Gluten allergy may have a cause.
First, note that a gluten allergy is considered rare. More common is gluten sensitivity, or celiac disease.
Some people are allergic to wheat, but not the gluten in wheat. For such people, following a gluten-free diet, now growing ever more popular, is a convenient way of avoiding wheat, using language (“gluten-free”) that more and more people are familiar with.
The medical establishment is very conservative in attributing cause and effect, especially when there is not clear surgical intervention or prescription medicine to manage a specific set of symptoms. Keep this in mind as you continue to read this article.
A true gluten allergy is considered “idiopathic”, in other words, medical researchers don’t have a clue what causes it.
The existence of a phenomenon is not dependant on our ability to understand it or explain what caused it. So if you find you react negatively to gluten, just cut it out, and feel glad that you feel better as a result.
Allergy-Enhancing Chemical Treatment Of Foods
The above phrase caught my eye in a Wikipedia article.
Actually, the full paragraph reads:
“The rise of gluten sensitivity (particularly in adults) may reflect the convergence of many phenomena. An aging population, genetic risks associated with westernization, excesses in the diet, sensitizing chemicals (e.g.MSG, aspirin, NSAIDs), and allergy-enhancing chemical treatment of foods (e.g. enzymatic deamidation of gluten) may act together with natural defensive agents in foods to cross the threshold between normality and pathology.”
This caught my eye because allergies in general are on the rise.
Deamidation is a biochemical term referring to the removal of an amide functional group from an organic compound. Further explanation is beyond the scope of this article, but it would be worth understanding why this happens, especially with gluten.
One reason is so that gluten can be blended with other food chemicals in the industrial processed food industry. This is because this style of food processing involves fracturing the basic food ingredients into components, and combing them in unnatural ways. Hardly health-enhancing.
For example, when gluten is separated from starch, it becomes hard do handle. It can be dissolved in alcohol, but this mixture can not be mixed with milk products.
Gluten can be made to mix with milk by applying a deamidation treatment to it. One way is with acid at high temperatures, the other is using enzymes.
If this causes you to worry that there may be gluten lurking in foods in which it has no right to be, such as catsup and ice cream, then you worry with good reason.
If you consume a lot of processed food, you are opening the door to ill health, and developing allergies.
As always, a healthy diet is essential to a healthy body.