Email required. Moreover, some parents, believing that ingesting gluten is detrimental for their health, adopt gluten-free diets for their children. People who suspect they may have a gluten-related disorder should eliminate gluten from their diet before seeing their doctor. Kemppainen T. In the US, an estimated 83 percent of people who suffer from celiac disease are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. We live in an age of gluten-phobia, which some have pointed out is more religion than science. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if your goal is to lose weight, a gluten-free diet isn’t the golden ticket.
The percentage of Americans who follow a gluten-free diet is more than three times higher than the percentage of Americans with celiac disease, the main medical reason the diet is recommended, a new estimate suggests. Researchers found that between and , the percentage of people in the U. Celiac disease is a disorder in which people can’t digest gluten normally. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. In people with the condition, eating the protein prompts the immune system to attack the small intestine, leading to digestive complaints, such as diarrhea, bloating and weight loss. Some people may also give up gluten if they have an allergy to wheat. The researchers estimated that 1. The new study is the first to use nationally representative data to describe trends over time in both the prevalence of people with celiac disease and the percentage of people following a gluten-free diet without a medical need to do so, said study lead author Dr.
The gluten-free movement was launched for people with Celiac disease, an ailment that prohibits the body from digesting gluten normally and can cause some uncomfortable side effects for sufferers. Celiac patients have good reason to go gluten-free: a regular diet might cause diarrhea or painful bloating, flatulence and heartburn, and can lead to weight loss and malnutrition. The authors of the study tracked about 22, annual surveys from conducted by the Centers for Disease Control that asked participants if they had Celiac disease and whether or not they followed a gluten-free diet. They found the number of Americans with Celiac remained fairly steady, rising slightly from. Yet during that same time period, the number of participants in the survey who said they followed a gluten-free diet more than tripled. From ,. Hyun-seok Kim, a resident in internal medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, told Live Science that the diet was particularly prevalent among three groups: females, young adults ages , and non-Hispanic whites. Daphne Miller, an associate clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a commentary accompanying the research. Originally posted on January 3, am.