Leave it out: are food intolerances fact or fad? | Society | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015 ... om-coeliac

I know a ridiculous amount of people now who have genuine, visible reactions to gluten, or at least products containing it. They never had a problem before. And they're all in their forties with no other obvious health problems, though one guy's daughter has it and she's 16 or so.

Growing up all I ever heard of were people who couldn't take penicillin or peanuts... now it seems to be everything

I've got a bit of this and I actually don't think it's gluten. I think it's the process that's used to 'rush' mass produced bread through production. I can eat 'traditionally made' bread no problem and I can eat supermarket granary bread but supermarket white bread really upsets my stomach. I've only noticed this in the last five years for so. I think something has changed in the production process recently, but I haven't yet been able to find out what.

I had problems with Gluten for a couple of years, but they couldn't find any real problems. But I was on diclofenac for pain in my heel, which is aggressive on the stomach lining. As soon as I stopped taking the tablets, the gluten intolerance disappeared.

I also suffer from gout and managed to control it through diet for many years, but that meant no pork, beef, duck, goose or fatty fish (E.g. salmon). After a while, my body just couldn't metabolise it properly, I would just get diarrhea, even just small amounts - I was at a wedding and the soup had what looked like small dumplings it is, they had pork in them, I only at one, but... Now I have to take medication anyway to keep it in check, I put myself through a couple of unpleasant weeks, where I slowly weaned myself back onto eating pork and beef.

As you get older, you take more and more medication, I wonder if the reactions between the medicine and certain food products is a cause?

IMO it's a spectrum. On the one hand you have true allergy and coeliac's disease. My sister suffers from the latter but was only diagnosed in her late 20s. It's amazing how many processed foods contain wheat for no obvious reason eg chocolate. Somewhere in the middle is stuff like non-coeliac gluten sensitivity and is a barely recognised diagnosis. At th other end, you have people who eat s**t and then blame it on intolerances rather than looking at what they're eating. People who cut out wheat generally cut out a lot of the rubbish they eat and feel better for it.