and lives in a crummy apartment with blackened windows. You’d be an idiot to date him; you know the type and you know to stay away. You’re not that desperate for company, and you’re not that hungry.
The tricky part is that one woman’s Bad Boy could be another woman’s Serial Killer. How to know? If you experience severe symptoms of food intolerance after a dangerous liaison, you’ve found yourself a killer. (I’ll say much more about those guys later.) For now, move away from these characters. Just walk calmly in the other direction and pretend you never saw them. That’s right, just keep walking.
The Bad Boys
For most of us, the Bad Boys are OK in small doses—meeting for coffee, maybe, but not dinner and a movie, and most definitely not the night. The Bad Boys tend to be gluten, dairy, processed soy foods, sugar, and, for some, caffeine.
Gluten
Gluten is a kind of protein found in the grains wheat, barley, and rye. That means gluten is found in any food made with wheat flour, including bread, cereal, pasta, baked goods, beer, and many more foods (see the chart on page 36). This Bad Boy can undermine your looks and overall health. If you turn out to be highly intolerant, eliminating gluten can change your life and rock your world.
Gluten messes with your ability to absorb nutrition in your small intestine. It can cause an immune response that damages the inner lining of the small intestine and leads to an inability to absorb nutrients well.
ISABELLE AND THOMAS Changing a Young Life
A few years ago, Isabelle came to me to talk about her son, Thomas. At the age of five, Thomas had a lot of allergies, a constant runny nose, and frequent illness. Isabelle had taken her son to many doctors, who had put him through numerous tests and treatments, but nothing seemed to help. Her mother’s intuition told Isabelle that something in Thomas’s diet was the real problem, but none of the doctors were interested in following up on his nutrition.
When we talked about the family history, I learned that his grandmother had celiac disease. In fact, because celiac is often passed on genetically, Thomas had been tested for it—with negative results. As I explained to Isabelle, the test ruled out celiac disease, but it didn’t rule out gluten intolerance. Isabelle agreed when I suggested removing gluten from Thomas’s diet for a couple of weeks, just to see if it helped relieve his symptoms.
It’s not easy to take away bread, pasta, breakfast cereal, and cookies from a five-year-old. Isabelle and I took a trip together to a nearby well-stocked health food store. We were able to find gluten-free substitutes for pretty much everything Thomas liked to eat.
I wasn’t sure if Isabelle could stick with the program—Thomas was definitely strong-willed about his favorite foods. Within just a week, Thomas was so much better that Isabelle decided to extend the trial for a month. At the end of that time, Thomas was a different boy. He no longer fought chronic colds and viruses. The chronic mucus and coughs were gone. Today, he’s growing tall and thriving.
Isabelle noticed that because she was sharing the foods Thomas ate, she was feeling better too! She converted her entire home to a gluten-free zone and has even gone on to persuade the local pizzeria to offer gluten-free pies.
People who have celiac disease, an autoimmune condition, can’t eat gluten at all. It can make them extremely ill, usually with diarrhea and abdominal pain. Celiac disease is the most severe form of gluten intolerance. It’s usually diagnosed in childhood; the only treatment is lifelong avoidance of gluten-containing foods.
True celiac disease is rare, but an intolerance for gluten, ranging from mild to severe, isn’t. The symptoms of gluten intolerance include diarrhea, bloating, gas, a sense of fullness, stomachache, and abdominal pain. Not all symptoms of gluten intolerance are in your digestive system, however. You might feel brain fog after eating a big bowl of pasta, or you might be irritable or depressed (too much time with Bad Boys can do that to you). A scaly, itchy skin rash known as dermatitis herpetiformis is another common sign.
Gluten intolerance used to be considered rare, but more and more research is showing that it’s a lot more common than we once thought. You could have a lot of expensive blood tests to check for gluten intolerance, but there’s a much simpler approach: Cut gluten out of your diet for a couple of weeks and see what happens. If you’re like some of my clients, you’ll be amazed at how much better you feel in just a few days. Gone are the annoying, embarrassing digestive problems that sent you scurrying out of the room.
Avoiding gluten is hard because it’s everywhere. Your morning toast and cereal, your lunchtime sandwich, your doughnut or crackers in the break room, your pasta at dinner, the croutons in your salad, the cookies for dessert—they all contain gluten. In addition, gluten is often added to foods and even medications. (The chart on page 36 shows some of the surprising ways gluten can find its way into you.) So, even if you have just a mild intolerance, you could still be getting so much gluten all day long that it’s seriously affecting you.
Because so many people have found that they have some degree of gluten intolerance, a whole industry of gluten-free foods has sprung up. This is a good thing—people with gluten intolerance deserve sandwiches and dessert, too—but be cautious. Sugar is a Bad Boy, and in gluten-free foods, sugar fills in for the wheat. It’s like ditching the Bad Boy biker to take up with the Bad Boy meth dealer.
If you’re highly intolerant, giving up gluten can change your life. You might discover that the symptoms you thought were yours to live with forever can go away just through changing your eating habits. It’s not that hard.
SYMPTOMS OF GLUTEN INTOLERANCE
The symptoms of gluten intolerance can vary quite a bit, which is why it is often misdiagnosed or even ignored. The symptoms can range from diarrhea and abdominal pain to irritability to infertility.
Common Symptoms
Abdominal bloating and pain
Constipation
Diarrhea
Gas
Pale, foul-smelling, or fatty stool
Vomiting
Weight loss
Less Common Symptoms
Arthritis
Bone or joint pain
Bone loss or osteoporosis
Canker sores inside the mouth
Depression or anxiety
Fatigue
Infertility or recurrent miscarriage
Irregular menstrual periods
Irritability
Iron-deficiency anemia
Itchy skin rash (dermatitis herpetiformis)
Seizures
Tingling or numbness in the hands and feet (neuropathy)
Gluten-free
