New Study Confirming Biological Explanation for Wheat Sensitivity

​Just like we see super foods come in and out of vogue there are just as popular food trends requiring eliminating foods. Recent trendy foods that are often the scapegoat in diet discomfort include wheat, soy, corn, or entire macronutrients like the 90's fad to eliminate fat! Some people avoid foods for preference, taste, affordability, health beliefs or because they think they may be having some sort of allergic or sensitivity reaction.

I'd say from my own personal qualitative perspective the most recent and most popular food to avoid is not even a food, it's a protein: GLUTEN. Gluten is just ONE of the proteins found in wheat, barley, and rye. Wheat flour is used to make most breads, cereals, pastas, basically anything good, let's be serious. 

There is a condition called Celiac where people have a genetic predisposition and then have some sort of insult factor that enters and causes an individuals immune system to attack the important finger-like absorptive villi in the intestines when gluten is present, this makes them very, very sick and often causes extreme weight loss and malnutrition. But, many other people who do not have Celiac disease have begun avoiding gluten and thereby wheat products. Some do it because so is the herd, other because they can link some sort of symptom to eating wheat like bloating, fatigue, abdominal pain or diarrhea. 

I am happy to report another study coming out of Columbia University Medical Center which was recently published in GUT, a leading international journal in gastroenterology, evidences a biologic basis, and scientific support for something we have long described as leaky gut syndrome. You can read about the study here in Science Daily.

​I'll talk about the actual mechanism of leaky gut and why it can cause food sensitivities in a future post. For now I would just like to report the findings, that individuals with Non-Celiac Wheat Sensitivity were found to have an immune instigated inflammatory response to wheat intake in this study.  This shows that some symptoms of wheat sensitivity may not be imagined, and that there is a link in what is estimated to be 1% of the US population.