Gluten is a very hot topic right now in the world of nutrition and it’s very fashionable to slam it regarding it as the thing thats stopping you from losing weight, building muscle and is also ruining your digestion, but what I want to talk about today is is gluten really that bad or are it’s bad press and poor reputation ill deserved? Gluten is actually just a family of proteins that live in wheats and is what gives dough the ability to rise when baked which provides the soft chewy texture.
I want to start by saying if you’re a genuine celiac, then yes you should definitely avoid gluten because being a celiac means you have a serious autoimmune disorder whereby eating gluten will cause your body to attack the small intestine and devastate your gut health. However the research is pretty limited when it comes to gluten effects in non-celiac individuals, some of them such as a recent paper by Lis et al. (2015) stated ‘a short term gluten free diet had no overall effect on performance, GI symptoms, well being, a select indicator of intestinal injury or inflammation markers in non celiac endurance athletes’
People always tell me “But Ifeel miles better when Icut out gluten!”, well lets take a step back and look at maybe why that is. When you cut out gluten you tend to cut out foods like, bread, pasta, pizza, cakes and baked goods, so by removing gluten and then therefore losing weight is due to the fact that people are cutting out very high calorie and highly palatable foods from their diet, it’s not solely the glutens fault. Usually the bloated feeling associated with these foods is attributed to the evil gluten in it when in reality it’ s because of the sheer volume of food that you eat that causes the bloat which happens when someone binges on food after trying to cut it out for so long, pizza and bread being great examples of this.
Sometimes people are self diagnosed gluten sensitive people, because occasionally they feel bloated and gassy and with so many people talking about gluten intolerance these days they feel that this is the reason why. However a study by Biesiekierski et al. (2013) showed that these people were simply responding badly to FODMAP foods in their diet, which are basically fermentable carbohydrates that when they pass into the intestine can give off gas (more on the low FODMAP diet in another article). So by going gluten free you naturally reduce the amount of fermentable carbohydrates in your diet, you also lower calories and food volume so naturally you put yourself in a position to lose weight easier, it’s not just the absence of gluten that has caused these positive effects. However in actual celiac patients, the OPPOSITE is seen with regards to weight loss when going gluten free, because eating gluten causes a genuine problem with their GI tract, when you go gluten free and it heals then they can absorb food better they actually put weight ON instead of magically losing it, shown by Capristo et al. (2000) as well as Dickey & Kearney in their paper in 2006.
This myth surrounding gluten usually comes from gurus and Instagram nutrition ‘experts’ trying to sound clever and up to date, and is further supported by anecdotal evidence of people feeling better when cutting out gluten. In reality cutting out gluten rich foods tends to lead to a drop in calories, improved GI symptoms (from less FODMAP foods) but not because of a direct effect of gluten. Now I’m not giving you the green light to go cram in as much gluten containing foods as possible like bread and pizza because then more than likely your calories will dramatically increase and you’ll put weight on, just be aware that it’s not the gluten in these foods that causing the problem for most people.
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