Food sensitivities can manifest not only in a myriad of diseases. Not only that, but chronic illness often involves a state of inappropriate vigilance of our immune/defense system in which food allergy gets involved even if it is not the cause of the problem, leading then to chronic inflammation – which translates into disease.

Most people, including doctors, do not receive any formal nutrition education, so they simply will not believe that something as ordinary as our daily bread will wreak so much havoc on our health.  They won’t believe that a lot of people have difficulty with the digestion and biochemical processing of the gluten found in grains like wheat, barley, and rye.

Approximately one out of a hundred people has gluten intolerance, which can be manifested in about any possible symptom you can think of – and it is estimated that milder forms of gluten sensitivity may affect up to one-third of the American population. The incidence of gluten sensitivity is actually on the rise.

Sensitivity to gluten involves a delayed reaction involving the IgG antibodies of our immune/defense system, meaning that you won’t necessarily get an immediate reaction to gluten. In fact, you can get a reaction to gluten three days after eating it. Or you can eat gluten one day and nothing happens, but when you eat gluten  later on, you will have symptoms. Because wheat and other gluten containing foods may involve a delayed immune/defense reaction, alleviating gluten’s effects on your health may take weeks – or even months – after you stop eating such foods. Eliminating gluten from your diet not only helps to improve mood symptoms, but autistic children and people with schizophrenia will often improve enough on a gluten-free diet to the extent that more practitioners everyday consider it a priority treatment as more research emerges about the dangers of gluten sensitivity. In fact, there is evidence of a causative association between gluten intolerance and migraine headaches, fatigue, depression, any sort of chronic digestive problems (like abdominal pain or discomfort, diarrhea, constipation, irritable bowel, undigested food in stools, gastroesophageal reflux), difficulty gaining or losing weight, osteoporosis, infertility, complications of pregnancy such as miscarriage, diabetes, thyroid problems, schizophrenia, autism, psoriasis and other skin problems, abnormal hair loss, anemia, mouth sores, arthritis, cancers (especially of the small bowel, lymphomas, esophageal),  liver disease of unknown origin, malabsorption of nutrients and nutritional deficiency such as iron, folic acid, calcium, magnesium and fat soluble vitamins, neurological symptoms such as peripheral neuropathy, ataxia, epilepsy, cognitive dysfunction, depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, dementia. Add to that list systemic lupus erythematosis, type 1 diabetes, vascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis and Sjogren’s syndrome and other autoimmune diseases. Read more…