Celiac filmmakers take note: This is how it is done. 14 minutes long.
I sound very cynical because I’m bringing this up in the context of “Why aren’t there any great celiac movies?” but this video really touched me.  Touched, moved, inspired. Everyone should watch it. Keep your tissues handy. (And your credit card!)
Autism - Hope After Diagosis 

If you have a child with autism in Southern California, you are probably already familiar with this organization, but just in case: TACA [Talk About Curing Autism] is a tremendous resource - go there now.

Suzanne Frieder posted this link more than a week ago on the Los_Angeles_Celiac Yahoo! group - What You Need to Know About Celiac Disease and the Gluten-Free Diet. Thank you Suzanne! I watched it in pieces over time. (It’s 90 minutes - Yikes!) Apart from the length, this video has much to recommend it.

1. University of California at San Diego has assembled an world-class team in the new Wm. K Warren Medical Research Center for Celiac Disease. This video is a presentation by three members of this group, so it’s neat to see who’s working in the neighborhood.
2. There’s a fantastic picture of healthy villi in someone’s intestine, not a stained slide like you always see but practically 3-D. It looks like sea anemones! Dr. Kagnoff likens villi to shag carpeting, and it’s a good analogy.
3. Another very good chart diagramming the wheat family tree. Actually; really good visual aids, throughout.
4. About 68 minutes in, the question is asked of Dr. Harmon, “Greg, what’s the difference between gluten intolerance and celiac disease?” and he responds “That’s the million-dollar question!” I love this guy. He’s one of the few doctors you’ll ever hear say “we don’t know.” Give this man a cigar!
5. Susan J. Algert, Ph.D., R.D. / Nutritionist puts the number 20ppm in perspective when she likens it to “one penny in ten thousand dollars.”* These people have a knack for making things understandable.

*Wait - I just re-read that. Shouldn’t it be two pennies? Maybe she was talking about 10ppm.

Anyway, it may not be the most exciting video you have ever seen. (It is, after all, a very “plain-text” recording of a speech. Three speeches, actually, with a question & answer period after. No music, no dynamic editing or artistic lighting. We get spoiled here in Hollywood.) But it is informative and worth watching. Or listen in the background while you do other work!

We talked a lot before about gluten sensitivity vs. celiac disease and I thought it might be helpful to share this link: the Gluten Intolerance Group defines the difference between “gluten intolerance” & “celiac diease.”

The Gluten Intolerance Group is, of course, the group that brings us the Gluten-Free Certification Organization, the Gluten-Free Restaurant Awareness Program, and they organize GF summer camps for children with gluten-intolerance. Check them out!

I first learned about gluten when my niece was diagnosed with celiac, in early 2003. By the end of the year, half my family was gluten-free. Now, this was back in the days when they first realized how prevalent celiac disease actually is. I was working as a teacher’s aide in my kids’ school at the time, with 500 children in the school, and not one of them had been diagnosed with celiac. I used to walk around the yard wondering, which 4 or 5 kids here have celiac?

{Just for the record: my kids had all been tested for CD. They were the only ones in the school that knew for sure that they DIDN’T have it. But it obviously runs in our family, my father-in law has celiac, and my husband and most of our kids just feel profoundly better off gluten. And so a bakery is born.}

Anyway, when you approach a large group of people with the assumption that celiac disease is here, just waiting to be found, an amazing thing happens. Your eyes open up, and you see evidence of gluten intolerance everywhere.

Read the rest of this entry »

The thing that really bugs me about that Biagi article (which I called “dangerous” in a previous post) is that it somehow counts as real research in a “peer-reviewed journal,” a piece of work that somehow marches Science along. It documents ONE PATIENT! How exactly does one person count as a statistical sample?

And yet Dr. Lewey wrote in his article, “However, since we are both clinically based and are reporting our single gastroenterologist experiences, and we are now known to have a bias that non-celiac gluten sensitivity exists…,” he can’t get his data published. You’d think one or two doctors presenting data on scores of patients would trump four doctors presenting one isolated case.

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Dr. Kenneth Fine also gave a speech at the Greater Louisville Celiac Sprue Support Group in 2004 about the Early Diagnosis of Gluten Sensitivity: Before the Villi Have Gone. [I say “also” because I first heard him on the Nourishing Wellness show a few weeks ago and blogged about it, below.]

Similarly, Mara (from Sophie’s Produce) recently shared with us Gluten Sensitivity Confirmed by Genetics and Blood Tests in IBS, where Scot Lewey cites Predictors of clinical response to gluten-free diet by Wahnschaffe, et. al, and concludes,

• “The next questions may not be does NCGS exist but exactly how common is it? Is it one in ten or closer to one in three?”

The problem with getting excited about the Wahnschaffe article is that if you go onto PubMed and do a search on “gluten free diet” you’ll get even more articles like, Is a gluten-free diet necessary in patients with potential celiac disease? by Biagi, et. al, where they basically conclude that no, it’s not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Allen & Jeanne Peters, the physician/dietician team of Nourishing Wellness in Redondo Beach, have an online radio show hosted by HealthyLife.net. You can hear them live on Thursday mornings at 9am. What’s even better is that you can listen any time by going to the HealthyLife “archives,” clicking on the Peters’ name, and selecting a program.

Anyway, the most recent show added to the archives aired November 08 2007 & features Dr. Kenneth Fine of EnteroLab. (Those are the folks who do the mail-order stool testing for “anti-gluten”-antibodies.) Dr. Fine talks about his experiences as a gastroenterologist, the prevalence of gluten intolerance, possible reasons for this epidemic, and the paleolithic diet.

I’ve never heard Dr. Fine speak before. He actually makes a good case, and I’ve got quite a bit I want to mull over in future posts. Oh joy for you.

Half of Celiacs tested showed “a similarly strong inflammatory reaction” to Cows’ Milk as they did to Gluten

From Clinical & Experimental Immunology (March, 2007): 20 biopsy-confirmed celiacs now in remission were given a rectal-challenge of gluten & cows’ milk protein. (Oh, the things we do for science!)

18 of them showed an anti-gluten-type response, 10 of those 18 reacted equally to the cow’s milk (as exhibited by a different response). They then retested 6 of the 10 to see which component of cows’ milk was the culprit.

The conclusion? “A mucosal inflammatory response similar to that elicited by gluten was produced by [cows’ milk] protein in about 50% of the patients with coeliac disease. Casein, in particular, seems to be involved in this reaction.”

View the abstract on PubMed.
Clin Exp Immunol. 2007 Mar; 147(3):449-55. Mucosal reactivity to cow’s milk protein in coeliac disease. Kristjansson G, Venge P, Hallgren R., Department of Medical Sciences, University Hospital of Uppsala, Sweden.

– Baker’s Note: And that’s just the celiacs! Casein has long been implicated along with gluten in neurological (i.e., MS or ataxia) and neuropsychological diseases (most notably, Autism-Spectrum Disorder). And yet so much of gluten-free food contains dairy. Not here! The Sensitive Baker is 100% Gluten AND Casein-free.