As a celiac sufferer, I have gotten every douchey little remark you can possibly imagine about my highly necessary abstinence from gluten. “Why is everyone suddenly allergic to gluten,” I hear from get-off-my-lawners pretending they’re asking in good faith.
It’s not everyone, it’s not sudden, and it’s not an allergy.
Today’s Moment of Science… a brief history of celiac disease.
All these discussions about gluten were not brought upon us as a way to sell expensive bread that tastes like failure. It’s likely humans have had issues with various grains since the beginning of humans and grains. The earliest identified case of celiac disease was found in a well preserved body from Cosa, Italy, estimated to be from the first century. A cluster of symptoms we now know to be celiac disease was observed and identified as early as 50AD by Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia. He deemed it the ‘koiliakos,” from the Greek word for abdomen, roughly meaning “celiac affection.”
He said “if the stomach be irretentive of the food and if it pass through undigested and crude, and nothing ascends into the body, we call such persons celiacs.”
That was such a lovely way of saying “celiac patients have nuclear shits.”
Unfortunately he thought it was caused by drinking too much cold water, and we didn’t get much further than that for centuries. The problem with figuring out what caused celiac disease for the forward thinking physician from two millennia ago? It had an inconsistent presentation with highly varied symptoms, could start wreaking havoc at any point in the patient’s life, and even if some doctor managed to figure out that it was the bread? There’s also refractory celiac disease, in which cutting out gluten does precisely bupkis.
Before lab testing, the best they could do for managing it was science the old fashioned way: fuck around and find out.
Eventually- like the late 1880s eventually- London physician Samuel Gee suggested that since it was a digestive system issue, maybe something being digested caused it. Unfortunately his suggestions for what to eat and what to avoid were, well, bad. He did figure out that people with celiac often had issues with dairy and recommended avoiding it, but his various dietary attempts to fix it never hit the mark. To be fair, his all mussel diet would have been better than his ‘raw meat and toast’ diet.
In the early 1900s, Dr. Chris Herter observed that fats were, in general, tolerated better than carbohydrates in celiac patients, and the disease was sometimes referred to as Gee-Herter disease. Last in our line-up of also-rans, in 1924 Dr. Sidney Haas tried out patients on a diet of bananas. Which, to be fair, worked, albeit by cutting out way more variety from the diet than necessary. Before the banana diet, about 30% of children with celiac disease died. It may have been a culinary snoozefest, but Dr. Haas’s banana diet successfully managed celiac disease for about twenty years.
It may have taken decades longer to figure it out if it hadn’t been for World War II.
In the Netherlands during WWII, in the midst of a famine, Dr. Willem Karel Dicke noticed that mortality rate for his celiac patients had plummeted. To zilch. Something that had also plummeted during this time: bread rations. By 1944 he developed a wheat-free diet, a few years later observing it wasn’t just wheat, but a component of barley and rye that caused the symptoms. Contrary to his predecessor’s ideas that it had been carbs, Dr. Dicke was the first to recognize it was a protein common to the three grains: gluten.
In the mid 1950s, gastroenterologist Margot Shiner developed a new technique that was used to biopsy the small intestine in a patient with celiac disease. It confirmed that the lining of the small intestine was damaged, leading to malabsorption.
Breakthroughs trickled in from here. In the 1960s, the anti-gliadin antibody was discovered. Through the course of the 1980s it was documented that celiac disease is often comorbid with other autoimmune diseases, and it took until the 1990s for celiac to be widely recognized as an autoimmune disease. Genetic factors are now better understood, and various drugs and treatments have been in development for over a decade.
From the patient’s point of view, nothing much has really changed since the 1950s. There are more gluten free options now, which is great, but treatment is still avoiding bread that chews worth a fuck.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, begging you please, if someone tells you they can’t eat gluten? Don’t ask why, just give them the stupid fucking sadness bread.
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Yes, I sympathize with sufferers of celiac disease. The problem is that gluten has been demonized and consequently people avoid it who have absolutely no need to. When I tell people that I’m vegan, often their first response is, “Oh, and do you avoid gluten too?” As if that makes any sense at all. When I say, “No, I don’t have celiac disease,” they seem confused, as if I said something irrelevant. Perhaps you should do an article explaining that avoiding gluten if you don’t have celiac disease is a silly idea and can contribute to poorer nutrition unless you’re careful. Anyway, thanks for the article and for the celiac-sufferer’s perspective. My sister convinced everyone in my family to go one month gluten-free and it was not a fun month, so I’m glad I don’t have to live like that.
thought bodies were supposed to last a lifetime wih min maintenance
must suck
“Don’t ask why, just give them the stupid fucking sadness bread.”
HAHAHAHA. As someone living with celiac disease for almost 40 years, I’ve been asked this too many times and also given that sadness bread. Solidarity.
I’d be more along the lines of, “You and me are going through the foods, I really don’t want you getting ill over hidden gluten, which is damned near everywhere”.
Everything with gluten gets red tagged and my rye and barley remains tightly stoppered, as it’s all mine. 😉
Poisoning one’s guest is a hallmark of a lousy host.
The only other item I routinely purge from my pantry is GMO free foods that have no GMO variety available, but that’s just out of disgust with faithless advertising.