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I know it's cool to hate on things you don't understand yet, but Gluten (or more likely a sub-component of it) is a real problem for some of us.

Yes, this is the response I always get. I don't hate anyone. I'm 100 percent certain you don't believe me.

I can pose a question. Do you think it helps people who are seriously allergic to gluten when bottled water manufacturers put notices on their water that it contains no gluten:

http://claraglutenfreewater.co...

Some celiac sufferer's responses to gluten free water.

http://www.celiac.com/gluten-f...

Particularly as selective and genetically modified plant breeding has increased the average Gluten content of wheat by 40 times or more. Far above what anyone was exposed to 30 or 40 years ago.

SIde note: vegans for years have eaten pure gluten as a meat substitute. Seitan, they call it

http://vegetarian.about.com/od...

It's pretty much 100 percent gluten. And different ypes of flour have different amounts of gluten in them. This is pretty much where I address your increased amoount of gluten statement.

http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/wh...

Specifically speaking Cake flour is 7-9 percent gluten. Pastry is 9-10 percent Gluten Bread flour is 12-15 percent, "High gluten" flour is 14 percent. The essential gluten that is added to flours like rye in breadmaking is 45 percent gluten. No one eats that essential gluten except vegans making seitan - you couldn't make bread with that if you tried - it is almost all protein, not starch.

The amounts of gluten are critical to the purpose of the bread. If you raise or lower them, the wheat flour doesn't function correctly.

So your 40 times number is a little suspect.

You grandfather's wheat was not the same as today's wheat.

Even if so, the flour/gluten ratio's have not changes for the intended purpose. You're not going to make good cakes with High Gluten flour, and cake flour to make regular bread isn't going to be very good either. If modern day flower contains 40 times more gluten, they will have to take most of it out to get it to act correctly.

I am Gluten sensitive at least, and possibly allergic. I eat so little of it now that allergy tests are useless, but if I eat more than a trace amount I have measurable digestive and mental difficulties lasting roughly 12 hours from ingestion.

Before removing wheat from my diet, I would regularly run to the bathroom 5-8 times a day to painfully squeeze out liquidy, gooey mucas instead of anything even remotely solid.

That really sucks. Sounds like what happened to me when I went vegetarian for a while. Took several months to get back to normal after figuring out I was not meant to be vegan.

So be glad that you're not Gluten-sensitive, or at least not noticeably so, and stop hating on what is most certainly not a fad.

I am fortunate, yet I can tell you I've been told to go die in a fire by people, from gluten freeers, and anti-vaxxers saying that my calling GF diets or avoiding vaccines is a fad. Time to revisit that hate thing and who's handing it out.

This is simply science and public awareness catching up to the consequences of plant breeding decisions made years ago for the sake of higher and higher yields, without considering the nutritional quality of the grains that would be harvested.

Oh - you simply must show me the links to the documnets that prove that science has reached a consensus to all you speak about.

Here's some stuff you might want to watch and read.

Scientific evidence that you exist is non-existent.

I guess a neurology journal and multiple studies aren't "scientific" in your idiotic opinion.

http://migraine.com/blog/expert-featured-article/gluten-sensitivity-and-migraines/
http://www.celiac.com/articles/121/1/Migraine-Headaches-Gluten-Triggers-Severe-Headaches-in-Sensitive-Individuals/Page1.html

You're right, many foods are difficult to digest raw, but it's a matter of severity. Eat enough legumes (the seeds/bean part) raw and there's a good chance of death. Even when soaked and cooked they're still toxic, but then again, so are mushrooms.

Meat is relatively easy to digest raw. I've already mentioned sashimi, but red meat is too. Cooking accomplishes three things: it increases the caloric content, it alters/improves the flavour, and, important to industrial agriculture, it kills pathogens. Cooking, however, is not necessary from a digestive standpoint. Most people have no difficulty digesting a rare steak.

Many grains lack some of the essential amino acids. Carefully combining grains can provide all the essential amino acids. It's more nutritive to let a ruminant eat the grasses/grains and then eat the ruminant (not to mention the energy and input costs involved with industrial crop growing).

When it comes to the toxicity of grains, I'll skip the fungi that may be present. Phytic acid can interfere with the absorption of minerals, including calcium, magnesium, iron, copper and zinc, which are the main non-caloric nutrition in grains. Gliadin, a gluten protein and the cause of celiac disease, is an indigestible protein that gets trapped in the villi of the intestines causing inflammation, even in non-celiac individuals.

The high carbohydrate concentrations of grains wreak havoc on the metabolic system. Here's a good sumary of the trouble with eating high amounts of carbohydrates.

I'd say an ideal diet consists primarily of vegetables. Fruits, while nutrient dense, shouldn't make up a large part of the diet due to the high carbohydrate content. Calories should come largely from fat and animal protein. I avoid industrial agriculture products when possible. The pesticides, fungicides, antibiotics, colouring, preservatives, etc., present are obviously not good for you. Furthermore, much like a poor diet affects human health, so does a poor diet affect an animal's health. Corn-fed animal meat is far higher in omega 6 fats, and far lower in omega 3 fats than optimal. A high omega 6/3 fats ratio in the diet promotes many diseases and should be avoided.

I see no reason not to cook. I simply suggest eating only foods that are okay to eat raw. I would, however, avoid charring food as doing so creates carcinogens.

And of course, to each his or her own. :-)

There's a difference between "sensitivity" and "allergy"

I would object to the idea that there's a real line between the two. The difference between a mild allergy and a bad sensitivity is not so clear, and that's particularly obvious when it comes to gluten. The difference between Idiopathic gluten sensitivity and the obvious allergy of celiac disease is quite fuzzy.

Diagnosing someone with celiac disease is hard. The sort of tissue damage they look for on the biopsy can heal if it's mild, only showing up as mild inflammation which may not even be visible. That means that it can only prove you do have celiac disease, not really the inverse. Mild gluten sensitivity cases can show up on something like an antigliadin antibody test even if there's no visible damage to the tissue yet.

There's plenty of data showing gluten causes migraines in some people; see Migraine Headaches: Gluten Triggers Severe Headaches in Sensitive Individuals and Migraine Linked to Celiac Disease as two examples, there are a couple more. Your wife probably has something in the Gluten-sensitive idiopathic neuropathies family of issues.

44 seems pretty young to be troubled with arthritis. I'm 41, and have some physical ailments, but I was never resigned to accept them and let that be the last word.

I'm not a doctor and not offering medical advice, but I suggest that if you are having other symptoms besides the arthritis, your body may be reacting to something. In my case, I found that I was suffering from gluten intolerance or celiac disease. Gluten is found in wheat, barley, and rye. Countless foods in the supermarket have wheat flour (including meat products!) and is found in places you wouldn't expect. This disease is severely underdiagnosed in people (meaning that 3,000,000 people have it, but 95% are undiagnosed or diagnosed with something else caused by gluten intolerance), and estimates are that 1% of the population has it. In my case, this disease was masquerading as other things. The only way that I'm making progress is by being my own advocate, as all the doctors have failed me in the past.

Celiac disease and arthritis

This is just meant as a heads up.

I'd imagine a communion wafer is already low calorie. Now, is it low carb?

Actually, more importantly, is it gluten free?

Celiac disease is actually quite common (my mom has it), and it very, very, very undiagnosed in the US. In Ireland I know (from yet another Celiac friend) and in Europe I'm pretty sure that knowledge of Ciliac disease is greater there, and it is more likely to be diagnosed. They actually have entire aisles in grocery stores devoted to gluten-free products, and restaurants puts notes by dishes in restaurants that are gluten-free (meaning not containing even a small amount of gluten-containing flour).

It tends to be genetic, so I may have it myself, but I dread taking the test and finding out that I have to give up pasta. Still, I guess if it's a battle between the food I love and my health, I'll probably choose my health.

Anyone want to guess how much weight i lost with that kind of shock to my system? I only weighed 126 to start with, and most of me was muscle. I dropped to 106. And here's the important part: that kind of weight loss does damage. Every time. You're making a bet, on a high-protien diet, that your risk of injury from losing weight that way is less than your injury from remaining obese. Which is why my nutritionists and the other members of my medical team- that's right, i said team were in earnest when they told me that this is NOT a good way to lose weight- ever. THey told me that Atkins was not a fraud, but to take that idea to an extreme the way people do is a very bad idea. One piece of bread is not enough carbohydrates to stave off gout or other diet-linked damages.

So what am i doing now? Well, i weigh about 116, which is due to a serious effort to eat more, period. If i can take in more than the 1632 calories that i burn on an average day, I will probably gain weight. Some of those have to be carbohydrates, enough to keep my body in the habit of using them as fuel. The kicker is this- I NEVER liked rice. And there's wheat in most soy sauce, so that rules out the take-out diet.

My point: extremity is bad, you're likely to lose weight on the Atkins diet, and it's likely to do you lasting harm, as evidenced by how fast they started trying to get me off my accidental wander onto it. I'm holding steady at 116, and I miss my coca cola breakfasts. (I'd also point out that most of the geeks I know are in great shape, and some of them are slashdotters. So some slashdotters are in great shape.)

Gattaca, the name was taken from the initials used for the base pairs of DNA.

The problem with the hypothesized Gattacan universe is that just because you have a gene doesn't mean it'll be expressed. For example, I have celiac disease, which is genetic. Of the studies done, one involved identical twins, where it was found that where one twin expressed the disease, there was a 70% chance the other did.

Another study (I've been looking for it again) was on Type I diabetes. Basically, the study demonstrated that if one a) had the gene, b) was given cow's milk prior to 9 months of age, and c) had the third bout of influenza prior to puberty, the gene would be expressed.

Thus, I believe we'll develop rulesets, given a person's genes, of how NOT to express undesirable traits.

Thus, I see the future not in eugenics (as Gattaca would have us believe) but rather in providing information on working around genetic issues. To me, that is a far more plausible (and pleasant, if somewhat regimented) future.

_Deirdre