So, I tried asking it in askscience and my post got deleted, so I’m assuming this is a dumb question even though I’m just trying to understand a topic full of pseudoscience and it’s not a very uncommon assumption that gluten is just bad for health.
What I know is gluten can induce inflammatory response but for those who already have intolerance or allergy to it, but I’m not sure and nutrition is a very hard thing to get an answer for because there are a lot of misleading information. So, can anyone clarify this for me? I’ll gladly read some scientific articles too.
Thanks!
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For some people pure gluten can be inflammatory. Many factory baked breads just use pure yeast or other chemical compounds to fluff up bread consistently, leaving the gluten content unchanged. This is different from how we historically made bread with a combination of yeast and other microbes similar to a sourdough.
The combination of yeast and microbes helps break down the pure gluten to more easily digestible products that don’t have an inflammatory response. You’ll find that in cultures that normally eat handmade bread as their staple starch, gluten intolerance is not common.
Gluten isn’t a problem unless you have some specific gastrointestinal issues. We have a dedicated enzyme, glutenase, which digests it for us. For people with Celiac or (sometimes) IBS, that doesn’t help, but nobody else need be afraid of gluten.
The pseudoscience started from the following logic chain, near as I can tell:
1. Gluten is bad for people with bowel issues.
2. Therefore, gluten must be particularly hard to digest/bad for you.
3. Therefore, gluten is at least a little bad for everyone.
If biology were really that simple, we would be too simple to understand it. Suffice it to say that “health” isn’t an ordered list, there is no specific most or least healthy thing, what is healthy for one person might be lethal to another, and anyone claiming otherwise is mistaken or a fraud. Nothing is that simple in health.
Celiac here. If you are not celiac, you have absolutely no reason to avoid gluten. A truly gluten free diet is less nutritious, less rich in fiber, and higher in calories.
Eat the damn bread. For me.
Gluten isn’t a problem unless you have some specific issues with your digestive system, like Celiac Disease.
It’s more complex than something like a sugar, but that doesn’t mean it’s hard to digest for regular people.
It depends. Like most things, the answer is more complicated than both sides like to admit. (Side one being it is the cause of all suffering and side two being gluten is great unless you’re diagnosed Celiac). There could very well be a sliding scale of tolerance.
For example, look into inflammatory bowl syndrome. There are clear links to non-Celiac gluten intolerance [(reference)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4690093/).
If you think you might have a sensitivity, talk to your doctor. You can also try reducing/removing gluten for a few weeks and see if makes a noticeable difference.
As a gluten intolerant person I can say from experience that some products cause me more problens/discomfort than others. The bread/gluten products I sometimes consume living in Australia are worse for me than the ones I have eaten while travelling through South East Asia, and this is more noticeable when said products were freshly baked. And some products, like Sour Dough bread, usually are better for me also.
I think (been unable to find conclusive evidence) it’s likely to do with how these products are processed and preserved, as its the only difference I have been able to find.
Inflammation and migraine and gluten are not widely understood. A good rule of thumb is to mind your own business if you feel like having an opinion about someone else’s diet
Gluten is not generally inflammatory. The exception is if you have an genetic mutation that causes an immune disorder called celiac disease that causes your body to attack the lining of your gut when you eat gluten. It’s a lot more profound than being simply being inflammatory. A genetic test can confirm it.
Outside of that, people often complain about “gluten sensitivity”, which was long believed to be a psychiatric issue because tests showed that people that complained of gluten sensitivity were able to consume large quantities of gluten without incident. The problem with those studies was, of course, that they gave people gluten, and people were complaining about when they ate foods that had wheat (or other grains in it). Later studies suggest that some people were experiencing discomfort from bacteria in their gut fermenting certain carbohydrates in their diet (generally from foods that also contain gluten, though gluten itself had no role).
So, it appears some people get digestive issues (particularly gas and bloating) when they consume certain starches and complex sugars. This isn’t an inflammation response as such, but it can make them uncomfortable.
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