Gluten-Free Mania: another fad diet?

Gluten is a type of protein that naturally occurs in wheat, rye, and barley.

People with celiac disease — a common autoimmune disease that damages the lining of the small intestine — have to cut out gluten for life. But what about the others? The number of people who avoid gluten but don't have celiac disease has more than tripled in under a decade.

Multiple threads weaved together could have produced this lasting distrust of gluten: a sharp rise in allergies in the last decades, the legitimacy of a condition called non-celiac gluten sensitivity, a long-standing love affair with fad diets, the internet, celebrities, and marketing. We’re all fans of a quick-fix-as-long-as-I-get-slimmer mentality. Society is always looking for a nutritional enemy to demonize, and gluten has become the last sacrificial lamb. And obesity rates continued to rise in Western populations, so it’s no surprise that people were increasingly eager to find ways to lose weight and feel healthier. Browsing the internet, you can drown in the ocean of misinformation, disinformation, and scams. Telling the difference between these sources and the science-based findings is tricky because the dirtier end is highly financed and excellent at holding people’s attention with videos, likes, celebrities, and influencers.

Manufacturers could label foods as gluten-free and imply that they were better for you. And people are keen to eat foods that they think are healthy, especially if they’re also tasty. A survey in 2013 found that 27% of people who chose gluten-free products did so because they thought it would help them lose weight.

In reality, many of these GLUTEN-FRE foods are ultra-processed products that contain high levels of sugar, salt, saturated fats, artificial colors, sweeteners, and other additives, which certainly are NOT HEALTHY. Also, you risk to consume less gut-healthy fiber and to miss out on some micronutrients.

Bottom line: do not exclude any food group without consulting a nutritionist or another health care practitioner.