The researcher who established that celiac disease is much more common in the United States than long thought is now speaking about gluten sensitivity.

Alessio Fasano, M.D., Medical Director of the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research, is known for conducting landmark research that showed that celiac disease is a common gastrointestinal disease in the United States, with prevalence rates comparable to those in Europe. Now is he conducting research and speaking about gluten sensitivity, a non-celiac intolerance to gluten. Gluten sensitivity is a condition that many people who have tested negative for celiac disease have long suspected but that most traditional celiac disease researchers have not acknowledged.

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The topic of celiac disease is hitting the mainstream. This weekend it was one of many conditions covered in short stories in a Special Women’s Health Report in USA Weekend, a magazine distributed in 623 newspapers throughout the country, with a circulation of 23 million people.

Seeing a story about celiac disease in the nation’s second-largest-circulation magazine is encouraging. However, as I mentioned in my last post, “The New Picture of Celiac Disease,” many stories in the media – the USA Weekend story, “Celiac: A Gut Reaction,” included – perpetuate the old picture of celiac disease: that people with celiac disease almost always have gastrointestinal symptoms and weight loss.

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Celiac disease was long considered to be a rare condition; characterized by obvious symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal distention, and failure to thrive; and not common in areas of the Middle East where the domestication and cultivation of wheat began.

Studies in the past several years, including a few new studies, paint a completely different picture.

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Welcome to the increasing number of new visitors to this site! Many of you are looking for gluten-related information, and early posts I wrote a few months ago tend to get missed by newcomers.

So, here is a rundown of gluten-related stories you might have missed:

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A component of wheat gluten stimulates an innate immune system response in people with or without celiac disease, says a report in the British medical journal Gut.

Researchers from Spain performed gut biopsies on six patients without celiac disease. Then they used an innovative technique in which they challenged those gut biopsies with fragments of gliadin, a component of gluten, and watched for an interleukin-15 response. Interleukin-15 (IL-15) is a marker of activation of the innate immune system.

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Humans aren’t alone in being sensitive to gluten and having symptoms including diarrhea, bloating, fatigue, depression and skin rashes and blistering. Rhesus macaques, a type of monkey, develop gluten sensitivity and these same gluten-related symptoms. They also recover when put on a gluten-free diet.

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A reader from Canada wrote me to let me know about a post she wrote today on the Sjogren’s World Community Forum. She told me that my Going Against the Grain book helped her and that eating completely against the grain proved to be the answer to greatly improve many symptoms she was experiencing.

Sjogren’s disease is an autoimmune disorder characterized by dry eyes and a dry mouth. It also can be a more systemic disease, affecting many organs and involving connective tissue disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erthematosus or scleroderma.

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The gluten-free movement is growing exponentially. Consider this: Two years ago about 40 people attended the Southern Arizona Gluten-Free Faire. Last year 200 to 250 people attended — that took me and the Southern Arizona Celiac Sprue chapter by surprise! This year the Southern Arizona Celiac Support Group planned for higher attendance, rented a gymnasium to hold the Faire, and more then 650 people attended!

The dramatic increase over last year’s attendance is a record not only for SACS but probably a national CSA record as well! Perhaps most impressive is not the total number of people but the fact that approximately 80 percent of the people who came to the Faire were not SACS members, but new, off-the-street attendees ! That’s more than 500 people in the Tucson area who are new to gluten-free eating but have come to the conclusion that gluten free is the way for them to live for better health.

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I will be giving the keynote address at the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association conference in Auckland, New Zealand May 3 and 4, 2008. The conference is on obesity and diabetes, which are epidemics in New Zealand as they are in other western nations. But I will also be covering information about gluten sensitivity in my follow-up workshop, too. If you would like to see the program of the conference or forward it to anyone you know in New Zealand, you can find more info here. Needless to say, I am honored and excited!

Eat real food kind of goes without saying. But we need to get back to that and steer away from thinking of foods as carriers of nutrients that manufacturers can manipulate for the better for our health, keynote speaker and The New York Times best-selling author Michael Pollan told a capacity crowd at Natural Products Expo West last week.

Natural Products Expo West is the country’s largest natural, organic, and healthy products trade show. It was larger than ever this year: More than 52,000 retailers, manufacturers and industry professionals attended the show to see a record 3,392 exhibits in the Anaheim Convention Center. “Gluten-Free” was an extremely popular category of products – even hotter than it has been the past few years. There were a number of healthful, whole-food, gluten-free products at the convention. However, it is amazing how many companies offer highly refined gluten-free products that people think are healthy just because they’re gluten free. Pollan’s comments on the changes that have taken place with our food and the way we look at food offers some much-needed perspective so we can make smarter choices in the foods we buy.

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