Gluten Free Diet: Why it might not be helping?

I have lost count on the number of clients I have advised to gluten free because I thought it would help their symptoms.

For the vast majority it was a positive experience as their long term chronic symptoms disappeared. For the minority, the effort was not rewarded even though they had been 100% gluten free. Up until a few months ago this had been a puzzle to me until I was listening to a podcast in my car on the way to work. The podcast was a an  interview with Dr Tom O'Bryan, who is an internationally renowned expert on Coeliac disease and gluten sensitivity.  He was talking about a brand new set of blood tests that were now available which looked at gluten sensitivity. The test that interested me the most was for Gluten Cross Reactivity (GCR).

To understand what GCR is you have to understand how the body normally reacts to gluten

When your body gets sensitive to gluten it produces antibodies which are little Arnold Terminators that go around zapping the invading gluten proteins that are in your blood. Unfortunately sometimes Arnold gets confused between the gluten proteins and similar proteins in your body and starts zapping them.

GCR occurs when Arnold starts thinking that the proteins from other foods are gluten proteins. The body then produces more gluten antibodies to zap those other proteins but which will also continue to attack your body. So you may as well be eating gluten and no wonder your symptoms don't change.

The GCR test which is available through Cyrex Labs in the US tests the most common foods that cross react to wheat gluten.

These include: cows milk, casein, whey protein, soya, milk chocolate, instant coffee, yeast, oats, sesame, buckwheat, hemp seed, millet, sorghum, amaranth, quinoa, tapioca, teff, corn, and rice. 

As I mentioned these are only the most common and many foods have not been researched as yet. However if you have had no change in your symptoms on a traditional gluten free diet and you eat some of the above it would be worth getting tested or just try avoiding them all and seeing if you see any benefit.

Since learning this information I have begun begun routinely testing my clients for the above foods. To date that tested positive for wheat gluten were positive to some of the cross reactive foods.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.