Until about four months ago, I didn’t even know what gluten was. I mean, I knew it was something in wheat, and I knew that health food stores seemed to stock things that were free from it. But it wasn’t until I got a call from my mother one day, announcing that my sister had finally found out what had been making her vaguely sick for years, and very sick for weeks, that I got a crash course in the ins and outs of gluten. My sister had been diagnosed with Celiac Disease, and I didn’t know it at the time, but my diet was about to change dramatically.

Celiac disease is best defined as a serious, genetic, gluten intolerance. Gluten, as it turns out, is not just in wheat, but also in barley, spelt and kamut, and is hidden in a LOT of processed foods under a hundred funny names (another good reason to avoid them). People with Celiac disease can’t digest gluten at all, and their bodies actually begin to destroy their small intestines in response to it. Over time, this leads to malabsorption of nutrients, as it’s the small intestine that’s responsible for taking the food that your stomach has broken down, and transporting the nutrients out into the bloodstream. “Classic” symptoms of celiac disease are diarrhea, weight loss, and bloating. However, the list of possible symptoms is enormous, and not all digestive related. Many people find that their fibromyalgia, their migraines, or their ADHD symptoms disappear once they remove gluten from their diet. To complicate things even further, a huge number of celiacs actually experience NO symptoms at all – even while their small intestines are being destroyed. It’s a complex disease.

Worst of all, most MDs in North America are totally clueless about it. The average Celiac waits 8-11 years for their diagnosis, often suffering badly in the meantime, often being prescribed drugs for other conditions (which frequently resolve as soon as the gluten problem is figured out).