Gluten Sensitivity: A Slightly More Ethical Update

A bit over a year ago, I posted the results of a medically and ethically suspect experiment in the area of gluten sensitivity:

http://smart-as-a-bee.tumblr.com/post/127878104652/gluten-intolerance-or-chemical-sensitivity-an

Now comes the NIH with a much more well-conditioned study of this subject:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

Interestingly, they come to essentially the same conclusion in their real study that I did in my bullshit one. The recent upsurge in what appears to be celiac disease (increasing from 0.7% of the general population to greater than 5% in North America in less than two decades) is not biologically plausible if we think gluten is responsible. The culprit in all this diarrhea is not in fact gluten. It’s glyphosate (sold as Roundup). American farmers douse their wheat fields with the stuff just prior to harvest in order to kill the stalks and desiccate the kernels, and as a result it winds up in our food supply in significant amounts.

My take? Whether you get sick after eating American wheat or not, this might be one area where it’s worth the extra cost to invest in organic food. Glyphosate doesn’t appear to be carcinogenic, which is why farmers are allowed to use it they way they do. However, even in people who don’t react strongly to it, glyphosate definitely alters the makeup of our intestinal flora. We don’t fully understand how our body interacts with this biome, but we know these interactions are important in a number of ways. This is probably one of those areas where discretion is the better part of valor.