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Nutrition

Food Intolerance Or Eating Disorder?

Food Intolerance Or Eating Disorder?

  • February 14, 2013 9:32 pm
  • 6 comments

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Author evilcyber visit my website

Do all those people who swear they need gluten-, dairy- or wheat-free genuinely suffer from a food intolerance? Or may they actually have an eating disorder?

Back In The Old Days

Try today to invite over some friends for dinner, and chances are you end up serving cardboard.

It’s the only thing everyone can eat without nearly fatal consequences: Mary can’t eat gluten, Joe is allergic to dairy, Liz has to say no to anything that contains glutamate, while Hank is strictly vegan and Pamela a vegetarian.

Just twenty years ago you may have had a vegetarian or diabetic among your guests, maybe an allergic, but in general, food allergies were far from common. Now they’re almost the norm.

Why is that, when in those two decades our eating habits changed only little?

Celiac Disease

Take, for example, celiac disease, an illness that causes damage to the small intestine and hinders absorption of nutrients from food. People afflicted with it have to avoid gluten, a protein occurring in wheat products.

Celiac disease is easily diagnosed through a blood test, intestinal or skin biopsy. In western societies, about 1 in 133 people are affected by it, which for the United States gives us around two million sufferers. Two million in a population of 300 million.

But two years ago a panel of medical experts discovered that we have an epidemic of gluten-intolerance that can’t be explained by celiac disease. The doctors named it “non-celiac gluten sensitivity” (PDF). People who suffer from it get worse when they eat gluten, and better when they don’t.

So far the doctors are clueless about what causes it, but I’ll take a wager.

Is It The Gluten Or An Eating Disorder?

One  simple reason why self-diagnosed gluten-intolerance sufferers feel better after cutting out gluten is that it often means they changed their nutrition in general.

Where before it was pizza, hamburgers, milkshakes and other caloric behemoths, they now eat a lot more fruits and vegetables. This results in weight loss, and that in turn goes hand-in-hand with improved cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure and, last but not least, a better self-image.

Self-image ties in with my second proposed explanation. It goes back to what a friend of mine, who worked on the eating disorder ward of  a psychiatric hospital, told me about the patients he worked with: the vast majority of those affected by eating disorders report having food allergies.

This connection has become so common that psychiatrists gave it a name: orthorexia. The list of symptoms reads like a how-to manual for food intolerance self-diagnosis.

If It Makes Them Happy?

It’s simple to say, so what, if believing in gluten-, wheat- or dairy-free makes people happy, just let them be! Which in general is my position as well: whatever rocks your boat, do it.

However, we may have to draw a line when voluntarily cutting out certain food groups causes deficiencies. Saying no to gluten, for example, can not only cut the gluten, but your sources of fiber and B vitamins as well. If a person indeed suffers from orthorexia, then the obsession with food is just the symptom of a far deeper problem that left untreated can end in self-destruction.

By all means, if you believe you suffer from food allergies, get them tested. But if you self-diagnosed yourself and the changes you made to your eating style cause you problems, it may pay to also look deeper.

Picture courtesy of Mike Linksvayer.

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6 Comments

  1. Cindy says:
    February 14, 2013 at 10:11 pm

    I see a gastroenterologist a couple times a year because I have some problems and I asked him why I had no problem eating pizza in Italy when it is such a problem for me in North America. He said the variety of wheat grown here is harder to digest. He also suggested the tomato sauce was probably a factor too as ours is often rancid and over processed.

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      February 15, 2013 at 4:13 pm

      That could be. I also remember that when we were in Rome two years ago, it seemed to me that Italians use less yeast in their dough.

      Reply
  2. Band3 says:
    February 14, 2013 at 10:40 pm

    Well, the nocebo effect fueled by the flavour-of-the-month food paranoia that the media and broscientists so eagerly spreadan is an interesting subcategory of eating disorders indeed. You know, fat = death, grain = death, sugar = death, aspartame = death, etc.
    A while ago I read an interesting article dealing with homogenised & pausterised milk = death. It was a double blind study which tried to estimate the degree of the nocebo effect. They basicaly took a group of “disturbed” head cases who reported all kinds of terrible side effects after drinking dead, not to mention toxic, industrial milk. However, the symptoms magically disappeared when they switched to raw milk. Well, the double-blind showed that practically 100% of the “patients” suffered from a just really bad case of nocebo. Nuf said.

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      February 15, 2013 at 4:14 pm

      And unfortunately this is hard to turn around. Nothing much beats having personally experienced an effect – for the better and for the worse.

      Reply
  3. Dr. J says:
    February 15, 2013 at 4:17 pm

    When I was younger my mom told me i was allergic to penicillin. I didn’t think I was, so I took some 🙂

    She was allergic to penicillin.

    There is no question in my mind that many people eat a very distorted diet. I go to restaurants and everything on people’s plates is a shade of brown. Something very wrong there! It’s no surprise that there has been an over reaction to where we have gone.

    Monks understood the middle ground. Maybe the rest of us need to find it also.

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      February 15, 2013 at 7:22 pm

      I had really bad acne as a teenager, but my mom told me not to take antibiotics against it, because she got cause and effect the wrong way around: she thought if I took antibiotics against acne, I will develop resistance and the antibioics will not work on me anymore when I was hit by something really serious.

      For a teen, having bad acne *is* really serious.

      Reply

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