What Does Gluten Sensitivity Mean?

Often when a patient comes in, I adjust and change their diet by instructing them to eliminate grains and gluten. The next visit, usually within a week or two, they bounce into the office listing all the surprising symptoms that brought them in initially have gone away.

These symptoms can range as broadly as a skin rash or eczema all the way to severe and life-threatening autoimmune disorders like Multiple Sclerosis. There's a fascinating case where a man had severe neurological symptoms that mimicked ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), had an MRI showing the same brain lesions ALS produces, and after removing gluten from his diet all his symptoms abated and the MRI lesions cleared.

Gluten is a terrible little protein. Gluten intolerance or sensitivity can be life-altering. Here's the symptom picture:

Why Does One Protein Cause So Many Problems?

Gluten is found in a significant amount of the grains eaten in modern diets: wheat, barley, rye, and triticale (a hybrid between wheat and rye). Why does it get such a bad rap? It's just a little protein, and everyone's raving about protein.

The answer is that it isn't the protein itself that causes the problem. It's how your immune system reacts to that protein.

The easiest way to describe how your immune system works is to think of it as a lock and key. The keys are proteins that fit into the lock of your immune system's cells. When the right key fits the lock, your body mounts its defense by attacking that protein.

The interesting thing about your immune system: it travels everywhere in your body, but about 80% of it is located in your intestine. Your intestines are your first line of defense. They let the good things in and excrete the breakdown products of life. Since food proteins enter the body through the gut, it makes sense that your immune system would post a lot of watchmen there to make sure nothing harmful gets through.

When the gut barrier is intact, this system works. When it's compromised, gliadin (the specific fraction of gluten that causes problems) triggers the release of zonulin, which opens the tight junctions between intestinal cells. This is the leaky gut mechanism. Larger proteins slip through, the immune system attacks them, and because gliadin looks similar to proteins in other tissues throughout your body, the immune system starts attacking those too. This is called molecular mimicry, and it's why Hashimoto's thyroiditis shows up on that symptom list alongside joint pain and brain fog. Same mechanism, different tissue being attacked.

You've Probably Earned Your Gluten Sensitivity

Even if you weren't born with a gluten sensitivity, you've probably developed one over your lifetime. Most people react to gluten negatively because of the hybridization and genetic modification of grains to increase their gluten content. Modern wheat contains dramatically more gluten than what your grandparents ate.

If the increased gluten content weren't enough, the fact that we've become a mono-food culture makes it worse. Michael Pollan has written excellent books on this subject. Most foods consumed in this country come from a package and include significant amounts of wheat, corn, or soy.

Those three happen to be causing 95% or more of our health problems in this country. If we could rid our foods of gluten, we'd be a healthier America. There's no health reason to make gluten an additive in everything we eat.

Whether you think you're gluten intolerant or not, chances are very high that you are. Many people have symptoms and never realize relief could be as simple as removing that terrible little protein. I've personally seen patients do exceedingly well when gluten is removed from their diets.

Going "gluten-free" by buying gluten-free processed products isn't the answer either. Those products are often loaded with corn, sugar, and starches that create just as much inflammatory damage as the gluten did.

For comprehensive guidance on removing inflammatory foods and supporting gut healing, visit the Eating Right: Nutrition Primer.

For questions about which foods are driving your specific symptoms, start with understanding how food sensitivities actually work.

If you're in Frisco, Texas and dealing with symptoms from that list above that haven't responded to conventional treatment, Applied Kinesiology muscle testing can identify exactly which foods are driving your immune reactions and what your gut needs to heal.

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