Should We All Avoid Gluten?

November 5, 2018

Gluten-free diets are very popular these days. You may be interested in trying one, you may be annoyed by them (and everyone on them) or you may just be wondering, do I really NEED to eat gluten-free?

The answer is, as always, it depends.

We are seeing more instances of celiac and non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) lately, for sure. I just watched a great interview with Dr. Alessio Fasano, the leading researcher on celiac, NCGS and all things gluten. He believes this is happening for several reasons:

1. We all have much higher levels of inflammation than we used to because of the enormous amount of toxins in our environment, lack of exercise and decreased sleep that are common in our modern lifestyles.

2. Today's wheat is not yesterday's wheat. Yeast, used in bread-making, contains enzymes to dismantle the toxic elements in gluten. In the U.S., we make our bread so quickly (the process is accelerated artificially) that the load of toxic elements in bread isn't broken down. In Europe, the bread is typically made the old-fashioned way and the yeast has more time to break down all of those toxic elements.

3. Almost all of the wheat grown in the U.S. has been sprayed with a pesticide called glyphosate (Roundup) which has been shown to cause leaky gut.

4. We developed the gluten in our current wheat in order to increase yield and doughiness. In ancient Greece and Rome, 4% of the dry weight of wheat was gluten. About 1000 years ago, we increased the gluten to 8%. Nowadays it is up to 12%. This may not sound like much, but it makes a huge difference in how our bodies react.

Humans, by nature, cannot fully break down the proteins in wheat. If you're eating a healthy diet with well-sourced proteins, lots of veggies and good fats, a little bit of gluten is not going to kill you, assuming you are not genetically predisposed to be sensitive to gluten. However, since anyone eating gluten will have some negative change to their microbiome, if your diet is not particularly healthy, eating gluten can cause you big problems. And, if we were to eat a ton of gluten at once (or several times throughout the course of the day as many of us do), the toxic load becomes too much for the body to handle, leading to leaky gut and inflammation, the root of all disease.