Arc and I were discussing our thoughts on recovering from food intolerances and thought it might be of interest to others.

When I first started a gluten free diet I was symptom free from IBS for the first time in years (probably 15-20). But then I got worse again. Found out I'm also casein intolerant (enterolab.com) and I eliminated that and got worse again. Started SCD diet, started getting better. The theory is that having damaged the gut with bad foods that make one sick that bad bacteria get a foot hold and breed. So the goal is to kill bacteria by starving it and replacing the good ones with yogurt and/or probiotics. To that end you're only supposed to have sugars that can be digested by the human, nothing that goes into the GI tract undigested to be fed upon by the bacteria.

As you heal up it allows you to add more foods, but basically you can't really go back to the sort of refined carbs that feed bacteria.

The book claims to heal food intolerances. Color me extremely skeptical. However, I am happy to report that my gut seems a lot happier on this diet. I'm carefully and slowly trying foods.

The sort of sugar that humans can digest are monosacchrides which is basically only fructose. Sucrose is a disacchride so it gets passed along to the gut for digestion by the flora down yonder, thus it is food for good bacteria and bad.

I read recently (forget where) that acids break the bonds on disacchrides.

Anyway, there were a lot of things I was sending to my gut bacteria to work on, like polydextrose, sugar alcohols, even things like dextrose in Splenda powder, fibers like inulin and so on. That probably really encouraged things to get worse. I was making bowl muffins and using all sorts of things like oat fiber, high gluten flour, polydextrose to lower the calorie content by raising the fiber content. Poor GI tract, I am sorry I abused you so.

So, now I'm doing SCD but my own version is aiming for lower carb. I eat basically what you would on Atkins with the exception of dairy products. I'm current eating some fruit until I get rid of it. I don't know what I'll do for snacks once the fruit is gone. I also don't use the milk products in SCD but I make my own coconut yogurt. I've also eliminated eggs briefly to see if they were an issue for me. I don't think they were.

So... I'll be eating meat, eggs and veggies with probably small amounts of fruit now and then.

My stomach is finally deflating (most of the time). Sometimes it gets all mounded up again and I know something isn't agreeing with me. I'm also keeping a food journal and paying close attention to anything unusual, like extreme tiredness or headaches. I seem to get neurological issues when I've had a food I can't tolerate.

In Protein Power Life Plan , Dr. Eades has a chapter about Leaky Gut. He claims the proteins from grains and some legumes (particularly kidney beans), can enter the blood stream partially digested and cause a host of problems, including autoimmune diseases.

He also claims that the surface of the intestines sloughs off every 4-5 days, so you can heal the problem by ingesting only whey protein powder and glutamine for 4-5 days and then eating as a Purist (PP lingo) for at least a month. After that, stuff can be added back in but it's best to avoid the proteins that caused the problem to begin with.

It makes sense, especially from my own experience, but, the problem is that it appears from other research that "leaky gut" is kind of a catchall phrase. I even found vegan sites that claim meat causes leaky gut.

This is a little different from celiac and gluten intolerance, which seems to damage the villi.

I mentioned to Nancy in the PM that corn is a possibility. Corn protein is everywhere. It's in caramel coloring, "natural flavoring", modified food starch, MSG, and maltodextrin (like in powdered Splenda).

My symptoms got a lot better when I eliminated gluten. They weren't as intestinal as some. Mostly headaches, "hay fever", acne (at the age of 42!) and a sharp pain in the gut. As mentioned, something is still getting me and it appears that it might be in diet cola, both with aspartame and splenda sweetened.

Yeah! Like I said, I'm reacting to lots of stuff. I wasn't sure one day if I had been glutened or if it was corn that causing my issues. Anyway, all grains are out now.

I've been mixing some 100% cranberry juice (nothing added), to sparkling water and adding in a bit of sacchrine (allowed on SCD). Its very refreshing!

I think Ive tracked down a gluten intolerance issue for myself, (thanks to nancy's insistance and constant mentioning of it! hehe).

I havent gotten it confirmed by my doc yet, I'm going to see her at the end of February, but i have to say that i do not have the flatulance that i once had when i eliminate gluten containing foods. i dont think i have such a bad reaction as others so i'm being careful but not TOO careful. i also have not experienced any problems with corn such as corn tortilla chips.

the main thing is this: last night, i was feeling incredibly depressed (a professor in my department was killed in a car crash and i was really really shaken up by it) and i bought peanut butter M&M's. my absolute favorite. despite eating almost half the bag (so a ton of sugar and fat), my weight was still down this morning 1 pound.

in addition, i noticed my most sever water weight gain when i had eaten pasta or drank beer. (beer is made from wheat, right?)

so to conclude, until i hear from my doctor and probably even after i hear from my doctor in case celiac's is not diagnosed, i am going gluten free. it sure sucks though cuz i LOVE cookies!!

Nancy, i know youre going really clean right now, but have you experienced any problems with rice or potato flour that they say that celiacs can eat? Just curious as to your experiences.

You mean nagging?

Yeah, I used the various non-gluten flours and all I can say is they're very carby and extremely calorie dense. I think they work decently well with non-gluten recipes. The best one for my purposes now is coconut flour. But... it tastes like coconut!

Be careful when you're getting medical confirmation of your intolerance. Its not diagnosed well or often enough by MDs because:

1) They test for the antibodies in your blood, which you might not have until the disease is extremely far progressed. Read this article: http://www.enterolab.com/StaticPages/EarlyDiagnosis.htm

2) Even if you do have the antibodies they then want to confirm it with a bowel biopsy which is pretty invasive and often yeilds a false negative.

3) If you've been avoiding gluten you will probably not be able to detect it in your blood or by biopsy.

The best test is the stool test done by Enterolab that looks for antibodies. And they do the gene test as well. Failing that, the next best test is a dietary test. However, some of the Intoleratti (my silly name for us) are totally symptom free, or don't have GI symptoms, so it wouldn't work for them.

Wow! I'm sorry to hear about your professor. I had something similar happen. My favorite professor died in the middle of the semester from pnuemonia. Do you go to the U or Rochester?

Man, nothing like gulten (or dairy) to blow me up like a balloon. I think it might have also been behind my eyelid swelling to enormous sizes too. Yes, beer has "malt" in it which is made from barley (a gluten containing grain). I love beer.

There are some gluten free beers out there, but I haven't been able to find any in my small burgh. I have never been much of a beer drinker, since it just killed my stomach. It's been that way since I was a kid. Umm, I mean since I turned 21. Now i think I know why.

Its almost tempting to brew my own gluten free beer. My old roommate and I used to brew our own beer. Did you ever have wheat beer? That was some good stuff.

Yea Nancy, I'm at the U of R. You went to Eastman, we had this conversation before.

I did eat gluten before i got the test done, but as i said, even if im NOT diagnosed, im still going to eat gluten free, just on my own observation of weight gain/bloating/flatulence that comes along with eating gluten. i think im going to get some of the non-gluten flour type stuff and try that to see what that does to me, especially since its carby without being gluteny.

the one thing i do like about figuring out its gluten and not all carbs is that im so much more not afraid of fruit. i love fruit, i think fruit is healthy and now that i see that sugar isnt a big problem for me as far as food cravings or sugar crashes or hunger, im going to add fruit in.

im only 24, so thank god im getting everything taken care of early. its just so overwhelming to think that for the rest of my life i wont be able to eat fruit! but now i can. i think i can go without gluten without killing myself too much, but fruit really had me down. oh. chocolate too. but thats another story.

I was wondering if Nancy or anyone else had any thoughts on the difference between the "classic" celiac - who has the classic symptoms of being underweight along with the normal malabsorption symptoms - and the asymptotic celiac - who tends to be overweight with symptoms that are all over the map?

I, unfortunately, seem to fall into the second category while I think my Mom is in the first (though she refuses to get tested or even believe it might be a possibility). I am wondering if there is something more going on with those in the second category, either insulin related or something else. It seems like a lot of that type of celiac continues to have various problems, particularly if they just replace gluten containing food with high carb, gluten-free equivalents.

Quite a few diagnosed celiacs are overweight! Something like 30% or more. On the glutenfree message forum some folks lost a lot of weight after going gluten free. That magic doesn't seem to apply to me unfortunately.

I think there's a real addiction component to things you can't digest like gluten. The theory I've heard is that those partially digested proteins resemble opiates. So when you're going GF you basically have a little heroine addiction to kick. This could explain why people freeze up and look panicky and retreat into full denial when you talk to them about giving up eating grains. A lot of them actually feel sick for a few weeks when they first stop eating gluten.

There's a doctor with a difficult eastern european name who has done a lot of research on gluten sensitivity and neurological diseases who has found a it related to specific DNA's. I have one of those genes, plus the lesser common celiac gene.

I don't know if I had malabsorption or not or if my villi were ever damaged. By the time I was tested I was GF for 3 months and my fecal fat score was below the limit for malabsorption, but 3 months early perhaps it would have been different?

I've been following a low carb version of the SCD diet. My calories are quite low and I'm still not losing weight. Bumming me out!

Opps... over 40 brain here!
Just remember if it has bean flour in it, you might get a bit farty anyway.

Yeah! Fruit is good. I am still having a piece of fruit every day. My diet is so, so pared down that I gotta have something totally delicious and fruit is helping with that.



I tried to eat some chocolate a couple weeks back. Sure, I over did it and ate the WHOLE thing instead of one piece like I planned, then I got pretty sick afterwards. I felt totally gluten-brained. So, either the chocolate bar had undeclared gluten/milk in it or perhaps I'm just not ready for chocolate yet. Or... even worse... perhaps I can't eat chocolate any more.

Yes, I'm glad you caught this early too. I think I'm suffering from other autoimmune diseases caused by this. I think I might have Sjogren's. So you are very lucky to have caught this early!

Is everyone being careful about cross contamination and eating out?

Great thread.
About non gluten, low carb flour. I've been using rice protein powder, Nutribiotic, that is 80% protein. It works really well in baking, but here's the thing: The serving size is 1 heaping Tbs. (15 g). I can make that heap vary by quite a bit and my scale doesn't have a gram marker. The serving contains:
total carb:1.8 g
fiber: 200 mg
cal:58
protein:12g
I've been figuring that heaping Tbs is just about 1/16 cup, is that close?
Anyway, I hear that rice is generally figured to be safe for just about anybody that has mutliple food sensitivities.
I'm really happy to report that I do well with eating fruit and root veggies. Chocolate: no problem!

1 oz is 28 grams. 1 tablespoon is 1/16th of a cup. So a heaping tablespoon would be > than that.

I was just reading about a woman with celiac disease who gained 10 pounds after meals with wheat in them! Can you imagine?

I know I always put on a lot of weight whenever I ate wheat. My stomach was always terribly bloated and rounded.

Thanks, Nancy.