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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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.
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.
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
The short answer is that for most people, no, it’s not. If you have Celiac, a wheat allergy, or non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), it’s best to avoid any products that contain wheat as an ingredient or have been processed in a facility where wheat is present (which includes a whole lot of things). If you’re not sensitive to wheat or gluten, eating gluten free is NOT recommended, because it can wind up being less healthy overall (and more expensive).
Celiac people have to be extremely careful all the time. For NGCS people, symptoms can range from mild to extreme. For NGCS people, doctors think that gluten can trigger an innate immune response in the bowels that causes inflammation, diarrhea, bloating, and in extreme cases deterioration of intestinal walls, letting your poop leak out (sepsis). But that’s not yet a solidly supported theory – doctors still don’t know much about it, or even how to reliably diagnose it. Celiac has biological markers, I. e. specific things they can look for when your body reacts to gluten to give them a “yes/no” diagnosis. NGCS doesn’t, so it’s largely based on patient reports, which are not super reliable or scientific. But that doesn’t mean it’s made up, like some people seem to believe. Right now, it looks like NGCS is lumped in with IBS, another ambiguous condition that is likely a bunch of distinct ailments that doctors can’t ID or treat very effectively. It functions as a catch-all for malfunctioning bowels.
IANAD, I’m just regurgitating things I’ve read, like this paper, so I’m sure I don’t have it all correct. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6182669/
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