CSotD: Grave sensitivity
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I'm getting sick of zombie jokes, but I'm also sick of hearing about gluten, so today's Bliss is a nice mashup of tiresome subjects.
I don't doubt that some people are sensitive to gluten. I seriously doubt that everyone who thinks they're sensitive to gluten actually is, but I can remember back when some people claimed to be allergic to wheat and perhaps nutritionists have managed to narrow it down, and, at the same time, somewhat widen it — that is, here's why you can't eat wheat and here are some other things you should avoid.
Still, come on.
One year, there was a kid at camp whose mother said he was allergic to carbohydrates. We weren't sure how to keep him alive, if she was correct, but we moved forward on the assumption that he was a carbon-based life form and that his mother meant stuff like bread and spaghetti. He made it through the summer and I don't think he avoided much of anything, except his mother.
I think he was allergic to being micromanaged, though, yes, it's possible he had more gas and diarrhea than necessary. Still, babies are sometimes sensitive to things that, a year later, they are able to process just fine. This kid was eleven and I wonder what else he'd been unnecessarily avoiding for all those years, besides carbohydrates and sports where somebody wins and somebody loses, which he was apparently encountering for the first time at summer camp.
That was a rougher transition than spaghetti, but, after a little healthful purging of the tear glands, he made it and he ended up having a pretty good summer.
But, again, I don't doubt the possibility, just the prevalence. I'd like to know more about the methodology involved in discovering that someone needs to be gluten-free, because it's really obvious out at one end of the spectrum, where celiac disease dwells, but not so obvious at the other end of the spectrum where the test seems to be what magazines you read.
Still, it could be that the reason so many people have felt so good on the Atkins Diet is because they aren't consuming starches and ergo by happenstance are avoiding gluten.
Brains, you will note, are permitted when you're on Atkins, which is why you don't see a lot of fat zombies.
Only about one in ten people are gluten sensitive, and only one in a hundred actually have celiac disease, according to this very interesting article on WebMD, which posits the "hygiene hypothesis" to explain the increasing incidence.
Because of our ultra-clean environments, children aren’t exposed adequately to antigens in the environment while their immune systems are developing. If the gut has not been taught to deal with antigens properly, the immune system responds toward gluten with intolerance. In contrast, celiac disease is rare in less sanitary, developing countries.
Makes sense to me, and fits in with another study indicating that kids who grow up with dogs or on farms are less prone to allergies.
Also explains why my kids don't seem to have any allergies or gluten sensitivities. Joyful, chaotic squalor is your best, first line of defense, and we used to yell "Boil the baby!" as we laughingly retrieved one of them from yet another appalling bit of exploration and discovery, dusted him off and set him back toddling along on the path to more of the same, generally in the company of at least three and sometimes four dogs.
Little did we know that, not only were we saving ourselves from a lot of obsessive helicoptering, but we were actually making our lads more healthy as well as more sane.
Which I suppose means they ended up with tastier brains than those unfortunate kids who lived clean, sheltered, hyperallergenic lives.
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