I’ve been on the gluten-free diet for about 4 years now. Believe me, it sucks! Finding food with no wheat, barley, or rye in it is a pain in the ass. No fast food restaurants, no pizza, and until recently no beer (there are couple of gluten-free beers out now — if only more bars would stock it!). One little bread crumb, one piece of food that someone used a spatchula that previous touched a bread product — wham! I’m sick for 2 to 3 days, gut feels like it’s being eaten, major migraine headache, fatigue, depression. Happens about once every 2 weeks. Sucks!
But hope is in the air. According to Stuff.co.nz, Dr Robert Anderson is heading a research team in Melbourne developing a vaccine for Celiac disease. Per the article:
Anderson … said the vaccine contained a fragment of the gluten protein which was toxic to those with coeliac disease.
Gluten is found in wheat, rye and barley.
It was hoped that repeated exposure to the toxin through a vaccine would desensitise a sufferer.
“Your body learns to become tolerant. The goal is to allow people to return to a normal life.”
The vaccine was expected to go into human trials early next year.
A normal life? Please be true…
In the United States, it usually takes someone with Celiac Disease about 10 years to get properly diagnosed and put on the gluten-free diet. It took me 15 years. Stuff like the following from the article speaks to the long road of education needed here.
Despite increased awareness, she said, the condition was still being misdiagnosed.
She knew of one sufferer who was treated for severe depression with a medication containing wheat.
“So that was fuelling his depression.”
He was finally diagnosed with coeliac disease after he began bleeding from his bowel.
He had since become “a normal person again”.
Except he’s stuck on a gluten-free diet indefinitely now.
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