The war against gluten

[WouldYouKindly]

For some bizarre reason, gluten free is a new food fad. I understand it if you have a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, then it's a necessary dietary restriction. However, I've been seeing more and more people take up gluten free for no reason other than because fads...

There's scant to no evidence that a gluten free diet for a non-sensitive person is beneficial. It all amounts to marketing claims so vague they are also on homeopathic "medicine" bottles.

Then there's the matter of taste. A lot of gluten free foods taste like/have the texture of sawdust.

I see this all the time because I work in a grocery store. It comes up a lot when people ask about oats. Oats themselves are gluten free, but most are processed in a facility where wheat is also processed so it'll still have some gluten on it. I tell people that if they have a minor gluten sensitivity that it shouldn't be a problem, as the amount of gluten would be minimal. They proceed to tell me that they have no sensitivity and are just following a new diet.

It seems like there was just a major marketing campaign to turn a niche market into a larger one with pure, grade A bullshit.

Does anyone know more about this than I do? Am I hilariously misinformed?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Well, I try not to care very much when people make questionable dietary choices that are obviously bad for them. So I find it even harder to care when they make questionable dietary choices that are arguably good for them. Sensitivity or not, bread makes you chubby. You don't really NEED it for anything. If people want to cut shit out of their diet, they can fill their boots. It's not really my lookout.

 

[Eddie the head]

Well, I try not to care very much when people make questionable dietary choices that are obviously bad for them. So I find it even harder to care when they make questionable dietary choices that are arguably good for them. Sensitivity or not, bread makes you chubby. You don't really NEED it for anything. If people want to cut shit out of their diet, they can fill their boots. It's not really my lookout.

I thought ingesting more calories then you burn made you chubby. (or an attractive woman) But it was bread all a long?

More on topic yeah it's just a fad. It die out wen people realize there is nothing inherently wrong with gluten. Gluten is fine for most people. There is no reason most of them should be avoiding it.

 

[Vault101]

I know that white bread isn't great for you and something something blood sugar spikes and insulin resistance

though a lot of gluten free substitutes apparently are full of sugar and other bad stuff

I just stick to rye and avoid to many carbs

 

[Mad as a Hatter]

And you care because... why? what does it does it matter to you? It does not effect you. Nobody is forcing you to buy.

 

[Foolery]

I'm thankful for all the hippie types making it a 'fad'.
Regular grain consumption began a measly 10,000 years ago by most estimates. Before the Agricultural Revolution, humans had a couple hundred thousand years of not having any regular consumption of grains. We are not biologically designed to eat wheat or other substances with gluten. Evolution isn't that quick.

Grain consumption, especially in the the forms found today, are a blatant departure from the way humans have eaten for almost our entire history.
Just because humans seem to have no immediate negative effects from grains, doesn?t mean our bodies can handle them.

 

[Neverhoodian]

To be fair, gluten has only been a part of our diet for a relatively short period of time (10-13,000 years). Prior to the rise of agriculture, humans mostly subsisted off of meat, fish, fruit, nuts and berries.

EDIT: Ninja'd. I need to stop taking fifteen minutes or more composing these things.

I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but I suppose there isn't much harm in eliminating gluten from a purely health-related perspective. However, there doesn't seem to be evidence that gluten hurts you either. I think people are just looking for the "magic pill" pipe dream diet that solves everything with minimal effort. Companies have caught wind of this, and they're using "gluten free" as the next big marketing buzzword to sell all kinds of food, regardless of how good it actually is for you. I shit you not, I saw "Gluten Free!" labels on some Angry Birds fruit snacks, like they were actually expecting me to believe that sugary goo is healthy.

As is often the case in these situations, education and awareness is the best answer, but the burden rests largely on the public to do that. And we all know what the public is like:

 

[aceman67]

I'm going to end this debate right here with this question: Do you have celiac disease?

If the answer to that question is "No", then eat Gluten. Worldwide, gluten is a source of protein, both in foods prepared directly from sources containing it, and as an additive to foods otherwise low in protein.

By cutting it out of your diet and not substituting the lost protein, you are doing yourself harm and will lead to malnutrition.

You do not have a disease that makes your body unable to digest gluten and cause your body to have an adverse reaction to it, and there is no logical reason you could possibly give for not taking advantage of a source of protein that is several millennia old.

 

[Lieju]

The upside to this whole gluten free thing is that people with gluten allergies get all new stuff, as a friend of mine who has gluten allergies has had to live with a lot of crap food his whole life. Poor guy.

As for why care? Well, it's kind of like saying, why care when someone says "Omg, I'm so OCD!" A lot of people aren't just saying, "I'm doing gluten free because I think it might make me healthier because bread can be fattening." They're saying, "I think I have a gluten allergy, but I don't want to go to the doctor and find out, so I'm going to self diagnosis and cut out gluten."

Yes, so there is the risk that people won't take people who are actually allergic seriously, or have low standards for the 'glutein-free' food.
Although some people will always not take allergies seriously.

(Also isn't weight loss one of the symptoms of glutein-allergy?)

EDIT: Or I guess I should call it ?gluten intolerance? which includes bunch fo stuff including celiac disease and wheat allergy.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

It's not a new fad. When I used to work as a waiter about 7 years ago, we always had people coming in asking "is this gluten free?" Some of them were so cluelessly uniformed they'd ask if things like steak or milkshakes were gluten free.

Gluten is so important for making a good pizza or bread dough that I'd hate being intolerant to it. Gluten free bread tastes like the kind of seedcake they give to budgies.

 

[Eddie the head]

We are not biologically designed to eat wheat or other substances with gluten. Evolution isn't that quick.

We weren't "designed" to do anything other then survive and pass on our DNA. Things can come out of evolution that you don't necessarily expect. In genetics A dose not always lead to B. We appear to be perfectly capable of eating gluten. It matters little if we always have eaten it.

Grain consumption, especially in the the forms found today, are a blatant departure from the way humans have eaten for almost our entire history.

So what? Aspirin and morphine are a blatant departure form how humans have dealt with pain for almost our entire history. Cars, and domesticated animals, are blatant departure form how humans have traveled most of our history. The internet is a blatant departure form how we have communicated most of our history. So what? It's different doesn't mean it's bad.

Just because humans seem to have no immediate negative effects from grains, doesn?t mean our bodies can handle them.

And it doesn't mean our body's can't handle them. A claim requiters evidence. If you think it's harmful prove it. So far all you have done is appeal to nature, and say "I could be right."

 

[small]

doesnt phase me either way but i know people who do have an allergy to it so im so stoked for them this fad exists

 

[GabeZhul]

It's not really a "new" fad per see. It's been around for about a decade by now.

In a way it is just like all the other new-age bogeymen that can be blamed for anything and everything. I have seen people blame the most insane things on gluten consumption, from depression to autism. It's kind of like how my grandmother was completely convinced that eating anything even remotely made of tomatoes directly caused alzheimer's, except she didn't have the internet where she could spread her random pet theory to millions of scientifically illiterate people who would spread it on ideological grounds (like the "We are not evolved to eat it!" or the "It's not natural!" bullshit). It's kind of sad and infuriating at the same time.

doesnt phase me either way but i know people who do have an allergy to it so im so stoked for them this fad exists

The problem with that is that, much like the other marketing labels (Like "All-Natural" or "Organic") "gluten-free" usually doesn't mean what people think it means, or even worse, they can be regulated so loosely that they become pointless. I will look up the study up later and post it here (I've gotta run now, work to do...), but I actually read that a good portion of the "gluten free" stuff are actually just doesn't contain as much gluten as normal food, which is actually really bad for the gluten-intolerant, since the other people who just buy it for the fad likely won't even notice the difference while it can actually lead to serious health problems for the ones this supposedly benefits the most.