by Melissa Diane Smith

(Opinion) – After four years of inactivity on the matter, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reopened a public comment period for its proposal about labeling foods as “gluten-free” and said it aims to publish a final rule and start allowing official gluten-free labeling in the third quarter of 2012. Members of the gluten-free community around the country are excited about this development with many thinking gluten-free labeling approved and monitored by the FDA will automatically protect them from unwanted exposure to gluten. But will it?

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by Melissa Diane Smith

There are good reasons for men to pay attention to symptoms early.

Every single person I meet or hear about with gluten intolerance is female. I feel like the only guy who has it, writes one man on a celiac forum. Do men really have gluten intolerance far less often than women, or do they pay less attention to symptoms that are common signs of gluten intolerance?

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by Melissa Diane Smith

(Opinion) The decade of 2000 to 2009 was a breakthrough decade in our awareness and understanding of gluten intolerance.

In 2000, celiac disease was considered very rare and non-celiac gluten sensitivity was hardly on anyone’s radar screen (except for a few researchers’ and doctors’ – and mine as well. I published Going Against the Grain in 2002.)

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If you’re a parent of a food-allergic child, the phrase, “Let the buyer beware,” can’t
be more true. An alarming number of products sold as allergen-free actually contain harmful amounts of allergens, a Chicago Tribune investigation has found – and American children with food allergies end up suffering unnecessary reactions, including life-threatening reactions that send them to the hospital.

This news comes on the heels of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that found that food allergies among children in the United States are on the rise, having increased 18 percent from 1997 to 2007.

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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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Drinking more than one soft drink a day is associated with a higher risk of developing individual cardiovascular disease risk factors, as well as developing the cluster of risk factors known as metabolic syndrome, according to a 2007 study published in Circulation.

The research, part of the ongoing Framingham Heart Study that evaluates common factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, followed middle-aged men and women during a four-year period.

At the start of the study, researchers established that participants who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent higher chance of having metabolic syndrome than those who drank less. Over the four-year follow-up, the results were similar, showing that people who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 44 percent higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome for the first time.

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News Flash: I am now writing the monthly “Go Gluten Free” column for Better Nutrition, a complementary magazine distributed in natural food stores across the United States. You can look for it at a natural food store near you. The magazine ran my first column in its March issue – and I’ve already written the next several columns.

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