gluten free familyA mum's blog about gluten-free living in Australia

[6/12/09]  There is a new fad in town and it is not about what you do and don’t eat. Its about bagging out we people on gluten free diets.

TV3news in New Zealand wags its finger at us, warning that unless we have tested positive for coeliac, we are all wasting our money, and a USnews title has a similarly cautionary tale to tell about our fickle diet fancies.

Apparently we are all suffering from some hysterical delusion in which we imagine that we are actually benefiting from the stupendous amount of effort it takes to avoid gluten in our diets.

They have wheeled out the same type of doctors as our first GP and paediatrician who both assured me my son had absolutely no reaction to gluten after an apparently definitive blood test.

These people believe that only those with a positive result to coeliac testing are in any way responsive to gluten, and the rest of us are pathetic wannabes just trying to jump on their bandwagon.

These kind of misguided reports are not only shortchanging those poor souls that really do have a serious gluten sensitivity, but after testing negative to coeliac are left with no further medical support. They also do little to convince our own friends and relatives that we are not as balmy as they always suspected for removing one of the western world’s staple food from our diets.

Thank goodness for our current paediatrician who only needed one glimpse of my son’s faltering growth chart to suggest trialing a gluten free diet (I had honestly hoped he would not make that recommendation but in retrospect it was the nudge I needed).

Fortunately Dr Rodney Ford in New Zealand has also been studying affects of gluten on our minds and bodies and developed some very interesting ideas about why so many of us are starting to get sick from it despite what our doctors tell us. His research also indicates that the current testing methodology for gluten sensitivity might be quite deficient.

Of course I would never want to downplay the serious medical concerns of coeliacs, who unlike my son, can suffer devastating consequences from a trace fragment of gluten carelessly slipped into a pasta sauce. And when it comes to the food preparation business, there really is no excuse for ignorance about the distinction between the two conditions.

But I just don’t understand why those gluten-sceptic doctors think anyone of sound mind would take on a gluten free diet as a fickle, passing fad. Gluten free living is no picnic. It is a daily, difficult slog of deprivation and compromise in addition to the expense.

In fact the only reason I stick with it is that in return for my efforts I get a child that can actually sit down and eat a meal and gain weight from it, and no longer spends several hours most evenings grizzling for no observable reason. Oh, and I don’t get my own miserable, crippling stomach aches anymore.

But I probably  just imagined all of that.

LH

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