Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment

I am not sure what to make about the increasing amount of people with a real or an imagined gluten intolerance. By imagined, I mean someone that has a generally unhealthy diet, for them to not see the doctor, but decide for themselves that wheat is the enemy, rather than the garbage they have in their sandwich, in their burger or on their pizza.

Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded on it. This bad name is coming along at a time when most of what most people eat is 'processed food' rather than 'real food'.

I brought my own bread making 'in house' with a bread making machine and I have not looked back. Not so much as a slice goes in the bin and the machine is on 2-3 times a week. I have no incentive to pay more for bread laced with preservatives that does not taste quite as good. I have just the four ingredients, well, I add a spot of olive oil too, to keep it soft, but you get the idea. I don't add any extract of human hair into it, or any propionic acid as a preservative. There are no 'processing aids' that don't appear on the ingredients list.

I hear you regarding restrictive diets, however, I did restrict my diet to cut out all of the processed foods and to always cook from scratch. I buy mostly vegetables and fruit. Those aisles of frozen things or things in bright packaging are of no interest to me. I have just chosen the good stuff, and changed my ideas on what that might be.

This was just done on a whim, to see if I could last a whole week without chocolate, sticky toffee puddings, ready made pizza and all those good things. I did not expect to feel so much better in such a short period of time, so I decided to go for a month, which was easy, and, after that, the pattern was set.

I had always considered a certain amount of bloating, poorly formed movements and the rest of it as normal. Oh, how wrong I was! I have not had the slightest problem since my 'nutrition experiment' started and a fully working digestive tract is such a pleasant life upgrade. It is not something one brags about, 'having perfectly working bowels', but there is no way I would go back to eating processed food garbage.

The only downsides are no farts that smell (always odourless is weird), and no time spent doom-scrolling 'on the throne' (visits to the restroom are all too brief to need a book or a phone).

In my opinion we have over-complicated the deal with our microbes. We do this to get to a stage where people avoid fibre at all costs or become fearful of bread. From my n of 1 experience, wonderful things happen if eating just real food, as in mostly vegetables. I don't think there is anything wrong with sugar, all I know is that I can live life without it, and prefer having good teeth. It is the same with fats, clearly some are bad, but, from fairly natural sources, all is fine. Palm oil is ubiquitous in processed foods, and there is nothing wrong with it, but I don't have any in my food and see no reason to seek out processed foods that have it.

I count the half hour I spend in the kitchen as 'physical activity' and ring-fence that time much like how some people go to the gym. I know it is low intensity and not a 'workout', but, once I get off the sofa and into the kitchen, I enjoy preparing vegetables and cooking. I also enjoy the money saved. My 'superfoods' are things like potato and carrot. The only supplements I take are vitamin B12 and vitamin D. I also get to eat more, which is due to calories. Junk food is calorie rich, and, if you are eating mostly vegetables, then you have to eat to satiety, which needs a bit of stomach training.

I don't believe everything can be magically fixed by eating mostly fresh-cooked vegetables. Yeast infections and the like need some prescription medications to resolve, but, once done, there is a new normal of a perfectly working digestive tract, perfect blood pressure, a BMI at the lower end and skin that never gets so much as a pimple.

Give a 'restrictive diet' of just real food a go for a week, make some mistakes along the way, and learn what works for you.

> Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded on it.

However, modern supermarket bread is quite different to what people were eating even 100 years ago. We've selected for wheat with very high gluten levels as it makes for fluffier bread and we've started adding wheat to almost everything as it's cheap. It's very frustrating to go to a shop and see that products that traditionally don't have any wheat in them, now have wheat added to improve shelf life etc. Things like tortillas, onion bhajis, potato fries (or chips as we call them in the UK) etc.

Edit: Had a quick look to see if there's figures for gluten content over time and it looks like I've got the wrong impression from somewhere. This study shows that gluten content has remained relatively static: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200811120112.h...

> Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded on it. This bad name is coming along at a time when most of what most people eat is 'processed food' rather than 'real food'.

There's bread and then there is Bread. I can't tolerate "industrial" bread, the kind that stays soft and tender and doesn't get mouldy. It's something to do with the leavening agents they use (yeast or something other).

Basic Scandinavian Rye bread[0] works. Same with the COVID-popularised sourdough. Oat breads are good too.

But if I eat any of the delicious super-soft wheat breads or toasts... Whooo boy, I blow up like a balloon. Don't have celiacs, gluten intolerance or anything like that. For some reason my gut flora can't take some cereals.

There are some anecdotal stories of Americans coming to Europe and suddenly being able to eat bread with no symptoms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruisleipä

This is good general advice, but for as long as I've been an independent adult, I've cooked three fresh meals a day. Even with breakfast I usually do fish and rice instead of something quicker and easier.

Like the individual in the OP story, I'm more inclined to suspect a specific undetected infection rather than a lack of dietary discipline. I just don't know how to explore this without having my sanity questioned.

Your diet advice is great for people who don't have a food intolerance. I'm glad it worked well for you. As someone who has pretty serious - immediate diarrhoea, stomach pain etc - responses to certain foods (dairy, gluten, some alcohol sugars) cooking whole foods from scratch and supplementing with vitamins doesn't cut it. Lots of other people are in the same position. There's a lot of research about why these issues are growing - newer pesticide resistant crops seem one likely avenue - but they're real, and deeply disruptive for the people who have them.

Speaking for myself, I grew up in a home where all our meals were cooked from scratch, no fast food or 'candy', and was horrendously sick growing up due to the amount of (whole wheat, locally baked) bread and dairy in my diet. Had ulcers in my early teens, constant stomach upsets, and lots of secondary related issues.

Certainly eating poorly makes these issues worse, but I didn't grow up in a food desert, or eating an American diet, and they emerged none the less. And at a time (I'm 44) when there was zero awareness of them in the culture.

I was exposed to tonnes of antibiotics as a child - but its hard to deduce cause and effect here. The antibiotics were given because I had frequent gastric distress. Either way, I'm sure my gut bacteria are in a terrible state.

> onion bhajis, potato fries

These kind of foods should be home made. Wheat is lesser issue with them.

Even simpler foods like garlic-paste, if bought ready-made in store it contains lot's of unnecessary ingredients.

People buy junk food (pre-made meal) and blame wheat.

That's one advantage to being gluten sensitive - I don't bother buying those kinds of things now and generally just cook from simpler ingredients.

It is annoying to go out to a fancy restaurant and find that they use wheat based tortillas rather than authentic corn - you'd expect them to be making things themselves rather than just buying them from a shop.

Just thought of another one - Thai-style fishcakes (e.g. in restaurants). Why are they covered in breadcrumbs when Thai food hardly ever uses wheat?

> Bread is getting a bad name, yet whole civilisations have been founded on it.

The idea cereals are bad for health is at least 2 millenia old: https://www.persee.fr/doc/etchi_0755-5857_1983_num_1_1_993

Using a dish washer for all of that? I tend to question whether small amounts of dish washer detergent or SLS/etc in toothpaste might change us as environments for our bacteria and replacement bacteria. But that's also a tough area for rigorous scientific study.

If flour and machine made bread are not processed foods, it's obviously a meaningless bogeyman.

This is also a good lead, but I've already chased it. I only use hippie detergent and toothpaste. I do wonder about this while eating out, but hopefully once a week isn't enough to make a difference.