Celiac Disease : ( Symptoms,History,Cure)
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Why Does My Stomach Hurt ALL THE TIME?
More and more people are realizing that there's something wrong with their diet. When they eat certain foods–not just fast food–it seems like their stomach hurts a lot more than it should. Why is this happening? If they're lucky enough to have health care, or can afford a doctor, some tests are run, usually consisting of taking stool samples for several weeks. Not fun. Others who don't go to the doctor try to keep track of what meals they ate and when they started to feel sick. A lot of the time, the pain is caused by gluten sensitivity which can be mild or full-on Celiac disease. The pain from this sensitivity can range from mild discomfort to bad cramping and abdominal discomfort, diarrhea, and loss of appetite. How can you concentrate and go through your day when you're in pain? The stomach aches can take over one's life, putting pressure on one's self esteem, friendships, and relationships at home and at work. Obviously the best outcome would be a doctor's visit and a medical plan, but let's face it, not all of us have that option. So if you feel like you might have a gluten intolerance, there's a couple things you can try to assuage your pain along the way to eating a more gluten-free diet.
A Brief History of Gluten
If you have a gluten sensitivity, your body, specifically your digestive tract, is responding to gluten–the stuff that makes bread dough sticky. Gluten is a protein that comes from wheat and barley and rye. Why can't you digest this? Maybe you didn't have a problem with it before, but all of a sudden, your stomach started to hurt every time you ate a pizza. Science can explain some of this. But a holistic, balanced approach can help too. Bread is a wonderful, delicious, culturally and religiously significant food for a lot of people. Just the smell of freshly baked bread can evoke powerful feelings. In ancient Egypt, where wheat originally grew as a wild grass, it took a lot of energy to cultivate wheat and harvest it, separate the grains from the chaff, sort it, and mill it. And that's just to get flour! Even more effort to cultivate a rising yeast, make the dough, and bake it. No wonder it is a sin in many cultures, especially Islamic ones, to throw away bread! Now a days, especially in the West, these processes are so mechanized, we hardly give a thought to throwing away a bit of moldy bread. Bread is cheap. Who cares? Our food industry is so geared towards convenience, be it ready made meals, or fast food restaurants, this cheap, abundant protein is mixed into practically everything.
One of the consequences of cheap bread is we eat a lot of it. Gluten, ie wheat and barley and rye products are in A LOT of things we eat. Everything from pizza to pasta to cookies to cake to crackers to beer. Today, wheat is a cornerstone of our food industry. It is the most important grain, world wide, more so than even rice or corn. But should we be eating some much of it, just because it's cheap and ubiquitous? Going gluten free doesn't mean you have to give up fast food, but being more conscious of what exactly you are eating will help you feel better.
Balance is the Key
If you think you have a gluten sensitivity, or you're thinking about going gluten-free, you should try taking it out of your diet for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Unfortunately, you might not feel an effect right away. In fact, for a lot of people, it takes about a month to get the gluten out of your system and rebalance the microbes in the gut that have such an important role in our digestion. You might find that quitting cold turkey is a lot harder to do than to wish for. If that's the case, try taking out the big ones. Pizza. Bread. Beer. Trace amounts of gluten are in a ton of products, and if you're going to get serious about going gluten free, you're going to need to develop a new vocabulary and start reading the ingredient lists on packaging. And good luck eating out. You'll be asking your server whether the french fries have gluten in them and she'll say no, but you'll get them and eat them and feel terrible the next day, realizing too late that those fries were probably fried in the same oil as the breaded fish, and that cross contamination has sent your guts spinning. Some fast food restaurants have caught on to this growing trend of gluten awareness and readily publish foods that are gluten free. More and more fine dining restaurants are doing the same. Becoming more aware of what food has gluten inside it, and getting smart about limiting what you put into your mouth can have a dramatic impact on your discomfort.
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