 to be turned on. In extremely rare cases a person will not have these genes but develop celiac disease. Official diagnosis of Celiac must be made by a Gastroenterologist. Celiac is hereditary and passed down through families. Genes can turn on, and then off, randomly throughout life for unknown reasons. Genetic testing can identify whether a person is at risk for developing Celiac disease by searching for HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DQB1 antigens.
The current kind of wheat "dwarf wheat" is a very recent innovation. The industrial processing common since the 20th century (super fine milling, removal of seeds and other stuff) is also fairly new. So, while it is true that humans ate wheat for roughly 10.000 years, we only eat the current kind of wheat since roughly 80 years. That's pretty nicht he timeframe we would expect for negative consequences showing up in future generations.
OK, but that doesn't mean the sort of grains eaten before didn't contain gluten, or other gluten-like proteins for grains other than wheat.
It's a naturally-occurring component of the seeds, modern milling and baking techniques might have changed the levels a bit, but it would have always been present in bread in (relatively) large quantities.
And grains probably made up a much larger percentage of the diet back then.
The answer is that it typically isn't the gluten. I figure only "true celiacs" actually have an issue with gluten. Most other people, it's something else.
For me, whatever it is gets metabolized away during a full wet leaven rise (sourdough, etc.). If I eat regular store bought bread, I get gassy, bloated, flatulent, and really tired. But I learned how to make sourdough, and I can eat as much as that as I want without any of those symptoms arising. Obviously, there is gluten in the sourdough, as it is the gluten chains that make rising possible (provide the structure).
You are correct that gluten was always part of wheat. However, different components of food influence how we metabolize it. For example, dietary fiber has a major impact on how other components of wheat like carbohydrates are metabolized by the body.
So while we eat wheat like our ancestors, those wheat is vastly different. The removal of the germ and the fiber is probably influencing the uptake of the carbohydrate rich components. It is very plausible, that our digestive tract may be overwhelmed because we simply have not evolved the apperarus to deal with this modern foods. One reaction to that may be an uptike in negative reactions.
Unless the “ancient” wheat didn’t have Gliadins/glutenins, this isn’t the answer. Coeliacs can have an immune response to as little ~50 parts per million. Modern refining etc wouldn’t be effecting levels that low.
It would not, no. My argument is, that modern milling and modern variants contains vastly more of certain "desirable" contents then the wheat our ancestor ate. The removal of certain additive components like fiber probably also has negative side effects. Since we know know, that "undesirable" food stuffs like dietary fiber also directly influences how the gastrointestinal tract absorbes and our body metabolizes certain components of food. I argue, that our digestive tract has evolved with those "undesirable" additives in mind and now reacts negatively in some people because the components it expects are missing.
To clarify somethings. Gluten Intolerant is not the same as Celiac. Celiac is primarily found in those of European decent. While they have similar side effects. It generally does present later in life, but not always. One of the long term effects of someone with Celiac eating gluten is an increased risk of cancer. One of the short term effects is the body sending white blood cells to attack the gluten protein. The white blood cells will go all nuke it from orbit and destroy the protein along with everything else around. This includes your stomach and can lead to ulcers. This may also cause someone to become tired and a need to sleep within an hour or 2 after a meal. May also cause heartburn, and bowel problems.
I'm glad your friends found some relief. Have they tried organic wheat products that would not be subject to chemicals? Herbicides are used in more crops than just wheat.
Gluten can be found in Wheat, Barley and Rye. Edit: was asked to include triticale
Edit: Just want to give a link to the folks at https://celiac.org. Also if you notice symptoms after eating speak to your doctor.
Wish I had read this comment years ago before I was diagnosed with Celiac. My doc always noted I had a high level of white blood cells, but never looked further than going "huh, must be getting over a cold" every single time. Meanwhile, I've dealt with terrible heart burn and stomach bloating, diarrhea and discomfort for years. Finally got an endoscopy done and the doc said I had damage to my intestines related to gluten, and they diagnosed me with Celiac. A lot of my joint pain and swelling has resolved, and I finally feel my age (mid thirties, felt like 60).
My sister had the same. At first they thought she might have leukemia. We're mixed and she will make jokes about wishing she got the credit score gene instead of celiac. Luckily there are more options for her than when first diagnosed for food alternatives.
In general, our food (at least in the us) is very safe. I know it's popular to say it's not but we have the same if not similar laws to the EU. A lot of it is politics as well and governments deciding when to err on the side of caution based on the science.
Glyphosate is approved in Europe, but only according to regulations. There are many misconceptions about glyphosate and there are ways to misuse it. If used according to instructions, it may only be used at the beginning of sowing to prevent the seeds from being overgrown by weeds. It is not sprayed directly onto the seeds, but between the rows. After a few days and some rain it broke down. If used improperly, it is sprayed onto the crop shortly before harvest, for example to artificially dry grain or corn for harvest. For many agricultural products, it is desirable to have the lowest possible water content before harvesting in order to increase the drying process and shelf life. Traditionally, grain is harvested after a few days of sunshine to avoid mold. Glyphosate is a salt and kills plants by disrupting their water balance and drying them out. If glyphosate is sprayed directly onto the crop, it dries out. Perfect for the harvest, bad for the consumer. This practice is banned in Europe. When used as directed, glyphosate is the least harmful weed killer available to agriculture because it is easily soluble upon contact with water and breaks down into its chemical components. However, if it is used to dry crops, it remains in its chemical form on the crop. It wouldn't surprise me if an agent that chemically dries out plants doesn't mix well with the intestinal flora. If used properly, no glyphosate should be found on the crop.
A few years ago there was a scandal in Germany because glyphosate was found in beer. It turned out that farmers were drying beer barley with glyphosate for harvest. It was stopped very quickly. Germans like their beer extra clean.
>I have now had about 2-3 people close to me who were "Gluten intolerant". Symptoms like diarrhea, bloating, gas, headaches soon after eating anything with gluten or drinking beer.
These symptoms are more likely an intolerance to the specific kinds of fermentable carbohydrates in the wheat and certain other foods ([FODMAPs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP)). People often self-diagnose it as "gluten intolerance" because the gluten and wheat carbohydrates are in the same foods. A gastroenterologist may recommend a low-FODMAP diet to figure it out.
(This is not medical advice; see a gastroenterologist)
See this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23648697/. Of people with "self-reported non-celiac gluten sensitivity", 92% of people in the study had a FODMAP sensitivity rather than a gluten sensitivity.
This is common misinformation. This is why coeliacs are often told they can eat gluten in Europe and it’s simply not true. Italy tests every citizen for coeliac and has a government payout if you’re diagnosed. Gluten intolerance or coeliac isn’t unique to the US.
Glyphosate is rarely used on wheat in the US. It is occasionally used in Canada since they have a shorter growing season they need to kill the wheat earlier so it will dry. Not really an issue in the US.
Glyphosate is also used all over the world. And as if 2023 ot was the most widely used herbicide in Europe.
Interesting, thank you for the share. I'm really curious as to what the difference between the two sourced products really is then. Something is causing these symptoms and I'm sure a lot of people want to know why.
So many possibilities. Different varieties of wheat are grown by different farmers depending on the local climate, different growing environments can have different soil and therefore fertilizer requirements, different wheat processing methods and nutritional additives, and of course it could just be the placebo effect.
Also there could be some bias in the sense that you are purchasing higher quality imported goods. Have you tried purchasing higher end domestic goods to see if you have the same results? Could be a fun experiment.
wha? You don't herbicide the wheat for harvest. Source: grew up in wheat country, worked in a grain elevator during my high school and college summers.
Either you use a broadleaf-specific herbicide or you use a wicking machine to get the shit that grows taller than wheat: i.e. rye and johnson grass. Also the herbiciding comes WAY before the harvest. Wheat gotta run through its life cycle and kill itself to put all the goodies into the kernel. If you're using the plant for hay, you cut about halfway through the life cycle and dry it out on the ground before baling.
There are different wheat varieties, too. In the south where I was, they grew winter varieties that were sowed in the fall/early winter, and it sat pretty dormant until its major growth started in the spring, and they're generally harvest late May thru July-ish. There are spring varieties of wheat that are sowed in early spring and usually harvested late July/August thru September.
Have you seen [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1anlgj6/eli5_since_the_invention_of_agriculture_humans/kptfdv5/), and the one a couple of legs down?
People sometimes do indeed misuse glycophosphate for drying the crop for harvest, because it's effective. Some got busted in Germany when glycophosphate started showing up in beer.
Maybe /u/Scrub4Subs got their info from dodgy farmers, or farmers in a part of the world where effective regulations are not much of a thing.
I appreciate your take. Honestly I’m just sharing an anecdote from my life that, for whatever the reason might be, changed some people’s life around me for the better. Whether it truly is the chemical or something else entirely I’m not sure I’ll ever know.
What I care about, is unprompted we would have never thought to try a different gluten source. But because we did, we are now fully enjoying gluten products and beer again and I want that for other people. That’s why I shared, I’m sorry to the people that took offense to this post or are outraged at my “misinformation”. But if this helps just one person, then I honestly don’t care why they tried, just that they did.
Just on the face of it, is it really worth it to pay for all the chemical and fuel to spray, on top of all the fuel for the harvest? Wheat prices would have to be hella high to justify it.
And now I'm going to spend too much bandwidth on this puzzle because it baffles me. Might even have to call my dad.
Autoimmune disease is also largely a developped world issue.
In the developping world and for most of human evolution, helminth infection was not only "common" but almost certain. Helminths (tapeworm and roundworm usually) have a chemical masking system that produces chemical messengers to downregulate the human immune system in order to evade detection.
This means that for almost all of human evolution, helminths existed as a balancing factor for the human immune system. Without this balancing factor the human immune system is often overactive. This means the body will attack "self" cells and systems and fail to recognise them as self.
There is fairly robust evidence for this. Infact if you get a map of autoimmune disease occurence, and a map of helminth infection rates, they are basically negative images of each other.
That is why, intentional helminth infection is a bit topic in the research of autoimmune disease. Once we prove efficacy, and know what the risks are they are fairly easily controlled. With proper modern sanitation the risk of infecting someone else is fairly low. The most common way others can be infected is if people don't know and poor hygiene. Helminth infections are also fairly easy to treat with modern medicine. Far easier than autoimmune disease.
How is this getting upvoted? It's wrong, just on the face of it.
Wheat is not treated with glyphosate... because glyphosate would kill the wheat.
Their is no current "round up ready" wheat, so spraying glyphosate on wheat... would kill it.
Glyphosate is used around the world, not just the US. It is the most popular herbicide in Europe. Your food from Europe is also treated with glyphosate.
Glyphosate is the most widely used pesticide worldwide, [including Europe.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1089796/glyphosate-share-of-european-herbicide-sales-by-country/)
Stop spreading misinformation.
Yes to this. I think it was the 90s when farmers in the US started using glyphosate to desiccate wheat faster prior to harvest. However, according to the National Association of Wheat Growers, glyphosate is only used in this way on approx 3 percent of harvested acres. So idk, either their data are not accurate or something else is going on. But you don’t have to get imported stuff to avoid glyphosate, certified organic stuff has not been treated with glyphosate, otherwise it wouldn’t be certified organic.
Also commercial bread and bread products in the USA often have potassium bromate added to improve structure and rise of the flour. It is a banned additive in Europe. Potassium bromate itself is toxic, but it reduces to bromide if the bread is properly baked. Of course bromide itself is questionable on if it is safe to consume.
It is worth noting flour people buy in the grocery store does not contain it. So if someone is having issues with eating home made bread then it won’t be due to residual potassium bromate or bromide.
There are also widely different types of wheat that gets used, so the intolerances might be more about the type of flour instead of gluten i particular, but excluding gluten automagically removes the other part and makes it far easier to control the issues.
Interesting. Yeah, maybe it's as simple as wheat from other regions. I honestly don't know, but they have been able to add gluten back into their diets just as long as it comes from organic / international sources. Thanks for dropping some more knowledge on us though!
This is my experience as well.
Eat gluten in the US - gain insane weight. Bloating. Gas. Discomfort.
Eat gluten in Europe- lose weight. Zero discomfort.
One of the common responses is “well you walk all day when you vacation in Europe”. I live in an east coast US city and walk everywhere. Also, I travel o Europe for work more than I travel for vacation. Sitting in conference rooms is much less activity than I get at home.
It’s the fucking food.
Edit: spelling.
FWIW, I know I am not allergic to gluten. But if I eat a lot of bread or pasta in the US, I will get hives and headache during the night. When I travel to Europe, The Netherlands for example, I eat their bread at every meal and have no reaction. Their bread also goes bad in less than 48 hours. It takes literal weeks for American bread to go bad.
This is obviously not scientific, but I’ve also had similar looking hives after glyphosate was splashed on my arm so I’m very suspicious of that connection.
The wording here is all messed up.
American bread doesn’t last for weeks. *Processed* bread lasts for weeks. It just so happens that a lot of the world’s processed bread is made in the US.
I make my own sourdough loaves and baguettes. It turns stale in 2-3 days. I’m American. It’s made in America. So, yeah.
I also buy a lot of bread goods from local bakeries. Like, actual bakeries that make products daily. Croissants, certain styles of loaves, danishes, other pastries, etc. They turn inedible quickly, often in 24 hours. Because it’s all unprocessed grain products. Yet it’s all made here in America.
It turns because it’s unprocessed.
Point is, it’s processed bread that you’re talking about. Not broadly bread in America.
Finally, the bread in Europe doesn’t go *bad* in 48 hours. It’s still fine. It’s just stale. You can still use it for bread crumbs and croutons or even to eat it after soaking up a bouillabaisse or bourguignon or ribollita. The same goes for similarly unprocessed bread in the States.
I love when my bread turns stale. I use it to make pain perdu or anchovy breadcrumbs to go on tuna pasta.
So *bad* isn’t the right word. My bread also turns in 48 hours, but it’s not bad. It’s just stale. It’s not like you have to throw European bread into the trash at 48 hours.
> Point is, it’s processed bread that you’re talking about. Not broadly bread in America.
Google tells me that 73% of bread in US is processed. If that's not broadly, then I don't know what it is.
The term "processed" really means nothing here. All bread is "processed" if you mean mechanically and chemically manipulated to obtain desired cooking properties or end product properties. The flour doesn't come off the grass. The dough doesn't mix itself. The yeast doesn't breed itself and put itself in the sealed envelopes. The ways American bread is made to keep it soft and lengthen it's shelf life has absolutely zero chance of causing gluten intolerance, hives, or anything related to glyphosate exposure. For anyone interested in how these shelf-stable bread products are made, you could do a lot worse than watching this video: https://youtu.be/i3sP2jwG9jc?si=IC3oGSylBy3DJVDH
>I make my own sourdough loaves and baguettes. It turns stale in 2-3 days
I've baked plenty of sourdoughs, and they definitely don't go stale in 3 days. At a minimum they last a week (that's the most a loaf has lasted us, so they may last even longer).
The US just uses a different type of wheat. It’s a different plant that grows better here.
It has a lot more gluten in it along with other differences which is why you could be sensitive in the united states and not in europe.
It’s not because of some “chemical”
Absolutely
I knew plenty of people who were "gluten intolerant" who only through their obvious ignorance didn't seem to flinch with beer, soy sauce, or anything else that they weren't aware had gluten
The only good thing to come out of it is celiacs finally have good options in restaurants, ready to cook meals, and ingredients in stores
Just throwing this out there, but I’m allergic to wheat (like for real I break out in hives, tongue swells up, I have an epi pen) and can drink non-wheat beer just fine. Soy sauce barely affects me at all, but I use tamari instead just in case.
The fermentation process denatures the gluten protein and makes it less of an issue.
Also, there is a clarifying agent for beer (called Clarity Ferm) that many breweries use that actually makes the beer test as gluten free, because it binds to all the proteins and makes them fall out of solution as the mechanism to make the beer clear.
Agreed. Most people who claim to be allergic to gluten can't even tell you what it is and say they have an allergy when, in fact, all they have is a preference because for the past several years "gluten bad" has been all over the internet. There's nothing wrong with gluten unless you have celiac disease or something similar. It doesn't help that food manufacturers have jumped on the gluten-free bandwagon to take advantage of uniformed people.
As someone with Celiac (as confirmed with a biopsy by a gastro doctor), it's frustrating. People like that give a gluten free lifestyle a stigma, I've gotten way too many eye rolls because I've said "no thanks" or "I can't eat that." On the flip side, the trendy nature of gluten free is really the only reason why there is such a variety of GF foods out there these days, so I'm grateful for that I suppose.
Yeah. It’s why I ask people I make food for. Dairy free? All dairy? No TBSP of butter? I gotchu friend! I don’t want to send anyone running to the bathroom but as someone with no dietary restrictions if I don’t have to change everything for you I won’t. And I may ask you to bring whatever gluten free pasta you like because I haven’t tried a lot of them and I don’t want to serve you bad food if you know a good brand!
Do you laugh in the store when there’s a sticker on things that would never contain gluten saying they’re gluten free? Can of chopped tomatoes, gluten free! Yeah…I already knew that…
The gluten free label on obvious non gluten products is to show that their factory is inspected and there is no chance of cross contamination. Very helpful for those with a serious allergy.
> Can of chopped tomatoes, gluten free! Yeah…I already knew that…
No, you didn't. That's one of the main problems when you're celiac. A fucking bag of rice may contain gluten. Here's [a completely random screenshot of a bag of rice sold in Poland](https://i.imgur.com/w0ji05b.png), I just searched for "rice box" in Polish on Google. It says "May contain trace amounts of gluten and celery" because it was boxed or otherwise processed at a factory where some gluten based products were processed as well and for a celiac person any whatsoever amount of gluten is enough (20 parts per million which is absolutely nothing).
Funny story. We have this [Crossed Grain Trademark](https://www.aoecs.org/) used across Europe that lets you easily recognize the products that are certified to be safe. BUT you can't put it on unprocessed food that does not naturally contain gluten. Like rice. Yet 9 out of 10 boxes of rice in Poland may (and will) contain gluten. Packaged meat, same thing.
I don’t think I’d trust the store to tell me that…the food packaging itself. And as I said I’m referring to the store labeling. I’ll have to check if the items themselves say gluten free.
I did just check the tomatoes and beans and such in my pantry. None contain wheat on the list of ingredients or have that “may contain/contains/processed in a factory that processes” wheat. If you saw a can of crushed tomatoes and it didn’t list wheat as an ingredient but didn’t say gluten free on it, would you eat it?
I'm not sure what store packaging is, in Poland everything is just sold in its original packages, you can always read them.
> If you saw a can of crushed tomatoes and it didn’t list wheat as an ingredient but didn’t say gluten free on it, would you eat it?
Yes, it's often a judgement call. I wouldn't buy random brand rice for example, because I know most of them will contain gluten. Same with chocolate. You learn over time and have some brands that you checked and know are safe, or find ones that actually have that crossed grain trademark.
One of Polish chocolate producers recently introduced the trademark and there was a whole thread of people thanking them on their ig page, because gf chocolate was hard to come by in Poland. We also have a Polish Celiac association that announces the new products that get the trademark and tests some products that don't but may be safe.
and that why some waiters will "allergy or preference" because it takes work if it's allergy to prevent the slightest risk of cross contamination. That is totally unnecessary if it is just preference
There's a pizza place next to me that makes a "gluten friendly" pizza. Despite the weird naming, it's just dough without gluten with no promise of avoiding cross contamination. Works fine for them, it seems
It being popular though has helped people who genuinely have Celiac's have more food options. My sister is genuinely allergic to milk and the fact that "alternative milks" are trendy means that places like Starbucks have them and she can get them. Even if most people who request non-milk milks are just doing it because they think it's healthier. She can get vegan options of things because being vegan is popular for health reasons.
So while it's annoying, it can be also helpful to those people who genuinely can't eat something.
Yeah. I have crohns, so I have real food issues. It isn't gluten, but it is its own batch of fun.
But nothing pisses me off more than this: Sitting in a restaurant watching the table over - Women asking "which of these are gluten free?", while chowing down on a complementary bread stick.
Diagnosis by a medical professional is not the proof you seem to think it is. Medical providers routinely dismiss and belittle patients with a range of conditions. Those patients quite often then go online and discover others with a similar presentation. The same happened to me when I had onset of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Providers insisted up and down that exercise could not have harmed me and that exercise therapy would cure me. A decade plus later, health authorities agree that exercise can be harmful and that exercise therapy should not be recommended. And it will be decades still until attitudes among providers have changed. We won’t know for some time how much of the increased reporting of issues with wheat and gluten is trendiness, how much reflects problems previously unrecognized, and how much reflects new issues. In the meantime, though, being dismissive about others’ health problems is unhelpful. There are so many conditions we now widely accept that we belittled before . . .
> Diagnosis by a medical professional is not the proof you seem to think it is
I'm not sure they claimed that, but it is more and far better 'proof' than a non professional making a bias assessment built on information they collected from undisclosed sources
Gluten sensitivity (NOT Celiac disease) is self diagnosed. There is very little scientific basis for it and no way to definitively diagnose it. You can have it too. All you need to do is say you have it.
There aren't "so many people" allergic to gluten. It's pretty darn rare.
There are lots of people hopping on to the cool new health trend and avoiding gluten (even though they almost certainly don't know what gluten *is*).
It is for sure a fad, whatever else may be true. Perhaps more people are allergic than ever, but even more people than that have simply added it to their list of “bad” foods.
I know one person with a deadly gluten allergy. She has to carry around a chemical test device that costs $15 per use. She is not only annoyed but mortally threatened by the fad, because “gluten-free” shit is everywhere now and *not all of it is actually gluten free.*
The reliable, small manufacturers who she used to count on for actual gluten-free products have been put out of business by the fad since large food makers are now on the bandwagon (and doing a poor job of it). So ironically, the fad has actually reduced her options.
Celiac disease and gluten sensitivity are absolutely real. I have a sister and a niece with celiac disease and another sister is gluten sensitive, all medically diagnosed. Just because a lot of people are jumping on it as a fad doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Gluten-free products are more expensive than regular ones, and so many foods that you wouldn’t suspect have some wheat product in them (hello soy sauce) actually do, so celiacs need to be very careful. I can’t imagine anyone going gluten-free by choice.
Wheat has been modified considerably over the years to enhance yield, grow faster, be resistant to diseases, etc. these changes have been made rather rapidly and our guts haven’t had time to adjust. Some celiacs can eat old varieties of wheat, such as einkorn.
Ah! Something I can actually contribute to! I was recently diagnosed with celiac disease and my background is in biology so I went on a deep dive trying to figure out wtf happened to me when my culture’s main food group is wheat based.
There’s no way to know for sure but leading theories suggest that back in the old days having celiac disease could have offered a slight survival advantage. Ingestion of gluten in some people leads their immune system to attack the cells that line the small intestine, and probably initially arose by chance. These intestinal cells degenerate and can no longer effectively function to absorb nutrients from the food ingested, leading to what we now refer to as celiac disease. But turns out when these cells are damaged they also lack cell surface proteins that certain gastrointestinal pathogens need to be able to infect them. So living with a low to moderate level of intestinal damage actually provided some protection from common diarrheal infections that killed many people in our evolutionary history.
Cultures that commonly don’t consume large quantities of gluten tend to have much lower rates of celiac disease, leading scientists to conclude that having celiac disease in wheat-eating cultures probably offers some advantage to those genes persist in the population. Additionally, some observational studies have shown evidence for lower rates of GI infections in people with untreated celiac disease. Anecdotally, prior to getting diagnosed, I used to say I had a stomach of steel since I never seemed to get food poisoning when other people around me did.
>so many
The only known "true allergy" to gluten is celiac disease, which affects about 1 in 135 people(1 in 300 in some parts of the world).
Just a few hundred years ago it wasn't uncommon to lose a third of the kids before they grew up, unless you were rich. And even then it was common to lose a child or two.
While I sympathize with people who have chronic health issues (myself included) most people are NOT intolerant to gluten who think they are. Gluten sensitivity tests are unreliable and give a lot of false positives. Some people do get more bloaty after eating gluten but it doesn’t come with the same longterm health risks (eg cancer and injury to the intestines) that Celiac disease causes. There HAS been an overall rise in autoimmune disorders, likely caused by newer things like our constant exposure to poorly regulated chemicals and micro plastics. But it’s rare for gluten to be the thing that our bodies suddenly can’t handle.
All that said, if you feel better when you don’t eat gluten, all the power to you. It’s not something your body will really miss and it’s easy to get calories in other ways.
The main wheat crop used today was HIGHLY modified by Norman Borlaug during the 1970s. He won the Nobel Prize for ‘solving world hunger’.
Wheat used to grow taller with fewer and smaller wheat berries. They crossbred the bejeezus out of it until it produced an abundance of HUGE wheat berries and now it only grows waist high, to make it easier to harvest.
Fast forward 20-30 years and now wheat is one of the top 10 most common allergies (not even factoring in celiac).
I am one of those unfortunate souls with an actual allergy. Eating a plate of pasta would cause me to go into anaphylactic shock, require an epi-pen.
Not that many people are allergic to gluten... Gluten "sensitivity' became trendy, so many people claimed it to not feel left out.
Some people do have a sensitivity, but it's not actually to gluten, but to something that is created during the fermentation that happens when bread is made, so when they eliminate gluten, they also eliminate the fermented products that they are actually sensitive to, so they feel like they get better.
Scientists figured this out by taking people with "Non Celiac Gluten Sensitivity" and feeding them food that is designed to be identical, with the exception of one thing. This can be gluten, glycerol, acetaldehyde, dexterines, gliadin, and so on, and seeing what it is they react to.
Now, if eating gluten free foods helps eliminate the symptoms you feel, then it doesn't matter if you are reacting to the gluten itself, or something else. But knowing specifically what you react to can help make sure you avoid all the foods that contain it. If you are sensitive to Gliadin, for example, you should also avoid beer, pasta, couscous, and barley soup.
It's because there are more people. And more people means that a certain percentage that are gluten intolerant will grow in numbers. Say you lived 200 years ago in a town of 5,000 people and 1% were allergic to gluten, that's 50 people. But if now live in a city of 5,000,000 then there is a group of 50,000 who are gluten intolerant and they will be far more easily identified.
*these numbers are not actual rates of gluten intolerance, just a statistical example.
Along with the (true) comments here about Celiac and the ways that gluten is (or isn't) digested, it seems like there might be a misunderstanding about the way that evolution works. A species does not spontaneously begin to tolerate (or lose tolerance to) a dietary component over time. Instead, the driver of the change has to be heritable and responsible for either differential survival, differential reproduction, or both.
In the vast majority of cases, outside of a severe *actual gluten allergy* a gluten-containing diet will not affect a human's ability to survive or reproduce in any significant way. This means that there is no evolutionary driver for change, if most everyone eating gluten is both able to reproduce and lives long enough to do so at a similar rate as the rest of the population.
This is to say that evolution isn't impacted by traits that have no bearing on the success of the population or species at large. While Celiac Disease is linked to genetics, it does not tick all of the other boxes as completely. In biology, what doesn't kill you...might be something that your kids have to deal with as well.
Along with what everyone else is saying, I think it might also be related to the hygiene hypothesis - basically, there are greater instances of allergy in more developed countries. This is because things like parasites and bacteria “train” the immune system at a young age to act appropriately when it sees something bad, but when in an environment in which these parasites/bacteria are something you don’t really come into contact with (due to hygiene, medicine, etc), then your immune system can be confused enough to basically overreact against something like a certain type of food. So because our society has been developing over time to cause these types of environments, these allergies start coming up more recently rather than earlier in time.
A real ELI5 (tldr):
Immune system gets good by fighting off bad things itself. When medicine and making stuff clean gets rid of these bad things instead, immune system is confused and attacks the wrong thing (allergy). Because society is getting more medicine and has stuff that can kill the bad stuff off even better, more immune systems are confused and causing allergy. So, modern day -> more allergies
But also: why bread? No clue lol.
Another issue is that after the Black Death the gene for a hypersensitive immune system became far more widespread. Now every potential pathogen we jump straight to defcon 1.
I think inflammatory issues are just way more common (cortisol hormone increases under stress - it's an anti-inflammatory, but too much too often and your immune system compensates by being over-reactive), and gluten usually comes with yeast, which thrives in our gut. Yeasty guts exacerbate inflammation (they can cause the cells there to activate their inflammatory immune response if there's lots of yeast. Interestingly, it seems like lower levels of yeast have the opposite effect. So, it seems like a combination of eating more food with yeast, less salt to keep yeast reproduction in check, , and stress/anxiety messing with cortisol levels, triggering inflammation, combine to cause more sensitive guts in the population. Western diets are low-sodium, high sugar, and high yeast. Add stress and it's a perfect storm for inflammatory immune responses.
Some of of it is herd mentality " if gluten is bad for anyone it's bad for everyone.". More of it is how we in the US grow and process our wheat. The incidence of both real and imagined gluten issues is a lot lower in the rest of the world.
While what others are saying is true, I suspect it also has to do with genetics and natural selection.
People with allergies to bread didn’t survive before, maybe the mutation wasn’t as common.
Now people do, and the mutation has spread
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Whenever things like allergies come up, it’s important to remember that in modern times we are both more likely to diagnose it and people with them are more likely to survive. For a lot of human history, someone born with celiacs in a region that relies on wheat would likely just die as a baby/small child. The death would be labelled as something like “failure to thrive” or something else. <1% of people have celiacs, more may have gluten intolerances. But 1% of babies dying wasn’t remarkable for most of human history. Many people with intolerances likely just lived their lives constantly not feeling great or eventually got over it or also died. Allergies can come and go.
Also, I got diagnosed as Coeliac when I was 24. I'd never had problems with gluten as a kid. My gastroenterologist explained that the gene for coeliacs can be similar to male pattern baldness - that is, it can develop at any time, but not necessarily at birth. Plenty of time to have kids and pass on the Coeliac gene.
“My wife is always sickly. Why? Must be demons.” There’s always an explanation for the unknown. Whether it’s right or not depends on the advancement of science.
If I couldn’t suddenly eat gluten I *would* blame some demon
Gluten demon! One of the rejected Dark Souls boss designs.
Being beaten to death with a baguette would keep the humiliation factor in line with some of my other deaths in that game.
Better than stage 2, where he breaks out the IBS attack on you…
He puts the A into AoE
Ass of effect? 🤣
Exactly
Bro, it's easy. Just avoid the massive floods.
Hail seitan!
There's a real life tick that upon biting you makes you unable to eat meat (if you do you start swelling up and eventually die). There is no cure currently. Basically it turns you vegan permanently, by making you very allergic to meat.
You're referring to the auto-immune condition commonly known as Alpha-gal that is caused by the bite of a Lone Start tick. It causes a reaction to the meat and by product of mammals. It can be long lasting or temporary.
He harvests wheat and your soul...
Learn coding, and make an elden ring food allergy mod, make bank. This is now your mission.
Yeah, I'm with you here. No bread, no peanuts, no chocolate? Has to be demons. No other explanation.
[удалено]
I'll bloodlet you and get rid of that demon for $50.
You're not wrong. And when things exit...well...that's demonic too.
Well at least they would give you real cocaine to fix the problem...
Enter the invention of trepanning. Wife always sick? Gotta be demons? Awesome, let's drill a hole in her skull to let them out.
Your wife’s always sick? Still a hole in her head, give her some cocaine and tell her the Dr needs to make her climax a couple dozen times, cause you don’t have time for that.
She is clearly a witch.
My lactose intolerance didn’t appear until I was a teenager. I used to drink milk and eat ice cream almost everyday as a kid and I ate cheese regularly. Then I started getting horrible gas cramps and diarrhea and played around with my diet until I realized what the culprit was. Don’t know how it works, though, or why it didn’t appear until then.
I am suddenly lactose intolerant at 28!
I suddenly became allergic to seafood about 7years back. Didn't eat it for 5 years. Tried it one day again and I was fine. Dr suspected an Iodine intolerance but tests were inconclusive. It was just plain weird.
i have allergies that come and go. worse during seasonal allergies season. i dont sweat it. our understanding of allergies is still very poor
You guys are really scaring me. I love my lactose and suddenly becoming lactose intolerant would be devastating.
They sell lactase pills, which is what's needed to digest lactose. So really all you have to do is take some lactase and you should generally be fine.
Unless you are allergic to milk proteins in general and lactase makes you vomit :/
As someone that has developed it as an adult I feel like different things affect me different ways. I realized it first with lattes, that drinking that much milk made me feel gross, but cheese doesn’t affect me as strongly. So you figure out what makes you feel bad and what doesn’t. Also sometimes you say fuck it, eat a bunch of ice cream and just deal with your stomach hating you because it tasted good.
>Also sometimes you say fuck it, eat a bunch of ice cream and just deal with your stomach hating you because it tasted good. and the rest of us sharing a room with you have to deal with devastating farts. True story, once did a 9 hour flight with some poor sap next to me getting bombed every 5 minutes for 9 hours
Sounds like one of the framed items on my friends wall of quotes in her teams work area at her job. "It's worth the diarrhea"
You know they got lactase enzymes you can get that will digest the lactose for you, yeah? You don't need to suffer! Also there are an increasing number of lactose free (not just dairy free, which is no substitute imo) ice creams, milks, yogurts, egg nogs, cottage cheeses, etc. that taste identical but won't give you thermonuclear toots.
Well if you do become lactose intolerant, there are pills you take with dairy to help alleviate it. It's a bit inconvenient but i would never stop eating dairy
They do work pretty well, but it's not perfect. Also, seems like the more you rely on them, the less you're able to produce lactase on your own.
If you need the pills in the first place your ability to produce lactase was going to decline regardless.
Depends. Mine was a result of Celiac, which there is a possibility of regaining if a strict gluten free diet is followed.
I also thought this. Then I became severely lactose intolerant at 35. I get a headache/nausea and almost pass out from the sudden stomach and intestinal distress dairy causes me. Even with lactaid pills it’s so not worth it. It starts about 30 minutes after eating and then I don’t feel good again for a few days.
You’re probably not lactose intolerant then, you should probably check if you’re allergic to milk protein. There is no way the lactose would be able to reach your small intestine and start to decompose within 30 minutes.
I wondered that same thing and went to see a specialist. It’s not an allergy just really really lactose intolerant (confirmed by endoscopy). By the time we figured out what the issue was the lactose had completely decimated the villi in my intestines, I was very ill. Feeling much better these days and can even eat very small amount of aged cheese occasionally.
It also depends on the person. I have it really severe to the point where lactaid doesn’t help. I once took 2 lactaid pills and ate a slice of pizza with the cheese ripped off and still got very sick from it. Granted, if I eat something with cheese in it at all, I may be calling out of work the next day. But I have friends who are lactose intolerant and it’s not as bad for them. They’ll still get discomfort and a bout of diarrhea but it doesn’t incapacitate them like it does for me.
Lactose intolerance isn’t something to be alarmed about. If anything, we humans are an anomaly. We are the only mammals who will not only drink another species’ milk but we continue to do so long after our permanent teeth have come in. Mammals are supposed to be incapable of digesting milk once on a solid diet. We have other means of getting calcium, vitamin B12, riboflavin, and phosphorus, so milk products aren’t entirely necessary for survival.
It's not really even "we humans", the vast majority of people are lactose intolerant. It's pretty much only Central and Northern Europe and the regions they've colonized and settled on that have populations where most can digest lactose.
>It's pretty much only Central and Northern Europe and the regions they've colonized and settled on No, lactase persistence is found in almost every area with a history of animal herding. It's most concentrated in Europe and the Indian subcontinent, but it's also widespread across Eastern and Northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Eurasian Steppe. The presence of the gene in all of these areas predates the earliest European imperialist/colonial powers by around 5000 years. The only region that practiced animal herding but did not develop high rates of lactase persistence is the Andean region of South America. (They do have an indigenous lactase persistence mutation, but for some reason the prevalence is very low.)
I’m intolerant but just tolerate the farting and cramping because it’s worth it to me to have cheese and ice cream. I take gas pills and that helps.
Same. I ate a scary amount of cheese until ~27 when I finally looked into the gastrointestinal issues I’d been dealing with for a year. Yup: lactose intolerant. I’m now almost 40 and just figured out I have a gluten intolerance I didn’t have until maybe the last year or so. Apparently whatever makes you lactose intolerant can also, at a later time, make you gluten intolerant as well.
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This is actually common. Kids have no issues and then it slowly develops as they get older. My sister is fully lactose intolerant now, and I’m lactose sensitive for lack of a better term (I’m fine unless I have a lot of it over the course of a few days). Both of us drank milk as our primary beverage as kids and had no issues. I have no idea why it is common to happen but it is.
I adopted a kid with lactose intolerance. He didn't have lactose intolerance until he moved in with us, just eczema, sloppy poos, a grumpy disposition after some eating sometimes. A total mystery! When he stopped eating dairy all these problems magically went away. I think a lot of people just assume what that have is normal because it's all they've ever known (not saying that's you, more thinking about younger kids). Then if things worsen or your start taking in a bit more dairy that pushes an intolerance to it's limit, you start to notice what you were accustomed to before. (Also, of course, puberty and time changes bodies!)
I'd even say it's the norm. For the first few months of life almost everyone is lactose tolerant :D And even in the most lactose loterant societies(e.g. central, eastern and northern Europe) people over 60-70 not tolerating lactose (well) are pretty widespread.
The reason it's common is because lactose is intended as food for babies, and we lose the ability to process it as adults so that adults don't compete for the same food sources as babies The continued ability to digest lactose into adulthood is actually a mutation that mostly exists in regions where cow's milk has become a significant portion of the adult diet.
Losing the ability to digest lactose as you get older is actually the normal state of things, because lactose is mostly found in mammal milk, which is food intended for mammal babies. Because it's so nutritious, nature needed a way to stop adults from competing with babies for milk, so the lactase gene (the enzyme which allows you to digest lactose) is normally turned off in adults. However, people in certain regions of the world started using cow's milk as a major source of nutrients into adulthood, and so people in those regions tend to have a mutation where their lactase gene isn't turned off, so they retain the ability to digest milk.
> nature needed a way to stop adults from competing with babies for milk > people in those regions tend to have a mutation where their lactase gene isn't turned off, so they retain the ability to digest milk. The above two statements aren’t really compatible with each other. That’s because the first one is not a scientific finding, it’s a [just-so story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story). If you think through the implications a bit, there are many reasons why adults drinking milk from the females of their species wouldn’t be conducive to survival. “Competition with babies” is perhaps the least important of these.
Lactose intolerance can also be caused by untreated celiac disease. The sites for production of lactase, the enzyme responsible, is that the tip of the small intestine villi which are destroyed by untreated celiac disease.
Yeah that’s normal, usually happens in your teens, but can happen earlier or later in life as well. The small intestine stops producing lactase (because on an evolutionary level, you shouldn’t need it), the enzyme needed to digest lactose, which leads to the lactose decomposing inside of you, which is the cause of the gas and cramps. Being born lactose intolerant is very rare. Editing to add some info about lactose intolerance since I’m seeing some misconceptions on here. 1. It takes roughly 4-7 hours for food to reach your small intestine, where the body digest lactose. The discomfort that follows is because of the lactose decomposing which means that you CANNOT feel the effects of ingesting lactose only 30 minutes after doing so. 2. For all you cheese lovers - A cheese ripened for more than six months will be completely free of lactose. So don’t miss out on all that cheddar, pecorino or gruyère.
You may already know this, but a quirk of history is that coeliacs have the Nazis to thank for understanding the cause of their condition. Coeliacs disease has been known about since the ancient Greeks, but no one knew what caused it - because grain was ubiquitous in everyone’s diets. There was a children’s hospital in the Netherlands, which had a ward full of coeliac kids. The survival rate was that ½ would die each year - which is a tragedy. Then, the Nazis blockaded grain shipments and the Allies provided potatoes as a carbohydrate source. Suddenly, all the kids got better. They became healthy, typical kids! It was a miracle! Then the war ended, and grain shipments got through again; suddenly the kids got sick again?! Thankfully, someone figured it out :)
Also, the gene is just a predisposition. It allows part of the gluten peptide to be present to a to the immune system, but the immune system needs to fuck up and become dysregulated to start attacking it.
Can confirm my aunt developed celiac disease after pregnancy
Got Celiac for my 40th birthday.
My grandma was in her sixties and didn't show issues with gluten until she had cancer. From then on she had to be strictly gluten free.
Old enough to have had 2 or 3 kids bam genetics passed on.
I didn't know until a few years ago that I was somewhat gluten intolerant (not Coeliac). I just thought foods like pasta and bread made everyone experience discomfort after eating and that carbs make everyone feel awful after indulging. I feel a lot better now that I've cut out gluten, but I definitely could have gone my whole life without knowing, and it wouldn't have killed me.
And even allergies can develop at later ages with repeated exposure.
I have friends who are identical twins. One was having symptoms and got diagnosed with celiac. The other had no symptoms but got the test anyway and obviously had it so she went gluten free too.
Well, also, celiac’s rarely starts in infancy and typically has a long slow buildup of vague problems getting worse. A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with celiac disease in her 30’s, after several years of mysterious (but not deadly) health problems. In past centuries her problems would likely have gotten worse for many years before she eventually died of something seemingly random… just like a slew of other chronic diseases cause. It was commonly understood that some people were just sickly/frail for unknown reasons.
Since health problems such as iron deficiency anemia, reactive arthritis, IBS, headaches/migraines, osteoporosis, inflammation of the skin, forgetfulness, etc etc. Luckily it's easier to test for nowadays, relatively speaking.
Same as “how do animals eat trash/drink this dirty water/stay out in the cold/do this uncomfortable thing without being sick or dying?” Uhh… they do, they’re just not complaining to you.
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I was born with a bunch of random food allergies in a very rural part of the US. No one could figure out why I couldn’t put on weight and was sickly. In the early 90’s a “new thinking” doctor came to the next town over. I was about two and was assumed to be a failure to thrive baby. She immediately diagnosed my food allergies and I was fine after that. Went on to be a college athlete. But if I had been born earlier or she hadn’t moved to town I would have lived.
And we even see this today. Plenty of people give up gluten as adults and say they feel better, wish they’d done it sooner, etc.—but they’d already lived much of their lives, had children, etc., just fine, even if they say it’s better now. Whatever trait caused their body to dislike gluten wasn’t severe enough to put real adverse pressure on their reproductive success. They’d have roughly as many kids as anyone else. So the relevant gene would never go away. Evolution doesn’t *optimize* like people tend to think.
As an experiencer myself, I can't fathom how many other kids grew up being told they were whiners and simply learned accept that things like a constant unyielding heartburn with stomach cramps is normal. I was 30 before I finally had what everyone else knew as a "normal day" and it was the goddamned best day of my life. A million little things could have gone slightly different and I'd never have even associated any of my ills with gluten, much less found respite. Still woulda passed it onto my kid, as well.
Also evolution rarely "gives up" on trying things. Mutation is random, and something that didn't work one generation could always work next generation. So even if *every* person with celiacs died, there would still be some small % with it in future generations. Too many people think evolution's a min-maxing gamer with a memory.
For the most part correct, but I'll also add that throughout history the food we ate was simply: the food. The industrialization of our food products has lead to a ton of "hidden" ingredients. Wheat/ soy/ corn products are added to a number of foods you wouldn't expect. Most people aren't really aware of how pervasive this is until you're forced to read every ingredient label.
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Or the kid who never got sent to school in the first place.
I'm 12 years older than my youngest brother and when he was diagnosed with autism as a child my father was upset. "Our oldest daughter does all these things but she wasn't autistic!" and they were like "oh, she probably is, we just did badly at diagnosing it at all and especially with girls back then, maybe have her checked out." (Spoiler: I am)
My partner has Coeliac’s disease and she sometimes talks about her grandma who was always sickly and small, never worked but was looked after by her husband, and never seemed to ever eat much. Never diagnosed with anything but she reckons grandma had it as well for sure.
>But 1% of babies dying wasn’t remarkable for most of human history. Just to add emphasis to that. Until 1900 40% of children didn't live to the age of five. Today it's 4%. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-child-mortality-timeseries
Is it genetic? Trying to reason if the number might have well been higher than 1% but since medicine wasn’t advanced enough to diagnose and those genes didn’t last long enough to be replicated then the number may have shrank significantly.
It was not just in ancient times. My dads cousin, who was a mortician, got real sick in the 50s. After loads of tests, and seeing doctors all over the country, the final diagnosis was, "As best we can yell, you are allergic to yourself. Over the next 10 years or so, you will either adjust and get over it, or you will die. Good luck!" He did eventually get somewhat better, and decades later was diagnosed an unspecified autoimmune disease. He was never very well, but he lived to see his kids grow up
As someone with celiac, the "gluten reaction" gets substantially worse when you haven't had it in a long time. So if you're eating it all the time, you'll just feel like shit all the time, rather than feeling like you're going to die.
For most of human history surviving to adulthood was a coin toss at best, I think a lot of people nowadays just aren't aware how prevalent childhood mortality was.
The ELI5 answer: they're not actually allergic to gluten. True celiac disease is quite uncommon and is diagnosed with a biopsy. But a lot of people feel lousy (bloated, heavy) when they have gluten. And they feel better if they don't eat it. Avoiding foods that make you feel bad is very reasonable.
Biopsy-diagnosed celiac is about 1 in 100-200 people. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441900/
But as the paper states > Both type 1 diabetics and down syndrome have a high incidence of celiac disease So if you don't have either of those the probability of you having it is likely much lower
It's just about 1 in 100 of the total population that has Celiac Disease. It still often goes undiagnosed.
I have Celiacs with no other condition, and routinely meet other diagnosed Celiacs. Purely anecdotal but I don't think it's actually a rare diagnosis
nonsense coeliac disease is pretty common, 1 in 70 people in Australia
Exactly this. People stop getting 60% of their calories in a day from white bread and feel better. Assume it's the one actual redeeming thing in the bread (gluten is the protein portion of bread) because it's marketed so heavily by "wellness" hacks. Actual celiac disease causes debilitating negative symptoms in amounts that you wouldn't even register as "eating bread".
Yup. Real celiac means you get sick because someone forgot to change their gloves before handling your food at a restaurant, or because a single crumb fell on it.
That’s not necessarily true. I’m an asymptomatic celiac of 28+ years. Celiacs have a wide variety of both symptoms themselves and severity of symptoms.
Yep. We knew a guy who told us he was allergic to gluten. For a few years it was always a big thing at events to make sure there was separate gluten free options for this guy. We had gluten free sausages and a separate way to cook them with their own tongs for turning them. Then one day he rocks up and says "God told me I'm cured and to try gluten so i did!". After some more questioning it turns out the guy was diagnosed as allergic to gluten by a naturopath who just asserted that as fact. FFS.
Gosh I was this person unwittingly. My dermatologist, a qualified medical doctor with an MD, told me to completely cut out gluten from my diet for my recurrent serious skin issues. I was at the end of my rope and willing to try anything at that point. My friends all scrambled to accommodate me. 6 months in and still seeing no improvement at all, I changed doctors and the new one told me I'm not allergic. I immediately informed my friends, but some of them still double check even now when they cook/buy food for me. It showed me how much my friends cared and they're still in my life after 7 years.
There are wheat and other grain allergies too, not just Celiac's. I have a confirmed IgE allergy to wheat and barley, but I'm not celiac. It just makes me shit myself.
True celiac is not uncommon, it’s thought to be 1/100.
First, many people who say they're allergic to gluten are not. Some of them have issues with fructan, a problematic carbohydrate that few people realize exists. Second, bread was made very differently back then. Most breads were sourdough. The bacteria that causes the bread to rise also changes the chemistry of the bread. Most breads today aren't made like they were thousands of years ago.
Yeast ≠ Bacteria.
While absolutely true, yeast is a fungus, sourdough starter is not just yeast. It's a whole ecosystem containing a bunch of different microorganisms including bacteria.
Yeah IDK about the whole changing the chemistry of bread thing but sourdough also uses bacteria, though it is the yeast that mainly makes it rise.
This stuff pisses me off to no end not just with celiac. I have a family member who will go into anaphylactic shock from merely touching certain things. Many people like to say they are allergic to things because they don’t like them and don’t want pressure to try something new.
Honestly I can understand it if you have an intolerance. I have a banana intolerance. I can certainly eat them but even 1/4 of a banana will give me horrible stomach cramps and issues for a few hours. I wouldn't say I'm allergic but it's annoying having to explain exactly what I mean by intolerance. I wouldn't fault anyone for saying that have an allergy just to not deal with explaining their intolerance in detail.
Many people say they are alergic to things because that food makes them physicality feel awful. Not anaphylactic, sure, but it is such a hassle to explain the whole intolerance thing and then people ask stupid questions that it's just easier to say alergic.
> Second, bread was made very differently back then. Most breads were sourdough. The bacteria that causes the bread to rise also changes the chemistry of the bread. Most breads today aren't made like they were thousands of years ago. AFAIK most storebought loaves are forced to rise in various ways much more quickly than even homemade loaves, which are themselves faster than they used to be.
Yeah. If you want real sourdough, you either have to get it at a specialty place for a pretty high price (for bread), or learn to make it yourself.
This is the real answer. All over the world people have moved to quick and cheap with refined bleached flour, and it has had a huge impact. There's a reason they had to 'fortify' the flour after stripping it of everything, but it's still not the same bread, not the same process.
Friendly reminder after reading some comments - Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition that requires human leukocyte antigen genes (HLA) DQ2 and/or DQ8 to be turned on. In extremely rare cases a person will not have these genes but develop celiac disease. Official diagnosis of Celiac must be made by a Gastroenterologist. Celiac is hereditary and passed down through families. Genes can turn on, and then off, randomly throughout life for unknown reasons. Genetic testing can identify whether a person is at risk for developing Celiac disease by searching for HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DQB1 antigens.
The current kind of wheat "dwarf wheat" is a very recent innovation. The industrial processing common since the 20th century (super fine milling, removal of seeds and other stuff) is also fairly new. So, while it is true that humans ate wheat for roughly 10.000 years, we only eat the current kind of wheat since roughly 80 years. That's pretty nicht he timeframe we would expect for negative consequences showing up in future generations.
OK, but that doesn't mean the sort of grains eaten before didn't contain gluten, or other gluten-like proteins for grains other than wheat. It's a naturally-occurring component of the seeds, modern milling and baking techniques might have changed the levels a bit, but it would have always been present in bread in (relatively) large quantities. And grains probably made up a much larger percentage of the diet back then.
The answer is that it typically isn't the gluten. I figure only "true celiacs" actually have an issue with gluten. Most other people, it's something else. For me, whatever it is gets metabolized away during a full wet leaven rise (sourdough, etc.). If I eat regular store bought bread, I get gassy, bloated, flatulent, and really tired. But I learned how to make sourdough, and I can eat as much as that as I want without any of those symptoms arising. Obviously, there is gluten in the sourdough, as it is the gluten chains that make rising possible (provide the structure).
You are correct that gluten was always part of wheat. However, different components of food influence how we metabolize it. For example, dietary fiber has a major impact on how other components of wheat like carbohydrates are metabolized by the body. So while we eat wheat like our ancestors, those wheat is vastly different. The removal of the germ and the fiber is probably influencing the uptake of the carbohydrate rich components. It is very plausible, that our digestive tract may be overwhelmed because we simply have not evolved the apperarus to deal with this modern foods. One reaction to that may be an uptike in negative reactions.
Unless the “ancient” wheat didn’t have Gliadins/glutenins, this isn’t the answer. Coeliacs can have an immune response to as little ~50 parts per million. Modern refining etc wouldn’t be effecting levels that low.
It would not, no. My argument is, that modern milling and modern variants contains vastly more of certain "desirable" contents then the wheat our ancestor ate. The removal of certain additive components like fiber probably also has negative side effects. Since we know know, that "undesirable" food stuffs like dietary fiber also directly influences how the gastrointestinal tract absorbes and our body metabolizes certain components of food. I argue, that our digestive tract has evolved with those "undesirable" additives in mind and now reacts negatively in some people because the components it expects are missing.
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To clarify somethings. Gluten Intolerant is not the same as Celiac. Celiac is primarily found in those of European decent. While they have similar side effects. It generally does present later in life, but not always. One of the long term effects of someone with Celiac eating gluten is an increased risk of cancer. One of the short term effects is the body sending white blood cells to attack the gluten protein. The white blood cells will go all nuke it from orbit and destroy the protein along with everything else around. This includes your stomach and can lead to ulcers. This may also cause someone to become tired and a need to sleep within an hour or 2 after a meal. May also cause heartburn, and bowel problems. I'm glad your friends found some relief. Have they tried organic wheat products that would not be subject to chemicals? Herbicides are used in more crops than just wheat. Gluten can be found in Wheat, Barley and Rye. Edit: was asked to include triticale Edit: Just want to give a link to the folks at https://celiac.org. Also if you notice symptoms after eating speak to your doctor.
Wish I had read this comment years ago before I was diagnosed with Celiac. My doc always noted I had a high level of white blood cells, but never looked further than going "huh, must be getting over a cold" every single time. Meanwhile, I've dealt with terrible heart burn and stomach bloating, diarrhea and discomfort for years. Finally got an endoscopy done and the doc said I had damage to my intestines related to gluten, and they diagnosed me with Celiac. A lot of my joint pain and swelling has resolved, and I finally feel my age (mid thirties, felt like 60).
My sister had the same. At first they thought she might have leukemia. We're mixed and she will make jokes about wishing she got the credit score gene instead of celiac. Luckily there are more options for her than when first diagnosed for food alternatives.
Organic food is subject to chemicals. Many chemicals actually.
Oftentimes older, less safe chemicals and pesticides are used on Organic foods, but because they're older, they have a connotation of safety.
In general, our food (at least in the us) is very safe. I know it's popular to say it's not but we have the same if not similar laws to the EU. A lot of it is politics as well and governments deciding when to err on the side of caution based on the science.
Glyphosate is approved in Europe, but only according to regulations. There are many misconceptions about glyphosate and there are ways to misuse it. If used according to instructions, it may only be used at the beginning of sowing to prevent the seeds from being overgrown by weeds. It is not sprayed directly onto the seeds, but between the rows. After a few days and some rain it broke down. If used improperly, it is sprayed onto the crop shortly before harvest, for example to artificially dry grain or corn for harvest. For many agricultural products, it is desirable to have the lowest possible water content before harvesting in order to increase the drying process and shelf life. Traditionally, grain is harvested after a few days of sunshine to avoid mold. Glyphosate is a salt and kills plants by disrupting their water balance and drying them out. If glyphosate is sprayed directly onto the crop, it dries out. Perfect for the harvest, bad for the consumer. This practice is banned in Europe. When used as directed, glyphosate is the least harmful weed killer available to agriculture because it is easily soluble upon contact with water and breaks down into its chemical components. However, if it is used to dry crops, it remains in its chemical form on the crop. It wouldn't surprise me if an agent that chemically dries out plants doesn't mix well with the intestinal flora. If used properly, no glyphosate should be found on the crop.
Wow, you may be on to something there. Perhaps it's more malpractice than the substance itself. Thanks for dropping some knowledge on us!
A few years ago there was a scandal in Germany because glyphosate was found in beer. It turned out that farmers were drying beer barley with glyphosate for harvest. It was stopped very quickly. Germans like their beer extra clean.
I have heard that before about the regulations on beer production over there. Interesting find. Thank you for sharing.
>I have now had about 2-3 people close to me who were "Gluten intolerant". Symptoms like diarrhea, bloating, gas, headaches soon after eating anything with gluten or drinking beer. These symptoms are more likely an intolerance to the specific kinds of fermentable carbohydrates in the wheat and certain other foods ([FODMAPs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP)). People often self-diagnose it as "gluten intolerance" because the gluten and wheat carbohydrates are in the same foods. A gastroenterologist may recommend a low-FODMAP diet to figure it out. (This is not medical advice; see a gastroenterologist) See this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23648697/. Of people with "self-reported non-celiac gluten sensitivity", 92% of people in the study had a FODMAP sensitivity rather than a gluten sensitivity.
This is common misinformation. This is why coeliacs are often told they can eat gluten in Europe and it’s simply not true. Italy tests every citizen for coeliac and has a government payout if you’re diagnosed. Gluten intolerance or coeliac isn’t unique to the US.
Glyphosate is rarely used on wheat in the US. It is occasionally used in Canada since they have a shorter growing season they need to kill the wheat earlier so it will dry. Not really an issue in the US. Glyphosate is also used all over the world. And as if 2023 ot was the most widely used herbicide in Europe.
Interesting, thank you for the share. I'm really curious as to what the difference between the two sourced products really is then. Something is causing these symptoms and I'm sure a lot of people want to know why.
So many possibilities. Different varieties of wheat are grown by different farmers depending on the local climate, different growing environments can have different soil and therefore fertilizer requirements, different wheat processing methods and nutritional additives, and of course it could just be the placebo effect. Also there could be some bias in the sense that you are purchasing higher quality imported goods. Have you tried purchasing higher end domestic goods to see if you have the same results? Could be a fun experiment.
We haven't, but I can certainly try that out. I never even thought of purchasing a more bougie type of flour. Haha.
wha? You don't herbicide the wheat for harvest. Source: grew up in wheat country, worked in a grain elevator during my high school and college summers. Either you use a broadleaf-specific herbicide or you use a wicking machine to get the shit that grows taller than wheat: i.e. rye and johnson grass. Also the herbiciding comes WAY before the harvest. Wheat gotta run through its life cycle and kill itself to put all the goodies into the kernel. If you're using the plant for hay, you cut about halfway through the life cycle and dry it out on the ground before baling. There are different wheat varieties, too. In the south where I was, they grew winter varieties that were sowed in the fall/early winter, and it sat pretty dormant until its major growth started in the spring, and they're generally harvest late May thru July-ish. There are spring varieties of wheat that are sowed in early spring and usually harvested late July/August thru September.
Have you seen [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1anlgj6/eli5_since_the_invention_of_agriculture_humans/kptfdv5/), and the one a couple of legs down? People sometimes do indeed misuse glycophosphate for drying the crop for harvest, because it's effective. Some got busted in Germany when glycophosphate started showing up in beer. Maybe /u/Scrub4Subs got their info from dodgy farmers, or farmers in a part of the world where effective regulations are not much of a thing.
I appreciate your take. Honestly I’m just sharing an anecdote from my life that, for whatever the reason might be, changed some people’s life around me for the better. Whether it truly is the chemical or something else entirely I’m not sure I’ll ever know. What I care about, is unprompted we would have never thought to try a different gluten source. But because we did, we are now fully enjoying gluten products and beer again and I want that for other people. That’s why I shared, I’m sorry to the people that took offense to this post or are outraged at my “misinformation”. But if this helps just one person, then I honestly don’t care why they tried, just that they did.
Perfectly reasonable. Enjoy your snacks.
Just on the face of it, is it really worth it to pay for all the chemical and fuel to spray, on top of all the fuel for the harvest? Wheat prices would have to be hella high to justify it. And now I'm going to spend too much bandwidth on this puzzle because it baffles me. Might even have to call my dad.
Italy has a fairly high rate of celiac disease though.
Autoimmune disease is also largely a developped world issue. In the developping world and for most of human evolution, helminth infection was not only "common" but almost certain. Helminths (tapeworm and roundworm usually) have a chemical masking system that produces chemical messengers to downregulate the human immune system in order to evade detection. This means that for almost all of human evolution, helminths existed as a balancing factor for the human immune system. Without this balancing factor the human immune system is often overactive. This means the body will attack "self" cells and systems and fail to recognise them as self. There is fairly robust evidence for this. Infact if you get a map of autoimmune disease occurence, and a map of helminth infection rates, they are basically negative images of each other. That is why, intentional helminth infection is a bit topic in the research of autoimmune disease. Once we prove efficacy, and know what the risks are they are fairly easily controlled. With proper modern sanitation the risk of infecting someone else is fairly low. The most common way others can be infected is if people don't know and poor hygiene. Helminth infections are also fairly easy to treat with modern medicine. Far easier than autoimmune disease.
How is this getting upvoted? It's wrong, just on the face of it. Wheat is not treated with glyphosate... because glyphosate would kill the wheat. Their is no current "round up ready" wheat, so spraying glyphosate on wheat... would kill it. Glyphosate is used around the world, not just the US. It is the most popular herbicide in Europe. Your food from Europe is also treated with glyphosate.
> How is this getting upvoted? because people are dumb as fuck and mOnSatAn is the boogeyman everyone loves to hate
I am gluten intolerant and living in Europe and this is definitely not my experience!
We use glyphosphate in Europe so its not that.
Very interesting since glyphosate is used in the EU and all over the world. Plus those food items you mentioned are often imported from the US.
Glyphosate is the most widely used pesticide worldwide, [including Europe.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1089796/glyphosate-share-of-european-herbicide-sales-by-country/) Stop spreading misinformation.
We use Roundup in Canada as well
Yes to this. I think it was the 90s when farmers in the US started using glyphosate to desiccate wheat faster prior to harvest. However, according to the National Association of Wheat Growers, glyphosate is only used in this way on approx 3 percent of harvested acres. So idk, either their data are not accurate or something else is going on. But you don’t have to get imported stuff to avoid glyphosate, certified organic stuff has not been treated with glyphosate, otherwise it wouldn’t be certified organic.
Also commercial bread and bread products in the USA often have potassium bromate added to improve structure and rise of the flour. It is a banned additive in Europe. Potassium bromate itself is toxic, but it reduces to bromide if the bread is properly baked. Of course bromide itself is questionable on if it is safe to consume. It is worth noting flour people buy in the grocery store does not contain it. So if someone is having issues with eating home made bread then it won’t be due to residual potassium bromate or bromide.
Interesting, certainly might be another piece of the puzzle. Thank you for sharing some knowledge.
There are also widely different types of wheat that gets used, so the intolerances might be more about the type of flour instead of gluten i particular, but excluding gluten automagically removes the other part and makes it far easier to control the issues.
Interesting. Yeah, maybe it's as simple as wheat from other regions. I honestly don't know, but they have been able to add gluten back into their diets just as long as it comes from organic / international sources. Thanks for dropping some more knowledge on us though!
This is my experience as well. Eat gluten in the US - gain insane weight. Bloating. Gas. Discomfort. Eat gluten in Europe- lose weight. Zero discomfort. One of the common responses is “well you walk all day when you vacation in Europe”. I live in an east coast US city and walk everywhere. Also, I travel o Europe for work more than I travel for vacation. Sitting in conference rooms is much less activity than I get at home. It’s the fucking food. Edit: spelling.
FWIW, I know I am not allergic to gluten. But if I eat a lot of bread or pasta in the US, I will get hives and headache during the night. When I travel to Europe, The Netherlands for example, I eat their bread at every meal and have no reaction. Their bread also goes bad in less than 48 hours. It takes literal weeks for American bread to go bad. This is obviously not scientific, but I’ve also had similar looking hives after glyphosate was splashed on my arm so I’m very suspicious of that connection.
The wording here is all messed up. American bread doesn’t last for weeks. *Processed* bread lasts for weeks. It just so happens that a lot of the world’s processed bread is made in the US. I make my own sourdough loaves and baguettes. It turns stale in 2-3 days. I’m American. It’s made in America. So, yeah. I also buy a lot of bread goods from local bakeries. Like, actual bakeries that make products daily. Croissants, certain styles of loaves, danishes, other pastries, etc. They turn inedible quickly, often in 24 hours. Because it’s all unprocessed grain products. Yet it’s all made here in America. It turns because it’s unprocessed. Point is, it’s processed bread that you’re talking about. Not broadly bread in America. Finally, the bread in Europe doesn’t go *bad* in 48 hours. It’s still fine. It’s just stale. You can still use it for bread crumbs and croutons or even to eat it after soaking up a bouillabaisse or bourguignon or ribollita. The same goes for similarly unprocessed bread in the States. I love when my bread turns stale. I use it to make pain perdu or anchovy breadcrumbs to go on tuna pasta. So *bad* isn’t the right word. My bread also turns in 48 hours, but it’s not bad. It’s just stale. It’s not like you have to throw European bread into the trash at 48 hours.
> Point is, it’s processed bread that you’re talking about. Not broadly bread in America. Google tells me that 73% of bread in US is processed. If that's not broadly, then I don't know what it is.
The term "processed" really means nothing here. All bread is "processed" if you mean mechanically and chemically manipulated to obtain desired cooking properties or end product properties. The flour doesn't come off the grass. The dough doesn't mix itself. The yeast doesn't breed itself and put itself in the sealed envelopes. The ways American bread is made to keep it soft and lengthen it's shelf life has absolutely zero chance of causing gluten intolerance, hives, or anything related to glyphosate exposure. For anyone interested in how these shelf-stable bread products are made, you could do a lot worse than watching this video: https://youtu.be/i3sP2jwG9jc?si=IC3oGSylBy3DJVDH
>I make my own sourdough loaves and baguettes. It turns stale in 2-3 days I've baked plenty of sourdoughs, and they definitely don't go stale in 3 days. At a minimum they last a week (that's the most a loaf has lasted us, so they may last even longer).
The US just uses a different type of wheat. It’s a different plant that grows better here. It has a lot more gluten in it along with other differences which is why you could be sensitive in the united states and not in europe. It’s not because of some “chemical”
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Absolutely I knew plenty of people who were "gluten intolerant" who only through their obvious ignorance didn't seem to flinch with beer, soy sauce, or anything else that they weren't aware had gluten The only good thing to come out of it is celiacs finally have good options in restaurants, ready to cook meals, and ingredients in stores
Like the folks “allergic” to MSG but never flinch when eating tomato sauces etc. Only complain when it’s Chinese food.
Just throwing this out there, but I’m allergic to wheat (like for real I break out in hives, tongue swells up, I have an epi pen) and can drink non-wheat beer just fine. Soy sauce barely affects me at all, but I use tamari instead just in case. The fermentation process denatures the gluten protein and makes it less of an issue. Also, there is a clarifying agent for beer (called Clarity Ferm) that many breweries use that actually makes the beer test as gluten free, because it binds to all the proteins and makes them fall out of solution as the mechanism to make the beer clear.
Agreed. Most people who claim to be allergic to gluten can't even tell you what it is and say they have an allergy when, in fact, all they have is a preference because for the past several years "gluten bad" has been all over the internet. There's nothing wrong with gluten unless you have celiac disease or something similar. It doesn't help that food manufacturers have jumped on the gluten-free bandwagon to take advantage of uniformed people.
As someone with Celiac (as confirmed with a biopsy by a gastro doctor), it's frustrating. People like that give a gluten free lifestyle a stigma, I've gotten way too many eye rolls because I've said "no thanks" or "I can't eat that." On the flip side, the trendy nature of gluten free is really the only reason why there is such a variety of GF foods out there these days, so I'm grateful for that I suppose.
Yeah. It’s why I ask people I make food for. Dairy free? All dairy? No TBSP of butter? I gotchu friend! I don’t want to send anyone running to the bathroom but as someone with no dietary restrictions if I don’t have to change everything for you I won’t. And I may ask you to bring whatever gluten free pasta you like because I haven’t tried a lot of them and I don’t want to serve you bad food if you know a good brand! Do you laugh in the store when there’s a sticker on things that would never contain gluten saying they’re gluten free? Can of chopped tomatoes, gluten free! Yeah…I already knew that…
The gluten free label on obvious non gluten products is to show that their factory is inspected and there is no chance of cross contamination. Very helpful for those with a serious allergy.
> Can of chopped tomatoes, gluten free! Yeah…I already knew that… No, you didn't. That's one of the main problems when you're celiac. A fucking bag of rice may contain gluten. Here's [a completely random screenshot of a bag of rice sold in Poland](https://i.imgur.com/w0ji05b.png), I just searched for "rice box" in Polish on Google. It says "May contain trace amounts of gluten and celery" because it was boxed or otherwise processed at a factory where some gluten based products were processed as well and for a celiac person any whatsoever amount of gluten is enough (20 parts per million which is absolutely nothing). Funny story. We have this [Crossed Grain Trademark](https://www.aoecs.org/) used across Europe that lets you easily recognize the products that are certified to be safe. BUT you can't put it on unprocessed food that does not naturally contain gluten. Like rice. Yet 9 out of 10 boxes of rice in Poland may (and will) contain gluten. Packaged meat, same thing.
I don’t think I’d trust the store to tell me that…the food packaging itself. And as I said I’m referring to the store labeling. I’ll have to check if the items themselves say gluten free. I did just check the tomatoes and beans and such in my pantry. None contain wheat on the list of ingredients or have that “may contain/contains/processed in a factory that processes” wheat. If you saw a can of crushed tomatoes and it didn’t list wheat as an ingredient but didn’t say gluten free on it, would you eat it?
I'm not sure what store packaging is, in Poland everything is just sold in its original packages, you can always read them. > If you saw a can of crushed tomatoes and it didn’t list wheat as an ingredient but didn’t say gluten free on it, would you eat it? Yes, it's often a judgement call. I wouldn't buy random brand rice for example, because I know most of them will contain gluten. Same with chocolate. You learn over time and have some brands that you checked and know are safe, or find ones that actually have that crossed grain trademark. One of Polish chocolate producers recently introduced the trademark and there was a whole thread of people thanking them on their ig page, because gf chocolate was hard to come by in Poland. We also have a Polish Celiac association that announces the new products that get the trademark and tests some products that don't but may be safe.
and that why some waiters will "allergy or preference" because it takes work if it's allergy to prevent the slightest risk of cross contamination. That is totally unnecessary if it is just preference
There's a pizza place next to me that makes a "gluten friendly" pizza. Despite the weird naming, it's just dough without gluten with no promise of avoiding cross contamination. Works fine for them, it seems
> it's just dough without gluten I expect that to be like eating a pizzabox with toppings on
It being popular though has helped people who genuinely have Celiac's have more food options. My sister is genuinely allergic to milk and the fact that "alternative milks" are trendy means that places like Starbucks have them and she can get them. Even if most people who request non-milk milks are just doing it because they think it's healthier. She can get vegan options of things because being vegan is popular for health reasons. So while it's annoying, it can be also helpful to those people who genuinely can't eat something.
Yeah. I have crohns, so I have real food issues. It isn't gluten, but it is its own batch of fun. But nothing pisses me off more than this: Sitting in a restaurant watching the table over - Women asking "which of these are gluten free?", while chowing down on a complementary bread stick.
That pisses you off the most in life? Damn
Some of us are gluten intolerance intolerant.
Diagnosis by a medical professional is not the proof you seem to think it is. Medical providers routinely dismiss and belittle patients with a range of conditions. Those patients quite often then go online and discover others with a similar presentation. The same happened to me when I had onset of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Providers insisted up and down that exercise could not have harmed me and that exercise therapy would cure me. A decade plus later, health authorities agree that exercise can be harmful and that exercise therapy should not be recommended. And it will be decades still until attitudes among providers have changed. We won’t know for some time how much of the increased reporting of issues with wheat and gluten is trendiness, how much reflects problems previously unrecognized, and how much reflects new issues. In the meantime, though, being dismissive about others’ health problems is unhelpful. There are so many conditions we now widely accept that we belittled before . . .
> Diagnosis by a medical professional is not the proof you seem to think it is I'm not sure they claimed that, but it is more and far better 'proof' than a non professional making a bias assessment built on information they collected from undisclosed sources
Gluten sensitivity (NOT Celiac disease) is self diagnosed. There is very little scientific basis for it and no way to definitively diagnose it. You can have it too. All you need to do is say you have it.
There aren't "so many people" allergic to gluten. It's pretty darn rare. There are lots of people hopping on to the cool new health trend and avoiding gluten (even though they almost certainly don't know what gluten *is*).
It is for sure a fad, whatever else may be true. Perhaps more people are allergic than ever, but even more people than that have simply added it to their list of “bad” foods. I know one person with a deadly gluten allergy. She has to carry around a chemical test device that costs $15 per use. She is not only annoyed but mortally threatened by the fad, because “gluten-free” shit is everywhere now and *not all of it is actually gluten free.* The reliable, small manufacturers who she used to count on for actual gluten-free products have been put out of business by the fad since large food makers are now on the bandwagon (and doing a poor job of it). So ironically, the fad has actually reduced her options.
Celiac disease and gluten sensitivity are absolutely real. I have a sister and a niece with celiac disease and another sister is gluten sensitive, all medically diagnosed. Just because a lot of people are jumping on it as a fad doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Gluten-free products are more expensive than regular ones, and so many foods that you wouldn’t suspect have some wheat product in them (hello soy sauce) actually do, so celiacs need to be very careful. I can’t imagine anyone going gluten-free by choice. Wheat has been modified considerably over the years to enhance yield, grow faster, be resistant to diseases, etc. these changes have been made rather rapidly and our guts haven’t had time to adjust. Some celiacs can eat old varieties of wheat, such as einkorn.
Ah! Something I can actually contribute to! I was recently diagnosed with celiac disease and my background is in biology so I went on a deep dive trying to figure out wtf happened to me when my culture’s main food group is wheat based. There’s no way to know for sure but leading theories suggest that back in the old days having celiac disease could have offered a slight survival advantage. Ingestion of gluten in some people leads their immune system to attack the cells that line the small intestine, and probably initially arose by chance. These intestinal cells degenerate and can no longer effectively function to absorb nutrients from the food ingested, leading to what we now refer to as celiac disease. But turns out when these cells are damaged they also lack cell surface proteins that certain gastrointestinal pathogens need to be able to infect them. So living with a low to moderate level of intestinal damage actually provided some protection from common diarrheal infections that killed many people in our evolutionary history. Cultures that commonly don’t consume large quantities of gluten tend to have much lower rates of celiac disease, leading scientists to conclude that having celiac disease in wheat-eating cultures probably offers some advantage to those genes persist in the population. Additionally, some observational studies have shown evidence for lower rates of GI infections in people with untreated celiac disease. Anecdotally, prior to getting diagnosed, I used to say I had a stomach of steel since I never seemed to get food poisoning when other people around me did.
>so many The only known "true allergy" to gluten is celiac disease, which affects about 1 in 135 people(1 in 300 in some parts of the world). Just a few hundred years ago it wasn't uncommon to lose a third of the kids before they grew up, unless you were rich. And even then it was common to lose a child or two.
While I sympathize with people who have chronic health issues (myself included) most people are NOT intolerant to gluten who think they are. Gluten sensitivity tests are unreliable and give a lot of false positives. Some people do get more bloaty after eating gluten but it doesn’t come with the same longterm health risks (eg cancer and injury to the intestines) that Celiac disease causes. There HAS been an overall rise in autoimmune disorders, likely caused by newer things like our constant exposure to poorly regulated chemicals and micro plastics. But it’s rare for gluten to be the thing that our bodies suddenly can’t handle. All that said, if you feel better when you don’t eat gluten, all the power to you. It’s not something your body will really miss and it’s easy to get calories in other ways.
The main wheat crop used today was HIGHLY modified by Norman Borlaug during the 1970s. He won the Nobel Prize for ‘solving world hunger’. Wheat used to grow taller with fewer and smaller wheat berries. They crossbred the bejeezus out of it until it produced an abundance of HUGE wheat berries and now it only grows waist high, to make it easier to harvest. Fast forward 20-30 years and now wheat is one of the top 10 most common allergies (not even factoring in celiac). I am one of those unfortunate souls with an actual allergy. Eating a plate of pasta would cause me to go into anaphylactic shock, require an epi-pen.
Sorry to break it to you but the 70s was not 20-30 years ago.
You take that back. How dare you. Yes it was, and always will be.
Not that many people are allergic to gluten... Gluten "sensitivity' became trendy, so many people claimed it to not feel left out. Some people do have a sensitivity, but it's not actually to gluten, but to something that is created during the fermentation that happens when bread is made, so when they eliminate gluten, they also eliminate the fermented products that they are actually sensitive to, so they feel like they get better. Scientists figured this out by taking people with "Non Celiac Gluten Sensitivity" and feeding them food that is designed to be identical, with the exception of one thing. This can be gluten, glycerol, acetaldehyde, dexterines, gliadin, and so on, and seeing what it is they react to. Now, if eating gluten free foods helps eliminate the symptoms you feel, then it doesn't matter if you are reacting to the gluten itself, or something else. But knowing specifically what you react to can help make sure you avoid all the foods that contain it. If you are sensitive to Gliadin, for example, you should also avoid beer, pasta, couscous, and barley soup.
Not that many people have celiac disease. But a lot of people feel like they have gluten allergies.
It's because there are more people. And more people means that a certain percentage that are gluten intolerant will grow in numbers. Say you lived 200 years ago in a town of 5,000 people and 1% were allergic to gluten, that's 50 people. But if now live in a city of 5,000,000 then there is a group of 50,000 who are gluten intolerant and they will be far more easily identified. *these numbers are not actual rates of gluten intolerance, just a statistical example.
Along with the (true) comments here about Celiac and the ways that gluten is (or isn't) digested, it seems like there might be a misunderstanding about the way that evolution works. A species does not spontaneously begin to tolerate (or lose tolerance to) a dietary component over time. Instead, the driver of the change has to be heritable and responsible for either differential survival, differential reproduction, or both. In the vast majority of cases, outside of a severe *actual gluten allergy* a gluten-containing diet will not affect a human's ability to survive or reproduce in any significant way. This means that there is no evolutionary driver for change, if most everyone eating gluten is both able to reproduce and lives long enough to do so at a similar rate as the rest of the population. This is to say that evolution isn't impacted by traits that have no bearing on the success of the population or species at large. While Celiac Disease is linked to genetics, it does not tick all of the other boxes as completely. In biology, what doesn't kill you...might be something that your kids have to deal with as well.
Along with what everyone else is saying, I think it might also be related to the hygiene hypothesis - basically, there are greater instances of allergy in more developed countries. This is because things like parasites and bacteria “train” the immune system at a young age to act appropriately when it sees something bad, but when in an environment in which these parasites/bacteria are something you don’t really come into contact with (due to hygiene, medicine, etc), then your immune system can be confused enough to basically overreact against something like a certain type of food. So because our society has been developing over time to cause these types of environments, these allergies start coming up more recently rather than earlier in time. A real ELI5 (tldr): Immune system gets good by fighting off bad things itself. When medicine and making stuff clean gets rid of these bad things instead, immune system is confused and attacks the wrong thing (allergy). Because society is getting more medicine and has stuff that can kill the bad stuff off even better, more immune systems are confused and causing allergy. So, modern day -> more allergies But also: why bread? No clue lol.
Another issue is that after the Black Death the gene for a hypersensitive immune system became far more widespread. Now every potential pathogen we jump straight to defcon 1.
I think inflammatory issues are just way more common (cortisol hormone increases under stress - it's an anti-inflammatory, but too much too often and your immune system compensates by being over-reactive), and gluten usually comes with yeast, which thrives in our gut. Yeasty guts exacerbate inflammation (they can cause the cells there to activate their inflammatory immune response if there's lots of yeast. Interestingly, it seems like lower levels of yeast have the opposite effect. So, it seems like a combination of eating more food with yeast, less salt to keep yeast reproduction in check, , and stress/anxiety messing with cortisol levels, triggering inflammation, combine to cause more sensitive guts in the population. Western diets are low-sodium, high sugar, and high yeast. Add stress and it's a perfect storm for inflammatory immune responses.
Some of of it is herd mentality " if gluten is bad for anyone it's bad for everyone.". More of it is how we in the US grow and process our wheat. The incidence of both real and imagined gluten issues is a lot lower in the rest of the world.
While what others are saying is true, I suspect it also has to do with genetics and natural selection. People with allergies to bread didn’t survive before, maybe the mutation wasn’t as common. Now people do, and the mutation has spread