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Gluten-free dieting is all the rage these days. And generally, the medical advice is that if you have some kind of gluten sensitivity, be it celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS).
But now, it seems like a gluten-free diet may not even be necessary for those with gluten sensitivity.
Of course, now that it’s beneficial to businesses, gluten-free diets probably won’t go away very soon.
Gluten-free diets haven’t been found to have that much of a benefit for anyone without a gluten sensitivity. But now, this new study says that even those with gluten sensitivity may not benefit from it.
The small study, done on 35 people, tracked volunteers who had been diagnosed with non-celiac gluten sensitivity. This condition occurs when people who ingest gluten experience gastrointestinal pain in people without celiac.
These people were already on strict GF diets, and were given a challenge to add gluten-containing and gluten-free flours back into their diet, without knowing which one they were using. They would use that flour for ten days, go back to their normal diet for fourteen, and then go back to gluten-containing flour for another ten.
They were asked to track their pain and discomfort levels on a scale from 1 to 7 over this period.
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At the end, they were asked to guess which flour was the one containing gluten. If they guessed correctly, as it was the one that gave them the most discomfort, they were given an NCGS diagnosis.
What they found was that only 12 of the 35 participants could tell which flour contained gluten, as in the flour that was giving them GI discomfort.
“Of the remaining subjects,” says the research paper, “17 identified the gluten-free flour as causing symptoms and six reported no adverse symptoms during the trial whatsoever.”
Though this study is small, it does seem to suggest that people who believe themselves to be gluten intolerant may be misdiagnosed more often than not. Or worse, the gluten intolerance is all in their heads.
