If you are concerned about gluten sensitivity, why not directly test for the antibodies or celiac-related genetic variants (eg 23andMe)? You can do both at home via mail for like $200 total. That information sounds much more dispositive than reducing gluten and maybe observing some effect, and given the long-term harms of problems like celiac, this is not a problem one wants to cheap out on solving.
Many people who speak about gluten sensitivity (and other allergic symptoms) think that often even when the antibody levels don’t reach levels that are detectable by antibody tests there can be still gluten sensitivity and making the experiment of reducing gluten to test whether there’s an effect is more sensitive then the antibody tests.
While running tests is you can rationally deal with the results can be useful, actually doing the experiment of whether reducing gluten will have a noticeable effect is worthwhile.
If you do run antigen tests, do blood tests. Skin tests don’t really provide useful medical data use but are easy to bill to insurance companies.
When it comes to running the experiment sometimes heartrate or HRV are sensitive enough to detect allergy reactions that you wouldn’t notice otherwise.
The real high cost action would be “Eat only rice for a week, see if symptoms disappear, then add additional foods one-by-one to see when symptoms reappear”.
As to the high cost action, I am working on prepping to do a true elimination diet. I say true because in many ways I’m already on one, having cut out foods that seemed to clearly give me problems and only keep those I seemed fine to eat, but that scattershot approach has left me without sufficient information to suss out what the actual triggers are.
You mentioning heart rate and HRV is interesting. I’ve been diagnosed as having a large number of preatrial contracts (PACs). We only noticed because I’ve had palpitations after eating whatever the triggering foods are (not the only symptom, though; I’ve also had things like thirst and chest pain that made it necessary to rule out a bunch of stuff like heart conditions and diabetes). I wonder if monitoring my heart would allow me to detect issues when they are below the level of being a problem. But I lack a model of how heart rate is connected to all this for that to make sense to me.
I’ll look into it. I was unaware until this comment that such testing existed. My 23andMe results show I don’t have the markers so celiac disease, and SNPedia findings don’t show anything likely to be related to gluten. I’ll see if it’s possible to find testing that might indicate non-allergic food sensitivities that isn’t also bogus.
It’s not just about celiac disease. There are several other disorders that seem to be worsened by gluten, the first one that comes to my mind is endometriosis.
The way I see it, it seems that some people are susceptible to pro inflammatory effects of gluten, whereas most are not. So if you already have an inflammatory disorder or autoimmune condition AND have this inflammatory sensitivity then gluten will worsen it.
I don’t know if this susceptibility to gluten’s inflammatory effect is genetic, or genetically identified / identifiable. Whereas you can indeed identify celiac related antibodies using various tests.
This fits my model that gluten somehow contributes to autoimmune/inflammation “load” and that because I’m now dealing with chronically worse asthma, even with treatment it may not be getting me down to a low enough level to consume as much gluten (or something else!) as I could in the past without issue.
If you are concerned about gluten sensitivity, why not directly test for the antibodies or celiac-related genetic variants (eg 23andMe)? You can do both at home via mail for like $200 total. That information sounds much more dispositive than reducing gluten and maybe observing some effect, and given the long-term harms of problems like celiac, this is not a problem one wants to cheap out on solving.
Many people who speak about gluten sensitivity (and other allergic symptoms) think that often even when the antibody levels don’t reach levels that are detectable by antibody tests there can be still gluten sensitivity and making the experiment of reducing gluten to test whether there’s an effect is more sensitive then the antibody tests.
While running tests is you can rationally deal with the results can be useful, actually doing the experiment of whether reducing gluten will have a noticeable effect is worthwhile.
If you do run antigen tests, do blood tests. Skin tests don’t really provide useful medical data use but are easy to bill to insurance companies.
When it comes to running the experiment sometimes heartrate or HRV are sensitive enough to detect allergy reactions that you wouldn’t notice otherwise.
The real high cost action would be “Eat only rice for a week, see if symptoms disappear, then add additional foods one-by-one to see when symptoms reappear”.
As to the high cost action, I am working on prepping to do a true elimination diet. I say true because in many ways I’m already on one, having cut out foods that seemed to clearly give me problems and only keep those I seemed fine to eat, but that scattershot approach has left me without sufficient information to suss out what the actual triggers are.
You mentioning heart rate and HRV is interesting. I’ve been diagnosed as having a large number of preatrial contracts (PACs). We only noticed because I’ve had palpitations after eating whatever the triggering foods are (not the only symptom, though; I’ve also had things like thirst and chest pain that made it necessary to rule out a bunch of stuff like heart conditions and diabetes). I wonder if monitoring my heart would allow me to detect issues when they are below the level of being a problem. But I lack a model of how heart rate is connected to all this for that to make sense to me.
I’ll look into it. I was unaware until this comment that such testing existed. My 23andMe results show I don’t have the markers so celiac disease, and SNPedia findings don’t show anything likely to be related to gluten. I’ll see if it’s possible to find testing that might indicate non-allergic food sensitivities that isn’t also bogus.
My several cents :
It’s not just about celiac disease. There are several other disorders that seem to be worsened by gluten, the first one that comes to my mind is endometriosis.
The way I see it, it seems that some people are susceptible to pro inflammatory effects of gluten, whereas most are not. So if you already have an inflammatory disorder or autoimmune condition AND have this inflammatory sensitivity then gluten will worsen it.
I don’t know if this susceptibility to gluten’s inflammatory effect is genetic, or genetically identified / identifiable. Whereas you can indeed identify celiac related antibodies using various tests.
This fits my model that gluten somehow contributes to autoimmune/inflammation “load” and that because I’m now dealing with chronically worse asthma, even with treatment it may not be getting me down to a low enough level to consume as much gluten (or something else!) as I could in the past without issue.