Terry Prone: Give us our daily bread: gluten-free is not a lifestyle fad it’s a life-saver

THE symptoms of diseases are often misinterpreted. Diabetics, when they need sugar, talk nonsense or collapse, and people mistake it for drunkenness. But that’s a misunderstanding of the symptoms.

Coeliac disease is also misinterpreted, not because of symptoms, but for quite different reasons.

It’s recently that coeliac disease went from being an under-diagnosed dietary oddity to a serious, permanent, and sometimes killer ailment.

Coeliacs can suffer devastating depression, and the suicide of one friend of mine has to be partly attributable to its miseries.

A Swedish study in 2011 examined the causes of death of diagnosed coeliacs (30,000 of them) and found they had a higher rate of suicide than the general population. The study spanned from the late 1960s until eight years ago. The researchers noted the higher suicide rate, but could not speculate as to the cause.

However, it is just one more statistic that adds up to a serious problem.

That problem has been exacerbated by people who have extrapolated from the experience of ceoliacs and applied it to their non-coeliac selves.

Modern times seem to require at least one dietary villain per decade. Monosodium glutamate allergy was up there for a while, threatening anybody who used it to enhance the flavour of a dish — Paulo Tullio maintains it would make grass clippings positively delicious — with disability and physical distortion. Over time, MSG has been replaced as the villain by food colourings, by salt, more recently by sugar, and in the last 18 months by gluten. Gluten, goes the theory, is not just bad for coeliacs. It’s lousy for everybody.

The gluten-free section of most supermarkets has gone from a sadly dutiful response on behalf of a small, troubled cohort of customers to a widescreen panavision of multi-shelf displays; the once brick-like, gluten-free loaves produced by brands nobody ever heard of have become passably palatable and not outrageous in cost.

These visible changes are in response to a gluten-free movement, combined with the Paleo fad. For the most part, it’s a good response. In my own company, we currently have to stick ‘DON’T EAT THESE’ on packets of gluten-free biscuits, because they are now as delicious as ordinary biscuits.

This is not unusual.

According to University College Cork, 10% of the people buying gluten-free food are coeliacs. Only 10%.

In other words, only one in ten of the purchasers has a medical reason for eschewing gluten. The rest are doing it because they’ve become convinced that cutting gluten out of their diet will make them feel better, perform more effectively, lose weight and stay compos mentis in retirement.

And what harm, I hear you ask. Sure, doesn’t it give the poor coeliacs a bit of company? Short answer? No. Longer answer? It may be rather more serious and negative than that.

The president of the Coeliac Society, Professor Nicholas Kennedy, has reservations about all these non-coeliacs claiming to need gluten-free nourishment.

“It means people serving gluten-free foods in restaurants are less convinced people need a gluten-free diet for health reasons rather than a lifestyle choice,” he says.

The professor is not quite saying that a waiter will present diners with bread, letting on that it is gluten-free when it’s standard, but hurried cooks who think gluten-free is a meaningless modern fad might do just that, not realising that a coeliac who ingests gluten will not only go home and be grievously ill, but as a result their longer-term health will have been eroded.

Even the crumbs picked up by gluten-free bread passing through a toaster can sicken a coeliac.

But the fact is that a growing majority of people, in this country and elsewhere, believe gluten-free is the way to go.

Apart from the way this trend undermines the seriousness of coeliac disease, the fad deserves to be questioned in other respects. The gluten-free movement is increasingly being capitalised on in the way that the fat-free movement was a couple of years ago.

Back then, products like jellies announced themselves as fat-free and gave the impression the fat had been taken out of the product, whereas it had never been there in the first place: why on earth would a jelly baby have fat in it?

In the United States, right now, some packages of potato crisps announce themselves as ‘gluten-free’. This, perhaps, makes the thoughtless gluten-free dieter believe these crisps have undergone an extra process to remove the gluten. Not so.

Potato crisps worth eating have potatoes, fat and salt. Gluten is not in the DNA of a decent potato crisp and never was.

The fat-free approach to the marketing of foodstuffs distracts from the reality, which is that the removal of fat from processed food inevitably removes flavour and tastiness as well.

Many of these products had the flavour and taste re-introduced by the addition of more salt and sugar to replace the fat. Neither addition makes the foodstuff healthier.

Similarly, because removing gluten from some foods makes them less appealing, the appeal is reintroduced by additives, such as salt and sugar, which, in turn, mean that someone who kids themselves that they will lose weight on a gluten-free diet is doing just that: Kidding themselves.

In fact, many people gain, rather than lose, weight on such a diet.

The great danger of fads adopted as a result of non-existent, self-diagnosed allergies is that the ‘sufferer’ not only mucks with the public understanding of genuine afflictions, like coeliac disease, but can do themselves real harm.

For example, not only can you get fatter on a gluten-free diet, you can also develop deficiencies. That’s because a lot of the foods that are free of this component don’t have nutrients like folic acid, vitamins or iron added, as many gluten-rich foods do.

According to Dr Alessio Fasano, the director of the Centre for Coeliac Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, quoted in America’s Consumer Reports, eliminating gluten from your diet, if you haven’t got a real, present and scientifically diagnosed need to do so, could be detrimental to your health.

“When you cut out gluten completely,” says Fasano, “you can cut out foods that have valuable nutrients and you may end up adding more calories and fat into your diet.”