Gluten-Free Life

For most of you, gluten-free is just another pretentious label millennials have been using for the past five or six years when these products came into the spotlight. But for some of us, it’s our way of life.

No picky eaters here.

Whether you have celiac disease, gluten sensitivity or just plain wheat allergy, the shift to a gluten-free diet can be an abrupt and challenging one.

One moment you are enjoying every food found on Earth and next thing you know, your gastronomic options are shrunk to somewhere near zero, and you become aware of the fact that bread, pasta, cake, cookies, pizza, and beer have been surrounding you ever since you can remember.

As much as I struggled with the changes, and I still do, two weeks after going gluten-free and I felt incredible. The migraines were gone, mood swings nowhere in sight, not to mention the awful gut pain every single time I ate; so in a sense, gluten intolerance diagnosis can be quite a relief.

What is celiac disease, anyway?
It's a genetic disorder which affects both children and adults and causes an autoimmune reaction in their system when they eat foods containing gluten. Left untreated, it can lead to a complete destruction of the villi found in the small intestine.

Non-celiac gluten sensitivity however, is still an object of study for many researchers.
Despite having similar symptoms, gluten sensitivity affects all body systems, causing not only gastrointestinal symptoms but also behavioral ones which can include depression, ADHD, foggy mind. But probably, its most significant difference is the fact that there isn't any intestinal inflammation that could lead to a potential flattening of the villi. A different immune mechanism is triggered, and due to that, it does not cause the same long-term damage as celiac disease.

It’s a long and on-going process, for the diagnosed person and the people around them. It’s even expected of us to go through a period of mourning. Yeah, I know, sounds dramatic.

But, I can assure you, it can sometimes feel a bit lonely and isolating.

You are unable to join your friends for an unexpected round of beers after work and pizza nights are definitely a lot less frequent. And don’t get me even started with the awkward explanations you will be forced to give when your friends decide to make home-cooked dinner. Eating out goes from being a fun experience to a freaking odyssey in which you fearfully eat and wait in agony to see if your dish is going to get you sick later or not.

And it goes on and on.

It’s not all bad news though, once you realize that you are not alone and that there’s a significant, and welcoming, gluten-free community online, things soon start to feel a whole lot better.

And thanks to the fact the market has lately experienced an incredible growth, reaching sales of billion dollars in 2014, and who knows where are those numbers now, there are support groups everywhere, restaurants with gluten-free options, gluten-free supermarket sections and even cookbooks.

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If there’s a better time to go gluten-free, is definitely 2017.

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Sources: "Gluten Freedom" by Alessio Fasano
Image Sources: I, II, III