The annual sugar-fest has begun. It starts with loads of cheap candy hitting store shelves a few weeks before Halloween. People buy candy at “bargain” prices for trick-or-treaters. With lots of candy in their house, many decide to have a piece of candy, then maybe another and another. Their sugar cravings build, and they keep eating sugar, which leads to more cravings, which leads to more bingeing.

Halloween is our culturally acceptable “eat-all-you-want” candy day. It’s fitting that right after Halloween is November, which is National Diabetes Awareness Month. Few people see how ironic and telling this is.

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Are you experiencing anxiety about the worldwide economic crisis and wondering how you can tighten your budget? One simple way is to slash the number and amount of gluten-free products you buy. Gluten-free foods aren’t available at most stores so people have to spend more money to drive to locations farther away to purchase them. Even worse, gluten-free products are two to three times more expensive than regular products, according to a 2007 study. That’s a hefty price to pay for people experiencing tough financial times.

Consider also that it’s not just the cost of gluten-free products – it’s the cost of those products to our health. Few people in the gluten-free community or natural food industry like to talk about it, but many gluten-free products are simply junk foods that happen to be gluten-free.

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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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