One of the most common questions I get when I tell people that I don’t eat gluten is: What the f*** is gluten?
It’s a fair enough question. The first time I even heard the word gluten was in college after my ump-teenth visit to the doctor to figure out why my stomach felt like I was digesting broken glass. At the time, celiac’s disease wasn’t a widely known condition and practically no one had heard of “gluten intolerance” or “gluten sensitivity.” After being tested for celiac’s and determining that I don’t have it, my doctor just shrugged and told me to lay off the gluten.
It’s rather hard to avoid something when you have no idea what it is. For all I knew, gluten was derived from unicorn hair and was something to sprinkle on my Lucky Charms. In retrospect, unicorn hair would have been easier to avoid.
As it turns out, gluten is just as wonderful and magical as a unicorn dancing under a rainbow covered in fairy dust! (Or maybe it seems that way because I’m being deprived of it.)
According to Dictionary.com, gluten is “a protein consisting of a mixture of glutelin and gliadin, present in cereal grains, esp wheat.” It’s derived from the Latin word for “glue.”
Essentially, gluten is a protein compound found in grains like wheat, rye and barley. What makes gluten the magical, fantastical thing that it is, is that it acts as a binding agent. Its super sticky gluey-ness is what holds the starch in grains together.
Sticky Awesomeness!
Gluten is what makes cakes hold their shape, it makes bread rise and taste like miracles and it’s what holds together our beloved seasonings like monosodium glutamate (MSG). It’s also used to bind together some cosmetics, dietary supplements and medications.
Gluten can be separated from wheat starch to a certain degree, but because since it is, well, nature’s glue, it likes to stick, making a gluten-free wheat-based starch pretty impossible. Gluten that has been separated from the starch can be stretched and pulled into a meat substitute called seitan (pronounced “say tan” or in my case, Satan). Seitan has a chewy texture that is similar to meat and provides protein, so it’s used in some vegetarian cuisine.
If you’ve ever had gluten-free baked goods, they’re often grainy, like sawdust, and they fall apart. Why is this? Because their magic glue that gives it texture is missing.
Gross and Grosser things about Gluten
So what makes gluten so dangerous if it’s just a protein? It depends on what your sensitivity is. For people with celiac’s disease, also known as celiac sprue or sprue, gluten triggers an immune response. Your immune system that is charged up to protect you from colds and the flu and create some awesome pus when you scrape your knees begin to attack the gluten, and unfortunately, your intestines become collateral damage. The villi (which are like tiny super absorbent hairs in your small intestines) get flattened and erode in this process. Villi are responsible for pulling the vitamins, minerals and calories from your lunch time pizza and turning it into a viable fuel source to keep you from passing out at your desk. When they can’t absorb, neither can you.
And because gluten is sticky, it rubs off on everything it comes in contact with. You can put a steak on top of a bed of pasta and the steak will have instantly become contaminated with microscopic pieces of gluten that cling to the meat like glitter on Lady Ga Ga. Even these tiny particles will start to erode and dare I say, liquefy, the villi. For that reason, those with celiac’s disease have to eat food prepared in a gluten free kitchen to keep the tiny sparklies of gluten loveliness away from their insides.
An allergy to wheat is similar in that the body sees a relatively harmless substance, in this case wheat, as a danger and launches an attack. The body responds quickly by flooding your system with immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies (helper proteins that like to kill things) which can cause itching, hives or even anaphylaxis (this is where your body swells up like a water balloon, cutting off your oxygen supply and you need to be shot with an EpiPen). A wheat allergy is not the same as celiac’s disease, though neither of them is very pleasant.
Gluten sensitivity, on the other hand, is different than both of the above conditions. When a gluten sensitive person eats something with gluten, they experience a whole list of unpleasantly nasty side effects. The symptoms of gas, bloating and stomach pain (which are awesome to have when you’re on a date) are typically the same as with celiac’s. And like celiac’s, gluten sensitivity can cause a long list of other physical problems like chronic fatigue, vitamin deficiencies, headaches, vestibular (balance) problems and depression. For these people, being gluten sensitive means you won’t erode your intestines and most likely, won’t die from eating gluten. You might, however, spend the vast majority of your free time being sad and sitting on a toilet.
There are fewer studies and information on gluten sensitivity, but as more people are figuring out that feeling horrific every time you eat isn’t normal, more research is being done. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about a gluten sensitive study published in the medical journal BMC Medicine. It’s one of the few studies that looks at the phenomena of feeling awful from eating gluten but without it being traced back to an allergic or immune response.
Read: Study Sheds Light on Gluten Sensitivity
There are tests for both a wheat allergy and celiac’s disease. For a celiac’s disease test to work, you must continue to eat gluten in order for the anti-bodies to show up in a blood test. Either way, it’s worth a trip to the doctor to talk about your symptoms and get it checked out.
