Duck through the doorway of Sweet Christine’s Bakery in Kennett
Square, Pa., and you’re enveloped by the sights and smells of a classic
neighborhood bakery. But what makes this bakery unusual is that
everything from vanilla cupcakes to chewy chocolate-chip cookies to
baguettes is gluten-free, baked with ingredients such as brown rice
flour and tapioca, rather than wheat. As a result, the bakery has become
a safe haven for people with both celiac disease and gluten
intolerances.
Lisa Stevens, 41, the bakery’s wholesale manager, spent years
struggling with digestive issues before she learned she had a problem
with gluten nearly four years ago: “I was always the little girl with
the tummy ache,” Stevens recalls. But, as she grew older, her ills
spread beyond her belly. In her 20s, she was plagued by debilitating
headaches, joint pain and fatigue. “I could hardly get out of bed in the
morning,” she says. “I was 25 but felt 85.”
She bounced from doctor to doctor with no diagnosis. Finally, a
friend with celiac disease insisted Stevens experiment by cutting gluten
from her diet. Within two weeks of going gluten-free, her stomach
stopped hurting after meals — a first. Within a few short months, her
fatigue, joint pain and headaches all vanished. Testing confirmed her
suspicion — gluten was the guilty party. But Stevens doesn’t have celiac
disease; she has an intolerance to gluten, an increasingly common
diagnosis.
As scientists chip away at the mountain of health problems caused by
the modern American diet, a troubling finding is emerging. Gluten,
present in our most popular grains, is being linked not only to celiac
disease, an autoimmune disorder affecting one out of 100 Americans, but
also to non-celiac gluten intolerance, which afflicts many millions
more.
Non-celiac gluten intolerance is a lesser-understood but
no-less-serious condition capable of igniting inflammation, the first
stop on a path toward chronic illness. Yet not all doctors understand
the condition or take it seriously, says New York City naturopathic
doctor Donielle Wilson, ND: “These people need help, but conventional
medical practitioners aren’t listening.”
Feeding the consternation of practitioners like Wilson is that many
of their colleagues, including most gastroenterologists and even some
celiac specialists, hesitate to acknowledge that any gluten-related
disorder beyond celiac disease even exists. “The perception is that if
you don’t have celiac disease, you don’t have a problem,” says Stephen
Wangen, ND, a board-certified and licensed naturopathic physician in
Seattle and author of Healthier Without Wheat (Innate Health Publishing, 2009).
But people with non-celiac gluten intolerance have plenty of
problems, as evidenced by a 2009 study in the Journal of the American
Medical Association, which found an increased risk of death among
patients with both celiac and other types of gluten-related
inflammation. The risk of mortality, mostly from heart disease and
cancer (two leading inflammatory conditions), was an alarming 39 percent
higher in people with celiac disease and a jaw-dropping 72 percent
higher in people with gluten-related inflammation.
“This is ground-breaking research that proves you don’t have to have
full-blown celiac disease to have serious health problems from eating
gluten,” says Mark Hyman, MD, chairman of the Institute of Functional
Medicine and founder of the UltraWellness Center in Lenox, Mass.
If that forecast sounds dire, take heart. There’s a lot you can do to
dodge the gluten bullet. It starts with understanding what gluten
intolerance is, and why it has become such a huge problem for so many.
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