Skeptic Hat: Gluten Probably Isn't Making You Sick

This isn’t new by any means but, like that frog sitting in the just-boiling water and jumping for the love of god, I’m suddenly really aware of the large crowd of people around me going gluten-free or its kinda/sorta extention, the “Paleo diet.” The former is precisely what it sounds like. Some gluten-having foods are more obvious than others, like wheat and barley and other grains, and some are less so because gluten is an additive in a lot of things. So the nut of it is that gluten-free people are skipping out on bread and grains, and generally keeping an eye on ingredients lists of other products for things like dextrin.

Meanwhile, the Paleo diet is based off of what we presume to be the diet of human animals during the pre-agricultural, pre-bread Paleolithic period. The idea is that we haven’t evolved so much since then and, thus, are better suited to that diet. That sounds science-y, I guess, and the argument continues that by going Paleo we get to skip out on the various diseases that have evolved in the first-world since, well, bread came along, like diabetes and heart disease. It’s a bit like Atkins, but…cooler.

The Paleo diet’s for another time—the issues around it deserve their own discussion. But its cousin, the gluten-free diet, makes for a better starting point.

There are three types of people in the world that should not be eating gluten ever: people that are allergic to it, people suffering from Celiac disease, and another, much smaller segment with gluten-sensitive idiopathic neuropathy, a disease of the nerves, of course. That’s it really, but it’s caught on like mad among healthy people, helped in large part thanks to its boosting by naturopaths and the alt-medicine crowd.

An argument that comes up a lot is that people who kick gluten tend to feel better, but anecdotal evidence isn’t enough for anything really. And when we’re talking about a lifestyle that whole industries are building themselves upon, one to which people are entrusting their health, anecdotal evidence really isn’t enough. Evidence has shown some benefit in going gluten-free for people with Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, but there’s no good, sound evidence out there that says it does anything good for healthy people.

“No widely accepted research shows any plausible reason for healthy people to reduce the amount of this protein in their diet,” Brian Dunning, the champion bullshit-caller behind the Skeptoid podcast, tells me in a recent email chat.

Feeling better could, of course, have something to do with cutting back on a thing found in bread that actually is bad for you: cheap carbohydrates. But cutting out carbohydrates as rationale for cutting out gluten isn’t sufficient rationale at all. They’re different things. And protein (from whatever source) is a thing that your body wants and needs for all kinds of reasons. Understand: gluten is the good part of bread.

How do things like this get started? And how do they build like this? “What usually happens is that some small paper or student research project will get picked up by the mass media and trumpeted throughout the headlines, owing to its surprising nature, and is frequently sensationalized,” says Dunning.

That generates consumer buzz and the market responds with a vast explosion of gluten-free products. We’ve seen this many times before: the Atkins low carb was a previous fad, as was fat free, sugar free, low cholesterol; follow all the fads, and soon there won’t be anything left to eat at all. Some people should avoid sugar, some people should avoid cholesterol; but just as with the gluten fad, there’s no credible reason for most people to avoid normal amounts of those ingredients.

Mainly, you are being marketed to. Same as most any other bullshit trend. Which makes it even a little irritating that it gets so much adoption among dissenters. “Fad diets have always been popular with the alternative crowd,” says Dunning. “Much of the CAM [complementary and alternative medicine] ideology is based on vilification of common substances or standard practices, so zeroing in on gluten as some kind of poison is right down the alternative alley. Last year it was aspartame, then it was food coloring, then it was sugar, and it will be something else next year.”

There are guidelines out there for eating healthy based on good science. Those guidelines sure aren’t what the food mainstream is pushing either, but that doesn’t make an alt-fad better for you. For serious: be better than the marketing, OK? Break the cycle. I don’t like the idea of corporations making money because consumers don't know the difference between good and bad science.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.