BDC #33 - Celiac Disease: and the battle against gluten

Lately I have been indulging myself with lots of BBC Documentary series about food, obese vs skinny people, eating disorder, etc. And eventually, I bumped to this interesting  name: 'Celiac Disease'. I don't think many people in Asia is familiar with this disease (especially since most Asian countries have been mistakenly analogize as rice-eaters), but I believe it is quite common for Caucasians. 

Why it is more common to Caucasians? Well, because in contrary to the assumption over Asian's diet of rice, European and American's diet are mostly about wheat. Nearly every food might contains wheat, starting from the obvious bread and pasta, followed with cereal, cookies, cakes, and various processed foods. 

OK... where is the correlation?

Celiac disease (or Coeliac Disease in European spelling), is basically an allergy. It is an autoimmune disorder in which people can't eat gluten because it damages their small intestines (1). Gluten itself is a kind of protein abundantly found in wheat, barley, and rye. Gluten gives elasticity to the dough and the chewy texture.

Anyway, I am not going to talk too much about gluten, but, YES.. you can easily guess the link in between. 

Back to the topic. So, when a person with celiac disease eats something containing gluten, the body will release a specific antibody. Unfortunately, this antibody attacks the small intestine and destroy the intestinal villi. In the end, the destroyed small intestine has poor absorption rate which effect the person's health.  

 

I don't own the picture. Click it for direct link

Symptoms of celiac disease include abdominal bloating, diarrhea, constipation, iron (and any other minerals and vitamins) deficiency and anemia, fatigue; and sometime even lead to extreme weight loss and malnutrition. For a long term period, celiac disease might leads to thyroid problems, diabetes type 1, osteoporosis and arthritis, dermatitis herpetiformis (an itchy skin rash), and miscarriage or infertility. If it happens from childhood, it might also effect the child's growth and menstruation cycle (for girls). To make it even worse, there is no definite age of the development of celiac disease. You can start developing this disease at any point of your life. 

If we are talking about number, in US alone, a study in 2003 (2) found that one out of every 133 Americans has celiac disease, but only approximately 4,700 Americans has been diagnosed. It means that 97% of cases are undetected. In Europe is not even better. In Hungary around one out 85 people and in UK at least one out of 100 people has celiac disease. Germans are the least with only one out of 500 people with celiac disease (3). However, those data are from more than 10 years ago.. Along with the rise of popularity of processed food, I believe there are more people developing celiac disease day by day. Based on World Gastroenterology Organization in 2007, there are at least 1:100 - 1:300 of people all around the world have this disease, and it just the tip of the iceberg (4).    

Who knows, Celiac Disease might hit more and more people in Asia too? Especially since local food is not local anymore. Not only exchanging food from all around the world, we are also exchanging disease. I am not saying that we are not allowed to eat anything. Let's just be more aware of what is your body telling you... There is no harm to be more cautious.

If you want to check if you possibly have this disease, why don't you try this quiz?

ps: Click the bracket numbers for direct link ^^