Paleo diet part 2

From Boing Boing

Ginna began to read about paleo ideas -- the evolutionary niche idea applied to humans. Websites such as Mark's Daily Apple. Books such as The Primal Blueprint and The Paleo Solution. She encountered many discussions of gluten intolerance, which was new to her. Gluten is a protein in wheat, barley and rye, which are recent additions to the human diet. From Kurt Harris, Ginna learned about the link between gluten intolerance and autoimmune disorders, such as Hashimoto's: "Nearly every common autoimmune disease is associated with at least an order of magnitude increased risk of celiac disease,” wrote Harris.  (Celiac disease is a severe form of gluten intolerance.) For example, a 2000 study found that celiac disease was about five times more common in patients with Hashimoto's than in patients with nondigestive problems and 13 times more common in Hashimoto's patients than in blood donors.
Why is gluten intolerance linked with many diseases, especially autoimmune diseases? The prevailing theory is that gluten causes inflammation in the intestines, making them more permeable, which allows gluten to leak into the blood.  When gluten is in the blood, the immune system makes antibodies against it. Gluten resembles a protein in the body, so these antibodies start attacking proteins in the body.
One estimate is that 1% of the United States population has celiac disease. A third have a genetic variant that makes it more likely. Gail's endless abdominal pain was a good reason to think she might be gluten intolerant. Like most Americans, she ate gluten daily -- toast in the morning, sandwiches, dinner rolls, pasta. Never had she not eaten it. Another reason to think she might be gluten intolerant was her Hashimoto’s. A third was her gallstones, which Ginna had read are weakly linked to gluten intolerance. (Another reason, it turned out, was her IgA nephropathy. According to this article, “the renal disease most commonly associated with [celiac disease] is IgA nephropathy.”)
In early 2011, Ginna told her mother to stop eating gluten (i.e., stop eating bread, pasta, and a few other things). Her mother didn’t object. To Ginna's surprise, her mother did not find it difficult, maybe because it was so successful. Within a week, she felt much better. The abdominal pain/discomfort she’d had continuously since she was a teenager diminished considerably and she no longer had pain after meals. She was very excited about that. Within a few months, for the first time in thirty years, her waist became visible. She had been bloated for thirty years. “It was amazing to her,” says Ginna. “To not be in pain all the time. She said I didn’t realize how much pain I was in until I wasn’t in pain anymore. She’s become an anti-gluten evangelist.”