The Scapegoating of Gluten

The chances are, you or someone you know believes they have a problem with gluten. Just as with other fad diets such as Atkins and South Beach, the increasingly popular gluten-free diet is being showcased in lifestyle magazines and TV talkshows as the new solution to our nation's weight and health problems. But are we scapegoating gluten unnecessarily? I do believe it works for many people (and I myself avoided gluten for five years), but the diet disrupts so many variables in the standard American diet that it's difficult to identify why it works. Giving up donuts, pepperoni pizza, Big Mac meals, and chocolate cake may make you thinner and healthier, but not necessarily because of the gluten these foods contain.

A couple of posts back I talked about the parable of stone soup, which describes a village solving a problem but misidentifying the true source of the solution. Could the gluten restriction benefit us for some reason besides the gluten itself? Could gluten-free diets be the stone in a stone soup, a lie that nevertheless motivates something positive?

Despite the accumulation of more and more data, many questions in nutritional science still lack general agreement, and there are seldom simple explanations even where consensus exists. Multiple theories often fit the same data set, and after a theory has been adopted selection bias filters out any new data that doesn't fit.

If you intentionally adopt a gluten-free diet and notice improvements in health, you're likely to conclude that gluten is harmful for you, ignoring evidence that suggests otherwise and even inventing explanations for any setbacks, such as contaminated food or unlabeled gluten. The fact is, a person may feel better on a gluten-free diet and have absolutely no intolerance to gluten, and the setbacks so many people on this diet report may be evidence that gluten is scapegoating for the real cause of one's weight or health problems.

Here are a list of some reasons why a gluten-free diet might make you feel better.

Calorie Restriction

For the overweight and obese, eliminating a common food like wheat from their diet may make it easier to restrict calorie consumption, which naturally leads to weight loss. A healthy weight is associated with a reduced risk of several diseases and tends to make people feel better physically and psychologically. Moreover, many people believe that moderate calorie restriction even in normal weight individuals may prolong life.

In other words, some people lose weight on a gluten-free diet because they don't know what to replace their pasta, bread, and cookies with, and the resulting weight loss makes them feel good. 

Gluten Intolerance (Celiac Disease)

If you have celiac disease, then the only solution is a strict gluten-free diet. In this case gluten is not a scapegoat but the actual problem. However, less than 1% of the American population suffer from this autoimmune disorder, which means most people who restrict gluten probably don't have it.

Gliadorphin Intolerance

Many parents of autistic children believe that a gluten-free and casein-free diet improves their children's psychological well being. Some experts have theorized that autistics react to the opiate effect of gliadorphin (in gluten) and casomorphin (in casein, a dairy protein). Support for this theory is speculative and controversial, however, and the claims of its proponents, such as that wheat and dairy may even cause autism, are unscientific.

Wheat Allergy

It is possible that a person might have a true immune-mediated allergy to wheat, in which case it would be necessary to give up wheat but not other gluten-containing grains such as rye and barely. However, wheat allergy is uncommon, occurs mainly in children, and generally resolves with age.

Insulin Resistance/Diabetes

The gluten-free diet is often low in carbohydrates because wheat is the chief source of starch in the American diet. If you have insulin resistance or type II diabetes, lower carbohydrate intake might make you feel better over the short term because of lower blood sugar levels. However, a low carb diet will eventually make your blood sugar problems worse because high fat diets are a cause of insulin resistance. If you are intolerant to carbohydrates (insulin resistant), you will probably feel better temporarily on a low-carb, gluten-free diet, but your health will deteriorate over time. Insulin resistance might not be a big deal if you eat a low carb diet your entire life, but carbohydrates are important for human health and should not be eliminated except in extreme situations.

Fructose Malabsorption

Fructose malabsorption is an impairment of the digestive system that leaves some dietary fructose undigested and available for bacterial fermentation in the gut. This impairment can lead to digestive complaints, bad breath, and nutritional deficiencies, notably in tryptophan, zinc, and folic acid, which have broad-ranging effects on mood, sleep, energy, and hormone levels. Some people with fructose malabsorption may also be sensitive to the fructans in foods such as onions, brown rice, artichoke, and wheat. Therefore, a gluten-free diet could benefit people with fructose intolerance because of the fructans in wheat, though it would not cure them if they continue eating fructose and fructans from other sources besides wheat.

Furthermore, eliminating all fructose and fructan-containing foods is not a cure to fructose malabsorption, which may be caused by digestive impairment that develops over time in response to stress and poor diet. Improving your digestion may allow you to eat wheat again without problems. 

Iron Fortification

In order to ensure the population meets its daily dietary iron requirements, the USDA mandates that bakers and millers fortify their flour with high levels of unbound iron. While enrichment is effective in preventing anemia, it may also cause digestive upset and excess iron absorption, which has been implicated in several diseases, including malaria, rheumatism, and cardiovascular disease, as well as many other chronic conditions.

A person may even suffer from hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that allows the intestine to absorb too much iron. Gradually, accumulated iron becomes so concentrated that it begins to disrupt the body's organs, causing fatigue, skin pigmentation and eventually more serious problems such as liver cancer, diabetes, and arthritis. The usual treatment for hemochromatosis is phlebotomy (bloodletting) but giving up gluten may also help lower iron levels because so many wheat products are heavily fortified with iron. The benefit would be lost, of course, if the flour was replaced mainly with red meat or other iron rich foods.

True iron deficiency anemia is rare in the United States because our diets are so rich in the mineral already. Mandatory iron enrichment, when deficiency is so rare and overload so common, amounts to a public policy catastrophe.

Starch Intolerance

Giving up gluten may be beneficial for people who have difficulty digesting starches. There isn't much research on the effectiveness of starch-free diets on people with digestive problems, but there is a popular diet called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet that makes broad claims about the health value of replacing starch with animal products and simple sugars. Elaine Gottschall, author of Breaking the Vicious Cycle, claims that a starch-free diet is "natural" for the human species and that many people have solved their digestive ailments adopting her way of eating.

However, in my experience, restrictive diets like the SCD may be beneficial short-term, but only end up making sensitivities worse. If you have difficulty digesting all starches, it is unlikely that starch is the root cause of the problem since starches have been the mainstay of human diets for thousands of years. 

Junk Food

A gluten-free diet often requires fewer restaurant visits, fast food binges, and convenience meals. Even people without any real food sensitivities may become healthier eliminating gluten if the diet forces them to give up low-nutrient foods and replace them with healthful alternatives. The wider availability of GF alternatives is reducing this side effect of the gluten-free diet, however, as it now easier than ever to eat as much gluten-free junk food as you like.

Eliminating junk food (sugary, fatty, fried foods) from one's diet is likely to be more beneficial for most people than eliminating gluten.

In Summary

In all of the cases above except true celiac disease, a gluten-free diet may be temporarily beneficial even if gluten itself is completely harmless. However, even if you feel successful, it is still important to diagnose the true cause of the problem. If the cause of your impaired digestion and undesired weight gain were eating too much junk food, for example, then it would be overly restrictive to stop eating wheat products, while at the same time you might allow yourself to continue eating the foods actually responsible for your illness.

A useful lie may be useful, but it is still a lie and may ultimately lead to poor decision-making and unsatisfactory outcomes. Gluten is unlikely to be the problem that the current popularity of gluten-free diets would suggest. It would be a shame to eliminate a perfectly wholesome food from your diet because of fear or misdiagnosis. In the best case, gluten restriction might be a stone soup that leads to positive changes in your life; in the worst case, the diet creates a scapegoat that conceals the real culprit in your declining health and weight gain.

The "Morality" of Gluten

The gluten-free diet is becoming increasingly popular, not only for those with with celiac disease or other obvious health problems, but even for those simply trying to optimize energy and longevity. I will comment in my next post on some of the reasons why such a diet might actually be healthy, but first I want to look at possible ideological motivations behind the diet.

Wheat, barley, and rye are the grains of Western Civilization, and there is no better way to ally oneself with the noble savages of the pre-civilized (or even modern) world than to reject the material basis of one's own society. No doubt there is also satisfaction in the diet's abstemiousness, which people tend to enjoy from time to time even though there are relatively few opportunities for it in our post-Christian culture.

Anti-civilization sentiments are often bundled in non-systematic ways and emerge subtly (or not so subtly) in movies like Avatar or Dances With Wolves, modern religions like Wicca and environmentalism, and "health food". The motive for rejecting gluten may not be explicitly ideological, yet still bound up in a system of mental binaries that ties it with the wrong set of associations. Such binary systems are essential to human thought and often conceal unexpected assumptions about the world.

Good - Bad
Moral - Immoral
Peaceful - Violent
Native - Imperialist
Victim - Oppressor
Aboriginal Culture - Western Culture
Pagan - Christian
Freedom - Slavery
Communitarian - Capitalist
Family Farms (or even Gathering) - Corporate (or Feudal) Agriculture
Raw - Cooked/Pasteurized
Unmilled - Milled
Whole - Refined
Wild Game - Cows, Chickens, and Pigs
Raw Fruits/Vegetables - Bread
Healthy - Unhealthy
Natural - Artificial

Not everyone will share the same set of binaries, but the dietary code among educated, left-leaning white people is obvious and very similar to a set of religious strictures. These dietary practices include restrictions like vegetarianism, veganism, raw foodism, and "whole" foodism, semi-ascetic practices like food combining and calorie counting, and purity standards such as organic fruits and vegetables, free-range meats, and various "fair trade" products. These eating practices not only establish one as moral, but also have advantage of distinguishing one as part of the educated class. The typical moral rejection of McDonald's has a lot to do with it being where poor people like to eat. The right dietary restrictions can allow one to be both morally correct and high status at the same time.

Gluten-free eating is only making its entrance onto this scene, but I predict it will become more and more popular. It is anti-civilization, difficult, and unlikely to become popular with the lower classes.

Of course, there ARE non-ideological reasons for avoiding gluten and many people have improved their health by avoiding it--although they may be mistaken that it is the gluten itself that is causing their health problems. I'll look at this topic in my next post.

ADDENDUM: I was thinking about the natural/artificial dichotomy, and it occurred to me that the Latin root of the word "artificial" means something like "to my make by art/skill". Of course, etymology is not always the best way to understand a word's present meaning, but it does seem striking that art and skill should be consider bad, and I can hardly imagine a more derogatory term than "artificial".

If nature is held to be benevolent and morally good, then it must be wrong for mankind to alter it with technology. No matter how many of such modifications are genuine improvements to human life, this assumption requires that "artificial" remain by default evil and "natural" by default good.

Stone Soup

Sometimes the stories we hear as children return to us with a new significance. I heard the story of Stone Soup (or Rock Soup) when I was young, but it wasn't until I was in my 20s that it occurred to me what a profound allegory it contained. For those who have never heard the story, it goes something like this:

A village is on the brink of famine, when a Charismatic Stranger appears and begins boiling a pot of water with a stone in it. When asked what he is doing, he explains that he is making an amazing new dish called stone soup that he would love to share--except that it could still use a few potatoes. It just so happens that one villager still has some potatoes and he offers them to the stranger, who then notes that the soup could probably use a few onions, too. This continues until all the villagers have contributed an ingredient to the soup and, instead of going hungry, enjoy a sumptuous feast together. They all praise the stranger and his amazing stone soup.

So in the end the villagers cooperate, share their surplus, and survive the famine--but only because of the stranger's lie. This lie, the stone, has become the unifying myth which binds the community together. Or rather, it is not the lie itself, but the universal belief in the lie. The idea of a socially useful lie was probably first discussed in Plato's Republic, but the lies themselves are as old as humanity. It is impossible to conceive of a society without a stone lying somewhere in the depths of the pot.

Yet the trouble with a useful lie is that it is still a lie. We have never heard what happens to the village after the original pot of soup is finished and the stranger has gone on his way. Doubtless the villagers begin a new pot--but if they truly believe in the stone, then gradually they may begin to omit all those unnecessary extra flavors, choosing instead to eat just the stone's own broth.

And who will they blame when they discover that their soup is no longer good? Will they look for another stone or another stranger, who may remind them of all those "extra" ingredients that they had been forgetting?

In writing this, I have purposefully avoided attaching any specific correlations to the allegory. Yet a thoughtful reader will see his own and doubtlessly many that I myself had not considered. I believe that the idea of the useful lie is of such wide application that we will find examples of it in every human activity.














The original reason I decided to discuss this theme is because of its significance to the modern health and nutrition movement. I would say that most theories about nutrition are actually recipes for stone soup--useful, but not for the reasons that are claimed. Among these stones is the rejection of the diet of civilization and, in particular, the gluten-free diet, which has had miraculous effects on many people's health, but not necessarily because of the restriction of gluten itself.

So why is gluten-free soup becoming so popular? Why is this soup so effective at achieving its goals, even for those without true gluten sensitivity? I'll get there in the next post.

The Diet of Civilization is Starch-Based

Without exception, every major civilization in the history of the world has lived on a starch-based diet. The Chinese and the Japanese ate rice, the Mesoamericans ate corn, the Incans ate potatoes, and the empires of Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome all lived on barley and wheat. Even hunter-gatherer groups often consume a majority of their calories from tubers, roots, and other starchy vegetables. Only marginal civilizations have survived without a starch--and probably not by choice.

Low-carbers and paleo-dieters often make reference to two of these marginal groups in order to prove that starches are not necessary for robust health. The Inuit of North America traditionally have lived on a diet of whale blubber and fish, while a group of African herdsmen known as the Masai live exclusively on milk, meat, and blood. If nothing else, the existence of these two groups does prove that when forced to live under harsh conditions, human beings can survive without carbohydrates.

So starches are unnecessary, just like meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables, nuts, and anything else people regularly eat. Human beings are wonderfully designed omnivores, capable of living and even thriving on an unbelievable diversity of food. But we are not concerned about what people can survive on, but what we would choose to eat in optimal circumstances. And civilized people, both rich and poor, have always favored starch as the centerpiece of their diets--and they have flourished on it.

With this mass of historical evidence against them, paleodieters still claim that their starch-free diets are favored by human evolution and lead to optimal health. While some of their claims are based on scientific research, others seem almost mystical. Indeed, the difficulty of their extreme position often reduces them to absurdities, such as when they talk about the lean, muscular, and healthful physiques of the Masai. You be the judge. Do these people look well-nourished?


































Almost the only source for the paleodieters health claims about the Inuit and Masai is the work of Weston Price, an American dentist who traveled the world investigating the diets of traditional societies and comparing these diets to the people's dental health. While the Inuit and Masai did have excellent dental health, so did a number of other groups that Price investigated, including purely vegetarian groups. To conclude from this data that a starch-free diet is optimal requires VERY selective reading. In fact, anyone who has actually read Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, will know that the good dentist is a zealous advocate of whole grains and never once recommends the Inuit or Masai diet to people living in more productive climates. It's a bad sign when your guru doesn't even agree with you.

The historical evidence is incontrovertible. There have been very few groups who have lived on starch-free diets, while the mass of human civilization, with all its dynamism and creativity, has flourished on starch, and very often on just one starch supplemented by meat and vegetables. The ancient Greek word opson means roughly, "food that you eat with bread" and refers to pretty much everything else. Bread is the staple, the basis of nutrition, and in fact we can live in robust health for long periods on bread alone.

So what explains the popular trend to demonize starches, particularly wheat, which has been the basis of all Western civilization? For that topic we will have to wait until the next post.

Introduction to Civilized Nutrition

This blog will be dedicated to my own personal, idiosyncratic, and often mercurial quest for better health through nutrition. I plan to post regularly on my thoughts on healthy living, as well as on my experiences with my diet and exercise program. Caveat lector ("may the reader beware"), I avoid dogmatism in my views and regularly update my opinions based on new information and experiences. This is not a blog for people looking for a guru to answer all their questions, but for people interested in reading about one man's thoughts and experiences seeking better health.

I have decided to call my dietary principles Civilized Nutrition as a reaction against the increasingly popular paleolithic diet, which models itself on the diets of hunter-gatherers from both the stone age and today. Although proponents of the paleolithic diet disagree on what exactly these hunter-gatherers ate and what people should eat now, there is a general agreement among them that the domestication of cereals has been a catastrophe for human health. In other words, they reject as an unambiguous dietary evil what has been the basis of human civilization for the past ten thousand years.

A few years back I agreed with them, but not any more. Not only does the absolute rejection of grain require a selective reading of nutritional studies, but it makes no sense from a historical perspective. Massive, dynamic civilizations were founded on agriculture, and with these civilizations came enormous intellectual initiative, creativity, and productive power. If I am going to model my eating patterns after my ancestors, I would rather choose Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great than Ug the wife-clubbing troglodyte.

Fortunately, there is plenty of scientific evidence to defend Civilized Nutrition, as I hope to demonstrate in future posts.