Celiac Disease. Ever heard of it? It’s amazing how many people haven’t. It’s a genetically passed on disease that makes gluten indigestible to about one in 125 Americans. This is what’s even more amazing: Approximately one million Americans have the disease and don’t know they have it. The average age for diagnosis is 42 years old! How could this be? I have a few theories.

First, even for those who have the double-recessive gene for Celiac Disease, the disease must still be “triggered” to become active. They will be asymptomatic until it is triggered. The trigger is often something like childbirth or surgery or emotional trauma. Sometimes the trigger is a virus and people wonder why it never clears up. This leads to my second theory, which is that it is often misdiagnosed. It looks like many other diseases, and manifests differently in different people. For a list of symptoms, click here.

Is it really important to know if you have celiacs disease? What if you suspect you might have it and you avoid having bagels and bread. If it’s going OK, do you really need to be tested? Actually, yes. It’s really important to find out if you have Celiac Disease or just a wheat allery, for example. Celiac Disease is not an allergy. You can’t have shots to increase your tolerance of gluten. The presence of gluten actually damages the intestinal lining of a person with Celiac Disease, so that all nutrients are poorly absorbed, creating other problems. Their immune system sees gluten as a threat and attacks it, creating a constant state of inflammation in the digestive tract. The damage is most often reversible, but it can get to the point of no return. The presence of gluten in the intestines of a person with Celiacs disease also puts them at increased risk for intestinal cancer and a host of other illnesses.

Where is gluten lurking in the food supply? It is the elastic protein in wheat, but kamut® and spelt are also varieties of wheat, and triticale is a wheat/rye hybrid. According to Wikipedia , “gliadin” is the problematic protein in wheat gluten, while “hordein” is the problematic protein in barley gluten and “secalin” is the one in rye. Apparently there’s another one in oats called “avenin” but the experts haven’t reached consensus on whether that protein is dangerous for people with Celiac Disease, since such a small percentage of celiacs are bothered by it. So besides being in all of those grains, gluten is also in beer, in the anticaking agent in some spices and in table salt, in caramel coloring and even in some types of mouthwash!

Here’s the bright side; Some of us have to go through years of solving the puzzle to good health, researching and trying one theory after another. If you find out you have Celiac Disease, there is a very clear path that is laid out for you and there is only one key to your good health. Yippee! Drink a toast to that (but make it with wine, not beer.)

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