Got Gluten?

Post Reply New Topic

Neuroman has celiac disease.
Simethicone is his friend.

Celiac disease means no wheat, oats, rye, barley or malt.
There is gluten in everything.
In Gatorade.
In Pringle's potato chips.
In chicken and other meat (as a tenderizer).

It is easy to have an accidental gluten exposure. This is what happens:

GI symptoms (think salmonella or severe stomach virus). Double over in pain for a few hours. The runs. Residual GI symptoms for up to three weeks.
Then chills and weakness and pain.
If lucky, that's it. If not lucky, neurological symptoms: dysarthria, trouble walking, migraine symptoms, tremor, more muscle aches and pains. If unluckier, confusion and really easy to melt down. During the aftermath, trouble concentrating, word finding difficulty, dyslexia gets worse, increased sensory integration problems, motor problems like hitting the same key a bazillion times without realizing it. Residual symptoms for 6 weeks to a few months.

Once someone begins to have obvious symptoms they need to stay on a gluten free diet. Prognosis for those who don't is as low as five years. Symptoms often get worse with each sucessive exposure.

All of this is to explain NM's drop in posting and online presence. He can still work, but it is exhausting, especially days like yesterday and today when an eight hour shift can turn into an eleven hour shift.

A post such as this one costs an hour of NM's time.

We think this will be a lucky exposure and NM will be back to his heroic self shortly.

Thank you for your patience.

My aunt has that. She liked to have died from a wheat exposure a couple years ago. I feel for you!

My daughter's doctor says that her corn "allergy" is basically celiac disease with corn instead of wheat. Neuroman, I feel for you brother. Out of courtesy to my daughter's feelings, our whole house is corn free. Like gluten, its in everything and she can't even have trace amounts of corn products like xanthan gum. Unfortunately, chewing gum was one of her favorite stims, but we have yet to find a gum that doesn't have corn syrup.
I wonder if its all these trace amounts in stuff that's causing these problems to surface more? Sort of like the we get antibiotic resistant bacteria. I'm sure when you're reading the ingredients lists you have the same reaction I do...a little of this, some of that, more of these, and a pinch of gluten JUST TO P**S NEUROMAN OFF!

I don't know why but Celiac Disease has been getting tons of attention in the last few years. It seems way more pervasive than anyone ever thought. My sister-in-law has it and almost died because she worked in a bakery (!).

Could there be various degrees of Celiac Disease? I wonder if it's possible to be slightly gluten intolerant. It could be the cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and all sorts of similar conditions that some people suffer with. I have seen some research that seems to indicate that families with some Native American heritage are more likely to have members with Celiac Disease.

I have thought about getting tested myself because I have had some annoying IBS type symptoms all my life. I can't imagine living without gluten though. You don't realize how much stuff has it until you really look. Practically everything has it. I purposefully add extra gluten to my pizza dough recipe to make a better crust.

Wheat, oats, rye, barley or malt are my friends. Along with beans, they help make up just about the only carbs I can eat more than a teaspoonfull of.

But I'd rather be insulin resistant than have celiac disease. My diet is very limited, but I doubt as limited as yours has to be, Neuroman.

I don't know much about celiac disease, but IBS is known to be linked for many people to Anxiety Disorders (which run rampant through the ASDs, too). I have IBS and appears to be directly related to my stress and anxiety. Anxiety = abdominal clench and then maybe an hour later, WHAMMO!

In times of calm, I don't experience it at all. In times of stress, well... let's just say I spend a lot of time reading Garfield in the bathroom.

...

Last edited by Cade on 11 Feb 2006, 7:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

thanks all for your support. it looks like i am lucky this time. i will know for sure in about two days, but so far the neuro-symptoms are not so bad. numb fingers, some tremors, chills and maddening increase in distractibility. executive functioning took a dive too, but not too much to do besides my highly structured job in the next 24 hours - i took a 16 hour shift.
believe it or not, stimming helps. not sure why.

Yep, that's probably most likely my problem. I have never been sure though. One of the biggest things normal people do is eat together and that's my biggest problem area. I pretty much can't eat anything without feeling somewhat ill and being around other people just makes it worse (plus the anxiety of being around people in the first place). Most restaurant cooked food is also too rich for me. Meh, it's not fun and probably one of the biggest causes of my social anxiety.



Heh, sometimes if my body is in the wrong state and I eat the wrong thing I get the WHAMMO within 5 minutes. Sucks.

Only vaguely related... my brother got me this for Christmas. First gluten-free cookbook I've seen. Highly awesome, and it even has a (somewhat biased but what can ya do?) explanation on celiac and the GF/CF autism diet.

Whoa, wait a minute. My mind is spinning a bit. Gluten and casein can affect autistic people? What about aspies? Do these diets really do anything? Any aspies tried it?

This is interesting to me. When I started having severe anxiety attacks and such a couple years ago I also became lactose intolerant so I cut out most diary. I figured the anxiety stress was causing me to become allergic to lactose. Recently an antidepressant relieved enough day-to-day anxiety or fixed my gut since there is a ton of serotonin receptors in your GI tract so that I was not lactose intolerant any more. At which point I started consuming a vast quantity of milk for no reason I could explain. It felt kinda like an addiction but I figured it was just because I had not had it in so long and I <i>really</i> like it. Now I learn that milk may be producing opiates in my brain? What?!

I've considered going on one of those diets. I've always been curious as to what affect it would have on Aspies.

next we have the sensory integration nightmare
now the flourescent lights are burning my eyes
still have the GI distress
muscles aching like flu

Soy milk was all I've ever drank since I was allergic to milk when I was very young (gave me inner ear infections) and so I've never gotten used to the taste of regular milk.

Embarrassing secret: I never got used to the regular soy milk either. Whenever I drank soy milk it was always the baby formula I'd started on when I was under a year old, Isomil. I don't say that to many people-- though I'm putting it on a public internet forum right now -- but the last time I drank it was probably a little over a year ago. I don't drink it much because it's incredibly expensive. And embarrassing to buy.



I'm not saying you don't have dietary problems which can cause the IBS. But just wanted to let you know that IBS is frequently associated with the Anxiety Disorders. It would still be a good idea to check out alternative diets to see if that helps. You don't want to assume it's completely anxiety-related when it could end up possibly being a treatable problem. Just always good to have more information.

...

Last edited by Cade on 11 Feb 2006, 7:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm so sorry. That sounds awful.

here is a page of links to articles, etc discussing the connection between autism spectrum and gluten/casein.
http://www.paleodiet.com/autism/

here are some studies:
http://diet-studies.com/autism.html

miscellaneous links from neurodiversity.com
http://www.neurodiversity.com/gluten.html

advertising oriented but good basic information about gluten and casein peptides and the fact that they bind to opiate receptors in the brain
http://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/gluten-casein.html

similar from wikipedia
http://www.neurozym.com/note_casomorfin_en.htm

I have never been both gluten and casein free. I am aiming at such a diet within the next few months. There is even a more drastic diet called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, nice because the food list is on the web: http://www.scdiet.org/

my gastroenterologist suggested the south beach diet, which is basically a generous atkins diet. and i have tried atkins. couldn't keep up with it because i couldn't eat often enough to avoid hypoglycemia. and i got really sick of nuts.
another note: my regular doctor told me for two years that i could not have celiac because the least sensitive test kept coming back negative. i came back negative on most tests that look for gluten related stuff in the blood or damage to the intestines, including an upper endoscopy. Had I to do it all over again, i would insist on the genetic test. as soon as the results came back they called to make sure i was on the gluten free diet.
that was Dec 2004. by that time i had been having severe symptoms for 3 years. luckily i had been on the diet for most of that time. life expectancy average 5 years for people who get diagnosed due to acute symptoms and don't stay on the diet.