Celiac disease has been on the rise for sixty years, and now it affects 1 percent of people worldwide. No one knows exactly why. One proposed hypothesis is the increased consumption of gluten-containing foods; another is a change in the immune system, possibly related to the alterations in the way the gut-based immune system is trained early on in life by interacting with foreign microorganisms. A third hypothesis is related to alterations in how wheat has been modified and is grown.
