A reader asked where I got the following data which I referred to in a prior post:
"Celiac is suffered by approximately 1% of our population. Research estimates that gluten sensitivity is conservatively present in approximately 40% of our population –big discrepancy there."

I was told that celiac disease = gluten intolerance/sensitivity; i.e., you either have it or you don't.

Nice question and thanks for asking it!

Let's start with the comment equating celiac disease to gluten intolerance/sensitivity. First of all you are correct - you DO either have it or you don't. Gluten sensitivity is genetic and the sooner it gets diagnosed the better your health will be.

While it is true that every celiac is gluten sensitive, the reverse doesn't hold up. In other words, not every gluten sensitive patient has celiac disease. The problem really arises from the incorrect equating that has been going on for so long in the medical community. It has been thought, for a very long time, that if a patient did not have celiac disease then they weren't gluten sensitive. And because celiac disease is relatively rare, looking for it as the root cause of a patient's symptoms was definitely no where near the top of this list for most M.D.s. It is this very misconception and the resultant patients who continue to suffer due to not being properly diagnosed, that was the driving force behind writing my book. What we kept seeing in the practice was patients who clearly couldn't tolerate gluten but who did not fit the classic narrow diagnostic criteria for celiac disease - which is villous atrophy (just think degradation of the small intestine).

Insisting that a patient is fine unless they have villous atrophy is akin to saying a person with very high cholesterol is fine unless they have a heart attack.

Add the above misconception to the fact that only 1 in 8 of those people suffering from celiac disease are diagnosed and you begin to see not only the magnitude of the problem but why it is that the average celiac patient takes 10 to 15 years to be diagnosed.

Gluten sensitivity is truly "the elephant in the room" that no one has been seeing!

In response to the first part of the question from the reader I'm going to include a little snippet from Chapter 8 of my upcoming book on gluten sensitivity.

For every one Celiac disease patient, there are eight who have asymptomatic gluten sensitivity.[9] It is estimated that between 35-50 percent of our population have some form of gluten sensitivity.[10] We understand more about our immune system now, and also we have many blood tests and other procedures that help us “see” how gluten affects some people. But we are just scratching the surface. It is not a surprise that a protein in our diets that has been causing bone, dental and nutritional changes for centuries still is not fully understood in its full scope of effects. Gluten has stealthily hidden itself from obvious view and continues to do so for much of the traditional medical community (a mistake we hope to correct with this book).

[9]. The Iceberg Cometh: Establishing the Prevalence of Celiac Disease in the United States and Finland,Gastroenterology Vol.126, No.1, Jan. 2004, 359-361.

[10]. EnteroLab. “Early Diagnosis of Gluten Sensitivity: Before the Villi are Gone,” June 2003. Kenneth Fine, M.D.

According to a New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, a gluten-free diet is a valid means for diagnosis of gluten intolerance. This is a very respected medical journal and this statement will hopefully be getting the attention it deserves.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

If you have Celiac disease or are gluten sensitive?

If you have Celiac disease or are gluten sensitive, you're probably used to this question. "How would I know if I had a problem with gluten?" "What would I feel?"

Whether it's asked by a concerned friend or a curious waitperson at a restaurant, once someone knows that you're gluten sensitive, the question mentioned above usually comes into the conversation.

Most people assume that if you were having trouble with a food you'd have a digestive complaint. While that is often true with gluten sensitivity, 2/3 of the time it isn't. Next to the digestive tract, the next most afflicted system from gluten sensitivity is the immune system. Why? What health problems might that cause? Glad you asked! Read on...

When gluten comes into the body of a gluten sensitive person, the body is unable to digest the protein. Instead it invokes a response similar to when a toxin enters the body and the immune system launches that response.

If you consider the frequency with which we consume gluten-containing grains in this country you start to get the idea of how often the immune system would get called into action. After years and years of several times per day responses, the immune system starts to get worn down in the intestine.

Considering it is estimated that the intestines are confronted with a pathogenic organism every 10 minutes in a normal person, the now weakened immune system of a gluten sensitive person is often unable to adequately defend itself and an infection can occur.

These intestinal infections can cause a myriad of problems but not always the one you'd assume, which is diarrhea. Countless times patients who suspected infections were told by their doctor that since they didn't complain of diarrhea there was no reason to test them. After two decades of experience I can tell you that is not the case.

The presence of gluten not only weakens the immune system of the intestine but it also degrades the very structure of the intestine itself. This compromises the intestine's ability to do its job of absorbing the nutrients you consume. Once again your intuitive thought might be that if you were malaborbing your nutrients you'd probably be losing weight. That is usually not the case. When you malabsorb your cells go into starvation mode, your metabolism decreases, and often the body starts to gain weight!

Therefore obesity is a sign of malabsorption. Most physicians in this country equate gluten sensitivity with Celiac disease. Celiac is suffered by approximately 1% of our population. Research estimates that gluten sensitivity is conservatively present in approximately 40% of our population – big discrepancy there. So not only does it take the average person suffering from Celiac disease a decade to receive their diagnosis, another 40% of the population is suffering with the same problem, gluten sensitivity, and never being diagnosed.

That is why this blog came into existence. And that’s why I just finished writing my book on gluten. (Hold for publish date, it’s only just arrived in the editing department.)

So, let’s get back to the immune system and why 2/3 of the time patients have non-digestive complaints.

We talked about the fact that the small intestine begins to structurally degrade and how that can cause malabsorption. Obviously if you are not absorbing adequate nutrition from your food, your cells will not get properly nourished and that can create multiple problems. But the loss of structural integrity also creates an interesting problem. Imagine that your intestine is a very sieve with microscopic holes. The holes are so small to ensure that food gets properly digested before it enters the bloodstream. But when the integrity is lost it affects the size of the holes as well. The microscopic holes actually get enlarged. This is knows as increased intestinal permeability, or “leaky gut”.

The significance behind “leaky gut” when it comes to a person suffering gluten sensitivity is that partially digested gluten proteins make their way out into the bloodstream via these enlarged “holes”. The immune system of the bloodstream marks this protein as an invader and mounts a response to destroy it. Unfortunately, the make-up of the gluten protein is very similar to the structural make-up of some of the parts of our body. After seeing this protein and attacking it as a foreign invader the immune system starts to see other extremely similar proteins in the body and mistakes them for gluten. This is known as “molecular mimicry” and it is at the root of why gluten sensitivity is associated with various auto-immune diseases such as cancer, diabetes, thyroid disease, arthritis, osteoporosis and more.

Simply speaking your own immune system confuses your body parts for gluten and starts destroying them.

It is exciting to work with such patients who have been given no hope for their condition other than dangerous drugs which suppress their immune system. The immune system doesn’t need suppressing it simply needs to stop reacting gluten and confusing other body parts for gluten. That is done by removing gluten from the diet and building up the immune system – not beating it down with drugs.

So when someone asks what symptoms are associated with gluten sensitivity, let them know that while the list is long, it’s also very treatable. It includes such things as:
Autism
ADD
Arthritis
Cancer
Depression
Diabetes
Fatigue
Fibromyalgia
IBS
Memory problems
Obesity
Osteoporosis
Skin problems
Thyroid Disease

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

Yesterday I posted part of the Introduction to our upcoming book about Gluten Sensitivity. As someone commented on its need for editing I want to address that by letting you know that you are viewing the "pre-edited" version. We're doctors, not editors, so please excuse the rawness of this material. I promise you it will be formally edited prior to publishing!

We look forward to hearing your comments and plan to post some more "snippets" soon.

I have to admit that I've been a bit of a "bad blogger" these past few months. I'm hoping the fact that I, along with another Gluten Doctor, have been writing a 350 page book on gluten is an adequate excuse!

We're very excited about this book because we believe that not only will it be a reference book for many suffering from gluten related health issues but it is literally the first of its kind. There are several books about celiac disease as well as several books about gluten-free cooking. But to the best of our knowledge there isn't a book which makes the distinction between celiac disease and gluten sensitivity while providing an abundance of scientific references to support the cause and effect relationship between gluten and such conditions as arthritis, thyroid disease, diabetes, IBS, etc.

I have included a bit of the book's introduction here and I would appreciate feedback about it.

Introduction

If you’re picking up this book in the hopes of finding an answer to your health problems, you have the right frame of mind. This book is about gluten sensitivity and its under-appreciated ability to have far reaching negative effects upon your health. The decision to write a book about gluten came as a result of an amazing phenomenon that occurred repeatedly throughout many years of practicing a method of medicine that focuses on identifying the root cause of a patient’s health problem which we call The HealthNOW Method. Again and again we had patients describing to us how significantly their lives had changed as a result of discovering that they were gluten sensitive. We write this book to inspire you to seek out the root cause of your health problem and to help you discover if the root cause of your illness is gluten sensitivity.

It has now been more than fifteen years since we became interested in the effects of gluten on our the health of our patients. At that time, even the most commonly known form of gluten sensitivity, Celiac Disease, was a rare diagnosis. What is even more startling is the fact that Celiac Disease is diagnosed in only a small fraction of affected individuals even today. Why is this? The biggest reason is lies in how standard medicine approaches health in general. Patients with gluten sensitivity, we have found, demonstrate many different symptoms. Likewise, the symptoms are usually nonspecific which means they could result manifest from many different health conditions. As a result, more common conditions are investigated first and sometimes the under-appreciated disorders such as gluten sensitivity go unnoticed.

Vikki’s mother was such an example. In addition to having many medical problems including an adrenal gland dysfunction, she had long suffered from constipation, chronic headaches, fatigue, low blood sugar, constipation and a host of gastrointestinal other complaints. She had undergone many tests and examinations, but none of these had given her an answer. Medicines were prescribed, treatments recommended, but in the end, the symptoms stayed the same. We had just begun investigating gluten sensitivity in our office, and when we tested Vikki’s mother for anti-gliadin antibodies. This is a test to see if the body’s immune system is reacting to gluten in a negative way. Well, to our surprise, she had elevated levels of these antibodies. Even more intriguing was the fact that she responded dramatically well to a gluten-free diet. Her headaches, low blood sugar symptoms and constipation resolved after having suffered for well over 50 years. Today she is a vibrant, healthy 85 year-old that takes no medication and by her own statement considers that she is in “the best health of her entire life”.

To drive home the point even further, 15 years ago our newly born daughter had been having persistent problems with projectile vomiting. When this is an ongoing problem, believe us that when we say you try to find an answer as quickly as possible. Not only is it painful to see your child suffer, but the mess is not much fun either. After Vikki’s mother was found to react poorly to gluten, and knowing that this can run in families, we tested our daughter as well. Sure enough, she likewise demonstrated gluten sensitivity and responded very nicely to the elimination of gluten in her diet. This started our crusade to evaluate the effects of gluten on people’s health.

But what is gluten? You have maybe heard of it in recent years with gluten-free foods being sold at health stores, and the rash of gluten-free recipe books in the bookstores now. But what is it? And what is gluten sensitivity? Gluten is essentially the major protein component of wheat, rye, and barley and to a lesser extent oats As it is metabolized or broken down, it can give some people tremendous problems particularly along their digestive tract . In short, the body’s immune system can see it as an infectious a toxic protein and can launch an attack against it (as if it were a virus) which can it also damages you’re the body’s tissues that harbors it (for instance the intestinal lining). Secondarily, you can develop a multitude of symptoms depending on what is organ system is affected, how severely it is, and what other problems occur later as a result of the prolonged damage. In short, the body’s immune system can see it as a toxin and therefore launches an attack against it. Varied and multiple symptoms are created depending on what tissues of the body are attacked.

Are you ready to consider a fresh approach to your health? Are you interested in finding what the underlying cause is rather than what is currently happening to your body merely masking your symptoms? So are we. If you suffer from cramping, nausea, chronic bowel problems, or stomach pains, the information in this book about gluten could be what you have been seeking. If you have chronic fatigue, sleep difficulties, depression, memory difficulty, or anxiety, you will want to hear about how gluten affects the nervous system. If you have joint pains, rashes, chronic pain, weight issues, or menstrual problems, don’t rule gluten out as a potential base cause to your symptoms. If you are constantly getting infections or have other immune or autoimmune disorders, gluten certainly is worth your time. While all of these complaints are varied in nature, their appearance occurrence reflects how gluten may “stress” your health individually.

It wasn’t until the 1970’s that we clinicians even appreciated how “bad” cholesterol and fats in our diet caused heart disease and stroke. But since that time, attention to these dietary components has significantly decreased these diseases. Likewise, we are just now understanding the effects that simple sugars have on our body’s ability to produce insulin and regulate glucose in relationship to diabetes and glucose intolerance. Diet has always been a major influence on our health, and truly we are what we eat. New vitamins, minerals and herbal nutrients continue to be discovered decade after decade. This is such a virgin field in this modern era of medicine, even though it would seem to be so basic. It is no wonder then that we are only now embracing how gluten can affect our bodies. This wheat protein in wheat, rye and barley has been around for thousands of years. But its evolution, and its growing appearance in our diets, has finally caught our attention. For many of you, it indeed may be the root cause to your symptoms. As we have stated earlier, the reason we have written this book is because of experiences with our patients. We love helping people get healthier so that they can live life to it fullest without having any attention on their body. Illness and symptoms keep a person from fully experiencing and fully participating in life. We believe life is meant to be lived, full-out with no stops.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

Lose Weight for the Summer!

Come get information on the following:

• What are the 5 secrets to Permanent Weight Loss?
• What foods tend to make us store fat-Hint: It's not what you think!
• Did you know that where you carry your weight tells you much about what diseases you'll be prone to get?
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Make your desire to lose weight a reality!

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Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”