gut syndrome, can cause lots of different health issues.
Discovering the Benefits of a Gluten-Free Lifestyle
The gluten-free lifestyle isn’t about your diet. Sure, this book talks about food, but the diet itself takes up only a few pages. Being gluten-free involves a lot more than just cutting gluten out of your diet. It affects every aspect of your life, from how you communicate and with whom, to how you handle ordering at restaurants, attending social functions, and dealing with emotional challenges.
It’s important to take control of your diet – or, if it’s your kids who are gluten-free, help them gain and retain control. Going gluten-free also gives you an opportunity to reach out and help others who may be embarking upon the wonderful world of gluten freedom, as well as a chance to discover more about nutrition and what you’re actually putting into your body on a daily basis. If that sounds like a lot of work, relax. You hold in your very hands the book that guides you through it. And not only can you feel better, but you also can feel better about yourself!
You have lots of company. The gluten-free movement is sweeping the nation for plenty of reasons, but the one that stands out is that when people give up gluten, they often feel better. This section tells you what the gluten-free diet can do for your body – the benefits you can enjoy in addition to all the emotional perks of the lifestyle.
People today live in a quick-fix, panacea-pursuing, pill-popping, make-me-better-fast society, and if they see promise of a quick way to fix what’s ailin’ them, they’re buyin’ it. Changing both your diet and your lifestyle is neither quick nor easy, but the benefits of going gluten-free can be fantastic – no surgery or medication required!
Food is fuel – it’s supposed to give you energy and make you feel good, not make you hurt. But when you eat things that your body doesn’t like for some reason, it has a sometimes not-so-subtle way of telling you to knock it off. Food that your body objects to can cause gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, and nausea – and even symptoms that don’t seem to be associated with the gastrointestinal tract, like headaches, fatigue, depression, joint pain, and respiratory distress.
Luckily, when you figure out which foods your body doesn’t approve of, you can stop eating them, and then your body stops being so pouty. In fact, if you feed it right, your body can make you feel great in lots of different ways.
When gluten is making you sick, nasty battles are going on inside your gut. Hairlike structures called villi line your small intestine. The job of the villi is to increase the surface area of the small intestine so it can absorb more nutrients. Villi protrude (picture fingers sticking up) so that they have more surface area to absorb important nutrients.
For people who have gluten intolerance, the body sees gluten as a toxin and attacks the gluten molecule. In doing so, it also inadvertently attacks the villi, and those villi get blunted and shortened, sometimes to the extreme of becoming completely flat. This attack can reduce their ability to absorb nutrients – sometimes dramatically.
Blunted and flat villi can’t absorb stuff so well, so those good-for-ya nutrients just slide right by and you don’t get enough of the important vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that are vital for good physical and emotional health. You may develop what’s called malabsorption and become poorly nourished.
Don’t worry! This story has a happy ending. Your villi are tenacious little things, and when you quit eating gluten, they begin to heal right away. Before you know it, your villi grow back and absorb nutrients again, and your health is fully restored. In other words, abstinence makes the gut grow stronger.
By the way, lactase, which is the enzyme that breaks down the sugar lactose, is produced in the tip of the villi. When the villi get blunted, sometimes your ability to digest lactose decreases and you become lactose intolerant. When you quit eating gluten and the villi heal, you may be able to tolerate dairy foods again.
Twelfth-century physician Maimonides said, “Man should strive to have his intestines relaxed all the days of his life.” No doubt! When your intestines aren’t relaxed – or when they’re downright edgy or uptight – they affect all your other parts, too. It’s kind of like when you’re in a really good mood and your best friend is grumpy – the situation can make you grumpy, too; one cantankerous intestine can be a buzz-kill for the entire body.
In a way, the body’s reaction to gluten doesn’t compute. For some people, eating gluten can cause headaches, fatigue, joint pain, depression, or infertility; at first, those types of symptoms may seem unrelated to something going on in your gut, much less something you eat – much less something as common in your diet as wheat.
But those problems – and about 250 others – are symptoms of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. People with celiac disease or gluten sensitivity do sometimes have gastrointestinal symptoms, but more often the symptoms are extraintestinal, meaning they take place outside the intestinal tract.
If your body has problems with gluten, the gluten-free diet may help relieve lots of symptoms, such as these:
✔ Fatigue
✔ Gastrointestinal distress (gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, heartburn, and acid reflux)
✔ Headaches (including migraines)
✔ Inability to concentrate
✔ Weight gain or weight loss
✔ Infertility
✔ Joint, bone, or muscle pain
✔ Depression and anxiety
✔ Respiratory problems
The list’s impressive, isn’t it? The idea that eliminating one thing from your diet – gluten – could improve so many different conditions is almost hard to believe. Yet it’s true – and it really makes sense when you realize that if the food you’re eating is toxic to your body, your body’s going to scream in lots of different ways.
In people with gluten intolerance, eating gluten may make the symptoms of some psychiatric conditions worse. Some of the most fascinating findings recently indicate that removing gluten from the diet can improve behaviors of people with these conditions:
✔ Autism
✔ Schizophrenia and other mood disorders
✔ Attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (ADD/ADHD)
Millions of people have wheat allergies, which are different from gluten sensitivity or celiac disease – and they, too, improve dramatically on a wheat-free/gluten-free diet.
But beyond the obvious improvement you enjoy if you have an intolerance, other conditions and symptoms can improve on a wheat-free diet, such as PMS and menopausal symptoms. Eliminating wheat may even slow or reverse the signs of aging, reducing wrinkles and improving the tone and texture of skin.
Deciding Whether You Should Be Gluten'Free
Many people who go gluten-free do so not because they have any of the conditions listed in this section, but because they’re striving for a healthier lifestyle.
The authors of this book believe gluten isn’t good for anyone (more on that in Chapter
