What Has Gluten and What Is Celiac Disease?

What has gluten, what is coeliac disease, and what are gluten sensitivity symptoms? Many people have heard of the terms gluten and a gluten-free diet. What you may ask, however, is what has gluten? Gluten is a protein traditionally found in wheat, barley, triticale, rye, spelt, kamut and oats, functioning as a binding agent. Gluten is very much a staple of the American diet. It is found in pizza, pasta, bread, wraps, rolls, and most processed foods as a filler.

Moreover, gluten is found in many other products that you may not think of, including chicken broth or marshmallows. It is used as a thickener as well in soups and can be added to the pepperoni on pizza. For those who find themselves highly allergic, it is also found in cosmetics at times.

What is Coeliac Disease? Coeliac disease refers to an autoimmune disorder that is marked by an inability to digest gluten, the protein found in these types of grains. Celiac disease, also known as gluten intolerance, is a genetic disorder that affects at least 1 in 133 Americans. Those affected suffer damage to the villi (shortening and villous flattening) in the lamina propria and crypt regions of their intestines when they eat specific food-grain antigens (toxic amino acid sequences) that are found in wheat, rye, and barley.

The condition known as celiac disease, or coeliac disease. Celiac (Coeliac) disease can also look similar in symptoms to Irritable Bowel syndrome, Crohn's Disease or Cystic Fibrosis. An estimated 99 percent of people who have sensitivities to eating gluten don't even know it. They attribute their poor health and symptoms to something else other than gluten sensitivity, which is 100 percent curable.

There are many reasons why people are so allergic to this grain. These include our lack of genetic adaptation to grasses, and particularly gluten, in our diet. Wheat was introduced into Europe during the Middle Ages, and 30 percent of people of European descent carry the gene for celiac disease which increases susceptibility to health problems from eating gluten.

Also, American wheat has been modified to contain a much higher gluten content which is needed to make bread lighter and more fluffy bread than those traditionally found in Europe. This super-gluten was then introduced into our agricultural food supply and now has adulterated nearly all wheat strains in America. Additionally, the wheat strand has been hybridized to introduce more protein into the grain. Thus, the stomach and digestive organs seem to not be able to understand how to process this, creating issues throughout the entire body. If a person with the disorder continues to eat gluten, studies have shown that he or she will increase their chances of gastrointestinal cancer by a factor of 40 to 100 times that of the normal population. Further, gastrointestinal carcinoma or lymphoma has been found to develop in up to 15 percent of patients with untreated or refractory celiac disease. Thus, it is vital that the disease is quickly diagnosed and properly treated to avoid these outcomes if you feel you have gluten sensitivity symptoms.