“How to become gluten intolerant”

i worked in a “health Food” grocery store for two years, and it delighted me to no end when a customer would return a preservative-free item full of bugs and mold. (shrugs shoulders)…they’re in there for a reason…

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New restaurant idea: all dishes are comprised of nothing but selected wavelengths of light. It’s the next logical step in veganism, man: eat what the plants eat.

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Come on now, the bugs are a healthy, low-impact source of protein.

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A clear case of Poe’s Law. People already believe in that for real.

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Yes, but have they figured out how to monetize that in the form of a wealth-generating New Age diet trend?

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My wife actually has celiac disease. It’s a real fucking disease that’s caused her all sorts of problems. Her food has to have less than 20 ppm of gluten in it, and it can’t even be made in a factory that makes other things with gluten. Not everybody with “gluten intolerance” is on a fad diet. She’d give anything to be able to drink Guinness again, or eat real bread.
But you mention gluten in a restaurant, and people start making fun of you because of all the health nuts.

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I feel for you both. Its a tough condition to deal with. One hand the fad means you have more choices; the bummer is, as a fad, there’s a backlash that you’re getting hit with too.

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I’m not gluten intolerant but eating a lot of breads, noodles, etc. tends to make me fat so I’ve cut back to a (roughly) paleo diet six days a week and immediately started losing excess weight. Getting rid of sugar probably didn’t hurt either.

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A lot of the time, dietary restrictions help because it means you’re paying attention to what you eat. You could be eliminating anything - say, reducing your salt intake - and you might see similar effects just because you’re not just mindlessly stuffing your gob. :slight_smile:

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Well it wouldn’t be good if you wanted a substantial meal, but then we all know it’s a good idea for people to have some greens now and then. Top them off with a slice of orange or two, and maybe complement the whole thing with some burgundy, and it doesn’t sound so bad. I might go there when I felt like a light snack.

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I don’t disagree with that. Cutting out sugar, baked goods, bread, etc. removes a lot of excess calories and simple carbs.

I don’t think I’d lose more than 14 lbs cutting out just salt though. :smile:

Celiac /= gluten intolerance. Gluten intolerance is a seperate, novel, as near as I can tell now largely disproven disorder that was technically called “non-celiac gluten intolerance”. What people are complaining about here, and what the guys mocking in the video above is not celiac, its the nebulous ill defined intolerance to gluten, or the lifestyle diet that posits gluten as evil deadly stuff for all humans. Both of which are BS.

I’ve got a number of friends with Celiac, most of them are even more annoyed by the gluten free trend than I am. From what I understand most of your new gluten free products that have cropped up don’t hit the standard necessary for Celiac patients. They’ve got more than that 20ppm of gluten in them. So for my friends with Celiac, truly gluten free is technically more available. But its becoming exponentially difficult for them to differentiate between that truly gluten free stuff that’s safe for them, and “gluten free” trend products that actually aren’t safe. So they’ve got more variety, and more availability of the food they need. But paradoxically they’re more likely to make a mistake now and end up sick.

On top of that the difference between trendy gluten free menus and safe gluten free for Celiacs at a restaurant has become a problem. With gluten trend menus you don’t need to worry about cross contamination. With Celiac (depending on severity) it very much is a problem. So not only do my friends with Celiac have to really, really, stress that. But as a person who works in restaurants I now have to have lengthy conversations with everyone who mentions gluten about Celiac, cross contamination etc. Often telling Celiac patients that sadly, we don’t have the staff or space to handle cross contamination properly. Despite our gluten free menu items. So the lady with the purse dog and long list of entitled demands gets special treatment we really don’t want to give. And the person who we’d genuinely like to make allotments for is shit out of luck. Then there are the restaurant workers who are just so sick to death of the subject and will ignore gluten free requests, or out and out hide bread in gluten free dishes out of spite.

The same thing has been happening with allergies as well lately. The “is cross contamination an issue” question has been a life saver. Easy way to vet claims of food danger without insulting anyone.

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Well its not just that what your eliminating contains excess calories. There’s a well documented effect where by any attention paid to diet leads to weight loss. By virtue of paying attention to any one thing, salt, meat intake, carbs, avoiding sugar, hell even deciding you wont eat things with Ys in the name you now have to think about and check everything you eat. That’s can cause you to avoid things that are more calorically dense, or lead to you noticing calorie levels of the meals you eat, eating less of certain things, varying your diet more, skipping meals etc.

Its one of the things that makes diet research so hard. Even just having people write down/track what their eating while attempting to research “regular” or non-intervention diets causes people to eat better and lose weight. So your control thereby becomes one more diet change.

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Yes, yes. I do read things too. Thanks though.

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i tried to explain that to them. apparently live insects are not considered vegan.

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Fuck.
Right.
Off.

I can’t imagine anybody choosing to go gluten-free for the hell of it. It’s incredibly limiting - there is Nothing Fun About Gluten Free - just lots of delicious foods you can’t eat any more. And then you get people taking the piss - sure, why not make life harder for someone who already can’t eat pizza? Assholes.

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Including an ex-coworker of mine who claimed, when challenged about breatharianism, “Science doesn’t know everything!”.

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Yeah, and that’s a hell of a catch-22. My niece has a four-year-old daughter with celiac disease, and the lengths she has to go to in order to ensure her daughter’s diet remains safe are exhausting. She really has to make a pest of herself at restaurants, and everyone’s first instinct is to roll their eyes at her, but she just has to remain politely tenacious and insistent about the standards the food must meet (until the point where the politeness simply needs to melt away in the face of stubborn ignorance). It really ends up limiting where the whole family can eat, even though every other joint claims to have a “gluten-free” menu.

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Because eating huge amounts of calories and carbs is a big chunk of why most of the first world is 30 to 40% fatter than previous generations and cutting out bread and other wheat products removes most of the carbs we eat, leading to folks often being thinner? That’s why all of my friends but one that don’t eat gluten have done it. The one that did it for other reasons was because eating gluten sends her to the hospital.

Well, at least one of my countrymen has made money from it:

But yes, he has stopped short of marketing the diet.