 here with us talking about it's cool to be gluten-free. He's done a number of these now. I think this is what, number four? I think so, yeah. So please welcome Professor Gabel. So a little, well one thing I want to say is based on some emails that I've gotten very, very recently, the time for all of these is 7 o'clock. And I know that one of the web pages on the UW-Shabuigan website has all of these listed at 6.30. They are all at 7. So for the remaining two, they will be at 7 o'clock. The second thing that I want to say is about the title. And this is based a little bit on my personality as I like to be a little bit snarky. And the students that I have in the audience that are here can attest to this. When I said it's cool to be gluten-free, I really did mean to have it in quotes. And so when we were doing the promotional material, I should have included the quotes because being gluten free, I wouldn't call it cool in any way because for some people it's a necessity. For some people it's a choice. And as we go through this particular presentation, we'll talk about what all of that means. So as Mark said, I have done this before. I don't think I've given all of these during this lecture series, but chemical-free, nutritional supplements, and I sort of talked about those together and then vaccines and GMOs. And I kind of think as I was putting this together that talking about gluten is sort of less controversial than those two vaccines and GMOs, maybe a little bit less controversial but not less important. So the common theme for all of these is finding the right kind of information and saying no to fats because you think about the consumer society that we live in, it's all about what's the next big thing? Paleo. Many of you probably don't even remember Atkins because that was big like a lot of the long time, but you could still find Atkins products. That's low carb by the way. It's, the list goes on, fad diets. And if you go back far enough and seeing all black and white videos of a little band that you would put around your waist that would like wheel back and forth. And I have to tell my wife that I actually did this during the lecture. She'd laugh at me. So this is what this presentation is not and this is not about diagnosis, meaning I am not here to diagnose you. We will talk about some of the symptoms of celiac disease and related issues, but I am not here to tell you what you have because I am not a medical doctor. My degree is in organic chemistry and I have a passion of debunking pseudoscience, which is also included in this. So one of the terms that I was introduced to within the last few years and now I have published is information literacy. So being able to understand and process and analyze information that you are presented with. And that includes this. So I am here to present you information and not make any kind of judgment on for you about what you take from that information. I am just here to present the various sides of gluten. So it seems like it's the new fat, carbohydrates, whatever thing that we are supposed to eliminate from our diets and if you have been paying attention to the news over the past 18 months or so, apparently the whole thing that we need to have low fat diet was a bunch of BS. That what we need, well of course what we need is a balanced diet, most of us. Now obviously some people are going to have issues with a balanced diet because of certain components of that diet and so they might not be able to have a balanced diet, which we'll talk about. But I mean going back to the first slide, you have a little humor in this. So one thing I like to point out is buzzwords. So gluten free has become a buzzword. Paleo has become a buzzword and we have Atkins and all of these diets, particularly when they're supported by celebrities, although I didn't bring celebrities into, well yes I did, a little bit later I did. So who are you gonna believe? So that's the question that I wanna start off with before getting to more of this. So if you're presented with a specific kind of information, let's say that gluten causes all timers. Now if you are presented with that information from me, how would you take it? I've already told you that I'm not a medical doctor. What would you say if your primary care physician told you? What would you say if Dr. Oz told you? What would you say if Brad Pitt told you? So which one of those people are you going to believe? Because perception is part of these kinds of discussions. Because I will be including medical doctors who are not telling you the correct information. So obviously now you can go to the grocery store and I think this is a little bit exaggerated, but at least you have the natural whole food section where there are going to be a lot of gluten free products and of course intermingled with all the different parts of the grocery store, you're gonna see gluten free on products and then you go online, you're going to see happy, shiny people presenting different information, recipes, products and so on. I think this is a joke. I hope it's a joke. Because I feel like this is some company that's taking advantage of a subset of people. Now it's important to bring people who are suffering together for support groups, but that just strikes me a little crass. Now, what is gluten? I think it's a little bit misleading because we say gluten and that sounds like a singular. But gluten itself is very complex because it's not just one chemical component or biological component. So it's a mixture of proteins that help provide bread its elasticity. So how this actually works has undergone quite a bit of study and we could spend an hour and I don't have the expertise to talk about this, but food scientists have gone into the combination of the two major materials, glutenins, which are water insoluble and gliadins, which are water soluble. So this is only one gliadin. There are polypeptides and there are many of them of a similar size and chemical construction that are considered the class of gliadins. And then glutenins are a composite of low molecular mass and high molecular mass subunits connected by disulfide bonds. They're much larger proteins. So the tendency is for larger proteins to be less soluble in water. The more massive something is and contains a lot of carbon, the less likely it is is going to be soluble in water. And so the combination with gluten and gliadin coming together and you do tend to form a mass that's like this, very, very, very complex and intricate. When you get that protein mixture together, it can expand when you go through the process of making bread and you're making carbon dioxide, it can expand and that's how you contain the pockets of bubbles that get bread to expand and so on. And so it allows you to knead it depending on the type of bread dough and my bread making experience is two things. One, using a bread machine, which I haven't used in about 10 years and then going back about 30 years when my mom was making bread and I do miss those times. But I am sure that 30 years ago we were not talking about gluten, glutenins and gliadins because back in the 1980s, I don't even remember what the fads were then. I'm sure there were fads, but not back then. So it is from what has been understood so far that is specifically the gliadins that are the cause of celiac disease. So it's only the one major component. Unfortunately, you cannot separate that out. So both of these coming together comprise gluten so you really can't separate one from the other and have the same effect in bread. You need the composite material to come together. So what is celiac disease? This is a very rough overview, but the major component here is the intestines. So we're talking about absorption. So it is a serious genetic autoimmune disease and I have a little bit of redundancy because I say genetic here and it's hereditary. But it's typically hereditary. And so where there is damage to the small intestine and when you have damage like this to the villi and I don't see my colleague, Mark Schmitz here. He would be able to confirm this, but so you have small finger-like projections from the small intestine. And they are the benefit is to absorb nutrients. And so when you have damage like this and you do not have those villi, you cannot absorb nutrients. And so this disease causes damage here and it leads to what we call malabsorption. And so if you think about malabsorption, malnutrition, that's a significant issue. So there are no drugs for celiac disease. The only way that you can treat, there's no cure. So the only way that you can treat it is with a strict gluten-free diet. So this is the beginning of what does it mean to be gluten-free? Because I know for a fact there are people in the audience who have celiac disease and it is a very restricted diet. If you think about not only what contains gluten and we'll talk about it in a little bit, but what gets mixed with things that have gluten. If you think about what you have in contact with anything that is bread-like in a diet, but things like drugs. So if you have anything that's made with starch, starch has the potential to come into contact with gluten or contain gluten. So things that you wouldn't necessarily think about, you could say, okay, this grain is not supposed to have gluten in it, but maybe it came into contact with something that did have gluten that was processed in that facility. So people who suffer from peanut or other nut allergies, one of the things that you read on the label on a product is processed in a facility that contains tree nuts or other kinds of nuts. Because for that kind of allergy, it's so severe that you really have to worry about that secondary or even tertiary contact. So this is a serious, significant issue. And the fact that it is turned into a fad is very disconcerting, and that's why I am here up in front of you today. Because I am not a celiac sufferer. I have family members that are. And I know how restrictive it can be. And the fact that a lot of it is turning into a fad is upsetting. So one of the other issues about celiac diseases can be very hard to diagnose. The symptoms vary from person to person. It's not like hypertension or heart issues or lung issues that tend to present a lot of very similar symptoms. You might not even have any. And that's one of the big issues here is you can have people living their entire lives without really understanding what they are suffering relates to this. So a couple of the common ones, particularly from malabsorption, things like that, any damage to the intestines you're talking about gastrointestinal problems. Fatigue, loss of weight. So if you have malabsorption, you're gonna deal with loss of weight. Bone or joint pain or arthritis, anxiety and depression. So you could think dozens of things that could lead to these. Maybe you had one, maybe you had two, maybe you had all of them. But there are a lot of other things that could cause this. I was, as I was going through this presentation, I was thinking back in my experience, my first year of teaching, this was 2006. And it wasn't here, it was in Washington state. And I had a student who had to leave in the middle of the semester because he was having medical issues. And I remember seeing him months later and he said, yeah, they originally thought it was Lyme disease and then they thought it was something else. And then I didn't see him for another month or two and he said, they finally figured out it was gluten intolerance. And even then I think they were referring to it as a variety of different things depending on what doctor you went to. And now we talk about as celiac disease. But the understanding of these kinds of issues undergoes evolution. The more understanding we have, it sort of coalesces around generally one thing and then it agreed upon treatment. But we're still learning about this because again, we don't know the root causes. We don't have a cure for it. We only have the treatments with the diet. So there are other things related to this and this is where we get into more of a gray area. There is celiac disease. So how do you know whether or not you have celiac disease? You go to your doctor and you get tests. So there can be blood tests but they are not always conclusive. The only way to really know is to actually look at your intestines and that means this way, which is something that I would never want to have to go through in my life. But ultimately you get old enough, there's going to be issues and so it may have to do that. And it's different from colonoscopy which is the other direction which again, I'm not old enough to have to do but my parents had and so I got to hear the wonderful details of that. What is currently termed non-celiac gluten sensitivity can have similar symptoms to celiac disease but have different health implications. So because it's not the same thing, it's not considered the same thing at the moment to real celiac disease where the physical cause is known, the small intestines. This is sort of again, hit or miss, the symptoms can vary. So one of the things about this as compared to celiac disease is there is a lot of disagreement among doctors about what the nature of this is, how legitimate it is and so this is something where if you have something related to this this is where typical celiac disease would be ruled out. So if your intestines are looked at and you have healthy villi but you still have some kind of averse reaction it could be not a wheat allergy or celiac disease but some other kind of what we would call right now gluten insensitivity. So some of these symptoms that have associated with NCGS are mental fatigue so does brain fog, body fatigue, gas, bloating, abdominal pain, headache. So it doesn't completely overlap with what we associate with celiac disease but there are a lot of similarities. Again, this is something where you go to your doctor and try to figure out what it is. Now there's another related discussion and because this sort of overlaps with celiac disease I wanted to mention this but again this is something where discussions have just really started. So FODMAPS, so scientists love acronyms and this is fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols. So this is a very grand way of saying sugars and starches. This is a specific subset of sugars and starches but fructans, galactans, those are the larger sugar and starch-based compounds. Lactose, so we know lactose from milk so those who are lactose intolerant is associated with this. The smallest sugars fructose, sucrose and glucose and then sugar-related polyols. So one of the things that you may find that are added to a lot of sweets are not the sugars themselves but where the sugars have been altered so they are being reduced and so they still have a sweetness but the molecule is just slightly altered. So these can sometimes be poorly absorbed and anything that is poorly absorbed is gonna sort of go right through and then you get gastrointestinal issues. So these are contained within a lot of material, a lot of foods that also contain gluten. So when you eliminate gluten from your diet so perhaps you haven't been diagnosed yet and you say, well I may try eliminating gluten. You're also going to be eliminating a lot of these and so you may feel a difference in how you feel but it may not necessarily be for gluten because there are a lot of things you're going to eliminate from your diet when you eliminate the sources of gluten. So what are the naturally gluten-free foods? And I was mentioning to Mark I happen to buy a ham from Miesfeld's and I didn't really, I just grabbed the ham like I want to have a ham, I know they have good meat, let's cook it and then I actually looked at the label and I got it home and it said gluten-free. Now, natural association with gluten because it's important in bread you think of bread products and grains. At least that's what I do. So when I looked it on a ham I'm like, well of course it is but then not everyone has a trained chemist like I am and know a lot of these things and so it would be important for that label. So these are the grains and starches that have no gluten content by themselves. Rice, cassava corn, soy, potato, tapioca beans, sorghum, quinoa, millet, flax, nut flours. Now, if they happen to be mixed with others with some of the traditional grains like wheat, you're going to have gluten but if you look at gluten-free products you're going to see a lot of these kinds of flowers and materials that go into gluten-free products and then fruits, vegetables, meat and poultry, fish and seafood, dairy, beans, leg, human, nuts, gluten-free. So we're talking specifically about a subset of grains but because that subset of grains is so ubiquitous in our diet it's everywhere. So breads, crackers and a lot of our starch-based materials that come from those grains. So it's important to note that if you're considering a gluten-free diet, you have a list of what is and what isn't gluten-free. Now obviously there are a lot of healthy things here. Now, here's the flip side. I'm not going to sugarcoat this. One of my least favorite people in the world is that man right there. Now, this is not meant to be an insult to those of you that have routinely watched Dr. Oz's show and he shows up on Oprah, he shows up on the morning TV shows, he's routinely brought in by The Today Show which my wife watches in the morning and every time I see him calling I'm like, he is a board certified doctor. So are the two men who wrote these two books. Now I have not read these in detail. I'm not sure if I could do that without throwing up. So I don't know if William Davis has actually been on the Dr. Oz show but I know that Pearl Mother has because I watched that show and that was the first time I ever heard about Pearl Mother was, these were interviewing and this goes way beyond eliminating gluten from your diet because you have celiac disease or you may have an insensitivity to some of the other things that I mentioned like FOD naps. This is gluten is the cause of all the ills of your body ever. So gluten is the cause of heart disease and Alzheimer's and arthritis and cancer and every kind of cancer and I think that's just from Pearl Mother and William Davis covers a lot of the same areas. So do we know that gluten causes all those things? No. We do know that celiac disease if it's not treated correctly can lead to a lot of other issues but a lot of other of those issues come from malabsorption and not getting the right nutrients and damage to your organs and because our system is so finely tuned that the damage to one organ can cause damage to another organ in a cascade and you can lead to a lot of things because we know that there are a lot of reasons of what causes cancer, what causes heart disease, what causes lung disease, what causes certain kinds of dementia. We do not yet know what causes Alzheimer's. We know what changes in the brain, the plaque that builds up the brain but we do not yet know the full cause. So there are two things that I wanna mention on the slide. One is these books are telling you to be empowered to take control. You could take control of your life, you can take control of your pain and you're suffering by doing this, maybe. And certainly if you alter your diet you're going to see a lot of changes. Not all of them may be good. And I will say this multiple times if you're going to make drastic changes in your diet without the supervision of a registered dietitian nutritionist or doctor you're taking a big risk because you don't know what is going to happen to you when you go from here to here. Just like if you are a very, very sedentary person and you go to CrossFit, you are going to break yourself. So please don't make drastic changes without talking to someone about it. And I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about someone who actually has a medical degree or well even nutritionists and dietitians they can be helpful but they are still not doctors. So again the evils of all things bread-like or gluten-like. And you could find books about this everything. The evils of fruit or the evils of dairy or the evils of pretty much anything else. And then you're gonna read books of no you need to eat as much gluten as you can because that's going to save your life or fruits or vegetables or for a while it was like you should be drinking one glass of red wine a day. Until they said well maybe you shouldn't be drinking one glass of red wine a day because. So one of the things that you will read and see from Dr. Oz is this study did this or this study showed that this thing was related to this thing. I didn't actually make a slide about this but I think it's important that I mention it anyway. When you see the word study without any kind of context it could mean absolutely anything. I could poll everyone in this audience and find out how many people had celiac disease and I could publish an article that said one in every 50 people that was surveyed or studied has celiac disease. The number is more like one in 300 depending on which source you go to the actually percentage of people in the United States is listed anywhere between a half percent and two percent I think from what I've seen. So what are the true numbers? We don't know we can take a subset of people we could take 10,000 people and get a relatively good idea. It's about statistics. And any good scientists know that you cannot base a huge judgment on this number of people. And some of the studies that you see referenced by these gentlemen are on say maybe a dozen people. Do you know who based his entire career on a dozen people? Andrew Wakefield and Andrew Wakefield was the person that said vaccines cause autism. Do vaccines cause autism? No. Not one study ever has shown that vaccines cause autism. But we are now having problems with diseases that we haven't had problems with in decades because people are not vaccinating their children. Because of one study and he studied about a dozen kids. He also falsified information, took money and was planning on taking advantage of this study to make more money. So I am not going to trust men and women or in it for money. Because I equate these people who do have, these aren't board certified physicians with people like the food babe. Who has no formal training whatsoever. You know what they're all doing? They're profiting off this. They very well may believe it. Fine, believe what you want. But the moment that you're making money off of a fad not only are you gonna shut you off but I'm gonna fight you. That's to me what I'm doing here. Because getting lost in all of this are the people that are suffering. Because when you take advantage of other people and you confuse other people into thinking that they need to change their diets the people that are gonna get stuck onto the bus are the people that are actually suffering. And there are a lot of people out there that are actually suffering with celiac disease. And to be generous with the other gluten sensitivities assuming that there really are other gluten sensitivities. So we now have a gluten free industry because we already had an Atkins industry and we already had low fats and low sugar and low everything else. This is great for people who need this kind of diet because they have choices. That's the good aspect of this. Unfortunately people have good choice. The people who suffer from celiac disease have good choices because a lot of other people are making this choice for no reason whatsoever. Because celebrities have now gone to gluten free and they say that going gluten free has changed their outlook on life, their health, their everything else but that's not supported by doctors. So if someone can come and say, okay, I talked to my doctor and he suggested that I may have a gluten insensitivity even though I don't have gluten disease and I've seen an improvement, great. Well, you don't get that information. It's a celebrity saying, I did gluten free. One of the worst ones that I've seen is and I'm pretty sure this, I want to say this was Jenny McCarthy because she was very much anti-vax and she said, going gluten free improved her son's autism. So if her son wasn't actually autistic he was suffering from something else. That's beside the point. But when you see anecdotes like this, you can never really trust anecdotes. Talk to someone who actually suffers and has the experience with going through and you can learn something. Talking to a celebrity who tried it and felt different, that's not a scientific study. And again, it comes down to who you're going to listen to. Are you going to listen to a celebrity or are you going to listen to a doctor or are you going to listen to someone who actually has suffered and has gone through this? Now, we have all of these things. And then we have the things that are naturally gluten free that are listed as gluten free. But what does being on a gluten free diet mean for other things? Well, one, it means money. Because anytime you see a buzzword someone's going to make profit off that buzzword. So antioxidants. A lot of foods contain antioxidants. And we think they have a beneficial effect. There have been studies shown, again, back to those key words. There have been studies shown that if you have antioxidants, you know where you get antioxidants? Fruits, vegetables, berries in particular. But you can buy supplements. Having an excess of antioxidant in your diet is not any different from getting the normal antioxidants you would get from eating, say, putting some berries in your cereal. That even goes to something as very simple as vitamin C. So we've learned that, well, you start getting a cold, you should take vitamin C because that's going to shorten the cold. No, it's not. No, it's taking echinacea. If you take 10 times the amount of daily allowance of vitamin C, you're going to get expensive urine. And that's all you're going to get. In fact, most supplements, that's all you're going to get. Now, that is not to eliminate the usefulness of some supplements because I'll get back to it a little bit later. But any one of those is going to be a profit to someone. Now, along with this, and this is just one group doing its statistics. You know, anytime you see these numbers like this, there's a whole bunch of different groups that are come up with different statistics. But there was an article that I was reading and I think it was from the New York Times from several years ago and it was saying that the gluten-free bubble is going to burst, that the fad has been oversaturated and then it's going to die out and we're going to move on to the next thing. But apparently this statistics doesn't agree with that. I see no evidence of it slowing down because what you're now seeing is Cheerios commercials that are saying, now we're gluten-free. But they are also processing those Cheerios probably at the same facility that with the non-gluten-free variety and so you have to be really careful with that. So again, it's a buzzword. I'm not meaning to not Cheerios. My son loves Cheerios. I like Cheerios. But they're also trying to take advantage of this kind of thing to get better profits. Now, product labeling. This is not as significant an issue as something or controversial I should say as GMOs. So the federal government does not have a mandate for the labeling of all gluten-free foods. So it's not as though you're going to look at every particular product and it will say contains gluten or gluten-free. But if it does say gluten-free, the maximum amount of gluten in that material is 20 parts per million. That is very low, but it's not zero. And so that is something that needs to be of a little bit of concern for people who do need to make sure that they are on a strict gluten-free diet because there is a small amount of allowable gluten in those foods. So the maximum is, and this is from the FDA website. This is the FDA's rule. So maximum 20 parts per million. Just like alcohol-free beer actually can contain a little bit of alcohol. So the terminology that meet the definition for gluten-free also say no gluten-free of gluten and without gluten. So the federal government covering most of its bases, you know, instead of gluten-free those are the terms that you may see for gluten-free foods. Gluten itself is not listed as an ingredient unless it has been added. So there are certain foods where gluten is added for texture or composition or so on. But it's not going to be listed as an added ingredient until unless it has been added to that food. So something to be, you know, you need to look at other resources say from a celiac disease website. You know, those people have studied what products are safe and what are not and that would give you a better list on what products you can be comfortable with. Now here's the other thing that relates to the fad of gluten-free and that's the placebo effect. So a placebo is a fake treatment. So you could be given a pill and you are told that it's going to get rid of your headache. And it could very well get rid of your headache. But did that person who gave you that pill tell you that there was actually something in there that was going to cure the headache? There is a power of the mind aspect to certain things. Now, this is not going to work if you have cancer. Your brain is not going to be able to cure your cancer. But there are certain things like headaches, stomach aches and so on that may have say an anxiety content to them. That's me by the way. Where a placebo may have some kind of physical benefit. This is not always going to be the case. But when drugs are tested, they are tested blind versus a placebo. So if you think about like a statin drug that has been on the market. And those are very common drugs these days. But pretty much anything. The group that is given that drug as part of the testing process, one subset is given a placebo and one subset is given the actual drug. And if you're watching drug commercials down, you can look at all the fine print that is down here. One thing you'll see with those drug commercials now is they give you an entire litany of all the side effects which is pretty scary in a lot of cases. Particularly when they get to death. But then some of the things that they describe before that it sound like they're worse than death. But oftentimes what you'll see down here is the efficacy. So 48% saw improvement on the drug compared to 25% on the placebo. So if you're just listening to the words, you're not seeing what's going on down here because they are required by law to present all the information. And we know with a lot of our politicians they're doing this while they're doing something over here that's a little bit more sinister. So you need to make sure that if you're looking at something like that, I would focus on, particularly if you have DVR, pause it and read the fine print. Or just go to the company's website and look at the fine print, the fine print is there. So you will see the comparison of how much benefit this particular drug has versus a placebo. Drugs are always compared. That's what the control is. So the control is there to find out how many people are getting some kind of benefit just because they're getting the drug. Now most of the time when you're talking about treatments, the placebo effect is going to be very minimal because you're talking about cancer or Alzheimer's where there's really not much of a mental benefit. The placebo effect really doesn't exist. But people who are taking gluten out of their diet and think, oh, I'm going to take gluten out of my diet, I'm going to feel awesome. And then those people feel awesome. But what is, so the other thing, and I talked about this where I had Dr. Oz's wonderful face, is correlation and causation. So you can do A and see result B. Does that mean that A is the direct cause of B? No. Because there are a lot of other factors that could be causing B. So just because you have two things that are correlating to each other, doesn't mean that one is causing the other. And that goes back to my discussion of FODMAPS and NCGS is there are a lot of other things that could be causing the issue that have nothing to do with gluten. And when you eliminate something that is as comprehensive as carbohydrates and breads from your diets, you are changing a lot of things, wholesale things. And so when you do that, you're not really doing a scientific study on what's really causing the issue. Then it comes back to going to your doctor and getting tests to find out what the issue is. And I know that can be expensive. I know that can be frustrating. Particularly if you're going through a lot of different diagnoses and they're not finding the right thing. But ultimately that is the better way to go than just making a change like this. Because when you eliminate gluten containing foods in your diet, you're eliminating a lot of other things too. You can have deficiencies in amino acids and vitamins that on a gluten-free diet that you may have to take with supplements. But if you simply eliminate the gluten-containing materials and don't get the supplements, all of a sudden you're going to be deficient in other things. Then you're going to have other issues. That's the problem with fat diets. So at the best, you're going to, one of my favorite things to talk about is cleansing. Cleansing is not a thing. You can drink whatever you want, but it's not going to affect the toxins in your body. There's only two things that are going to affect the toxins in your body. And they're already in your body. It's the kidneys and the liver. Drinking whatever concoction that contains inevitably those these things contain kale. I don't know why. I like cooking with kale. I put it in my soup, but I'm certainly not putting it in there to flush anything out. If you want to flush anything out, you increase fiber in your diet and you drink a lot of water. Because that is encouraging your own organs to flush yourself out. Gluten-free products often contain more calorie, salt and sugar than other gluten-containing materials because you have to build up the bread-like material in different ways. And you'll notice that I've tried gluten-free foods. The texture can be different. The taste is different. One of the things that I have noticed significantly is I am a beer drinker and gluten-free beers are much sweeter. And I am not a sweet tooth. In fact, my wife is the sweet tooth. She doesn't like beer. I figure if I'm going to get her to drink beer, I should just give her the gluten-free stuff because it's very sweet. Again, because you're using different grains, different grains are going to have different sugar content. And then with cookies and cakes and breads, you have to get the taste and the texture in in some other way. And anyone who has baked know that when you make changes like substituting applesauce for oil, you know, if you're using margarine instead of butter, if you're going to use a sugar substitute instead of sugar, you're really going to be changing the nature of the texture of a lot of these things. But it's really the calories, the salt and the sugar. So if you go to a gluten-free diet and you're not adjusting your caloric intake, fat intake, you may gain weight if you're not adjusting the rest of your diet. So it's not just, I'm going to get rid of the breads and carbs. Sure, fine. But you're going to have a lot of other things that you're going to deal with if you just do that. And again, without a specific diagnosis, blood tests, endoscopy, other tests, it could just be the placebo effect or it could be something other than gluten. One of the other things that may cause malabsorption or not be absorbed. And the biggest one, and this is what leads to the profits, is that anytime you're going to buy gluten-free material, it's going to be more expensive. Just like organic foods are more expensive than what I would call regular foods. And I've been through this with the organics and chemical frees. Walking through the farmer's market in the summer makes me cringe when I get to, the organic farms I can understand because organic is an FDA approved word as long as the practices are being followed. But chemical free is not a thing. There is only one thing that exists in the universe that's chemical free and it's a vacuum. That's the only thing that's chemical free. We could talk about that at the end of their questions. So this is something that I've created and now published is where you go for information. Who do you trust? Do you trust me? Well, maybe you did before you came in here and after 45 minutes maybe you don't. That's totally understandable. But what questions are you asking? So there's something else psychologically that goes on when you present people, certain people, with scientific information. So if I say a scientific study or thousands of scientific studies show that there's no connection between vaccines and autism. And if I present that to a very strong anti-vax person, how are they going to react? It's not going to be nicely. And they are certainly not going to believe the mountain of evidence, scientific evidence that they have that shows that there's no correlation between vaccines and autism. They're going to yell and scream at me and say, but I have this and this doctor said that. And this person on this blog said that. And I did this to my child and they're fine. That's what pseudoscience is. It's presenting some scientific information attempting to manipulate and getting a different result. Or it's basing it on an anecdote or a blog or some non-scientific source and passing it off as science. So where are you going to get your information? So on this list is unfortunately something that many people do not have access to and that's primary scientific literature. So this is a really boring, extremely scientific articles that have gone through the scientific method in order to determine the causation of something, not just the correlations. So if you're talking about the synthesis of a drug, you can read a paper about the synthesis of a drug, how it's made in the plants. You can read that. And when I say plants, I'm not only talking about if it came from a plant, we know a lot how that happens but if it's an industrial plant, we know that too. So when I say primary scientific literature, this is the extremely technical articles that you can get in our library or you can get online in a lot of cases. People don't want to go read that. So then you talk about scientific news. So this is where it's sort of distilled down and put into layman's language. But even then there was a science, there was a website that I used to go to all the time that I don't anymore that I'm going to shorthand it's IFL science and there's a word that I'm not going to use because of certain members of the audience but I, F, love science and you can assume what that F word is. It used to be very critique and debunk about pseudoscience and then all of a sudden it became pseudoscience and presenting articles without providing any kind of context. And I stopped following because I didn't think the information was useful anymore. So website and it's supposed to be a quote unquote scientific website but they weren't providing any scientific context to the scientific information they were presented. Notice where I have science fiction. Some of this is really high. Just recently the 50th anniversary of Star Trek and I was reading a book that was about Leonard Nimoy written by William Shatner and they were talking about towards the end of Leonard Nimoy's life and talking to each other on a flip phone. And the rather interesting connection that what were they doing in the late 60s on their own television show with their communicators? And 50 years later they're doing it in real life. So science fiction contains a lot of scientific fact. Then you get political articles. I don't really want to get into politics but guess what the next buzzword is, alternative facts. And this is sort of, there's a separate from what side you're on. It's all just, non-fiction books. So the two books that I had posted were non-fiction books. And when you say non-fiction there seems to be a connotation of truth to that. So that's not the case. Cause there are a lot of non-fiction books about aliens that have visited us. Not that I'm trying to equate the two but you have to be careful. And then random websites. There are a lot of blogs out there. Some of them are from people who are experiencing celiac disease and are posting, dealing with it on a daily basis and how they deal with food, how they deal with, you may be their children that are suffering through it. And so you can take some information but you have to be careful of the emotional aspect of it. So, oh that was the end, okay. So, I want to go back to this one. Will it work for you? I don't know. Will it work for you? Yes, if you have celiac disease, yes, a gluten-free diet will work for you. That's what you should be doing. But you should be doing it after you get the official diagnosis. So that if you think based on your experience that if you have certain gluten-containing foods that you see a negative or very negative effect, you should be going to your doctor. And I heard some conversations before I started today sharing of information and that's one of the beneficial things about something like this. You get people who have the experience of dealing with it can say, oh, I've seen this. Yes, this is what you should be doing. These are the kinds of tests that you should be getting done. Like blood tests and endoscopes and so on in order to figure out, yes, it's celiac disease or no, it may be something else and there's something else that you should be looking at. So I'm only here to present to you this kind of information and suggest to you that if you feel like you want to try a gluten-free diet, don't do it on your own. Talk to a professional first before you make such a drastic decision because this really is a drastic life choice just as you are gonna eliminate one thing or the other from your diet. You know, when someone has this or they have a significant allergy, it's not something that you should take lightly and it's not something that you should profit off and that's why I hate Dr. Oz so much because the man profits off all of this stuff. And I don't advocate violence but I just want to smack the guy every time I see him because it's not one thing, it's the other and if you look at the string of things that he's promoted on his show, half the stuff is debunked within a week. It's this supplement or it's this drink or it's this, pretty soon he's gonna tell you just to rub margarine all over your face and it'll cure warts or something like that which these are the kinds of things that I expect him to talk about on his show. I managed to convince my mother to stop watching the show after I got so many questions to her about does this work, does this work, does this work? There are a lot of horror stories about home remedies and there are some pretty gruesome stories that you would talk about of what people used to do to their children to try to get rid of autism or any kind of development issues and it's a great thing that we can now identify and get help for people who have celiac disease or people who suffer from autism that people can get help but it doesn't help when we present false information so that's where I'm at and I'm starting to lose my voice and you can tell I get very animated about this but I would be glad to take any questions you may have. Yeah and actually that was when I made the comment about drugs I was sort of leading to that and I just forgot to mention that but there are a lot of gluten-related additives that are added to a lot of particular products so it isn't just food. It's a lot of other things like that that you can come into contact with so yeah I'm glad you brought that up. You really had, that's why it's so comprehensive. When you think about doing this it's not just the one thing in your life that you were going to cut out. It is a complete lifestyle change and I think it gets minimized when people say I'm just gonna cut out bread. Well it's not just cutting out bread. There's a lot of other things you have to deal with so. They might have celiac disease and they haven't gotten tested yet. The importance of not eliminating gluten from your diet before you get the testing because if you take the gluten out and then you find you are feeling better and then you try to get tested and actually once in a while doctors will tell their patients well why don't you try to get gluten out of your diet and see if you feel better and then when they do and then they try to go back and they can't get tested and if they want to get tested they have to go on a gluten challenge which means they have to start eating gluten again and once they take it out of their diet and they start feeling better once they reintroduce it they're gonna get a lot sicker than what they were even originally and so anybody who thinks they may have issues with gluten I highly recommend you not take it out of your diet and because otherwise what happens is you get a false negative on your test and if you don't really know for sure if you have it that's kind of a bummer because it is hereditary it's important for you to find out it's important for you to find out for your children and your grandchildren your immediate family and extended family because your risk increases once you have an immediate family member who has it your other family members, their risk increases. So that's one of the reasons why playing with diets like this before you go to a doctor can have such profound effects because you do get those false negatives and it's not just gluten any time you're trying to eliminate something that's you're not following the scientific method so you're only getting one data points and you're not getting all of the information so it's best to go through rigorous studies and rigorous tests rather than try to figure out things on your own. I know that the group that I first got involved with to learn about how to navigate gluten free lifestyle was the Sheboygan Celiac Support Group and if I remember correctly you had mentioned we'll make sure you talk to an MD if you have an MD after your name well actually the group I believe was started with a donation made by a local gastroenterologist and he was the one who recommended they start the group because people who live with it on a daily basis and if they learn about it take responsibility for learning about it so that you can live, you know when you get sick and tired being sick and tired you'll figure it out and so he encouraged them to form the group so they could help each other and you really do learn a lot from the people who live with it on a daily basis and I know one of the new gastroenterologists in Manitowoc when he came here about two years ago he called me and said I'm wondering if he would help me put together a PowerPoint I have to give this presentation for our hospital for the public and he said I understand you're a gluten expert or a Celiac disease expert in the area and I said well I wouldn't go that far I live with it on a daily basis and so we asked you to put together some talking points and I did and then when I went to his presentation he did give our support group a plug and he told me when he called me he said you know I know the clinical side but I don't have the daily living I don't understand that and I thought that was really neat that he would say that I told him I said I don't have an MD after my name I just live with it and he was very appreciative and I admired him for saying that I don't have all the answers and so I think even if there was a doctor who had Celiac disease and he would be able to help you because he lives with it that's a great possibility to help you with the problem is there is so much to learn that they would never be able to have the time to sit down with you right so that's why that's why the support groups for that are so important because the people who are living with on a daily basis and that's why that's why communicating with people if you maybe you're a little bit nervous about going to a doctor if you maybe have a general distrust or you know particularly for specialists like a gastroenterologist it could be months and so since you know we're talking about several percent of the population it's likely that you know someone or know someone who knows someone who has Celiac disease that you can at least get some advice on where to start you know and they may even be able to tell you that one gastroenterologist is better than the other you know so you know all doctors are different if they're going to partner with you in your healthcare and they don't blow you off if you go to down like I've had people come to me and say you know I think I might have Celiac disease but I went and asked my doctor and my doctor said you can have Celiac disease you're too fat and actually over 50% of people who are diagnosed today are overweight and the reason for that is because they're not observing the nutrients from their foods so they're starving and they're hungry all the time so you don't have to be skin and bones like they were told in the medical school years ago not a rare disease I'm a fan of Celiac compilogy and I always have it and that was never my issue you know I never went super thin but I have Celiac disease and this is just proof that everyone's experience is going to be different so doctors can provide some information and then you're going to get information from other people so that's one of the reasons why this is such a difficult thing to nail down because there's not one set of symptoms that covers the whole thing and you could say this is Celiac because getting a second opinion is also important and my experience with doctors is again they're providing you information and I would put more trust in a doctor than say me telling you this but when it's such a significant diagnosis apart from the money there is no harm of getting a second opinion because you may... one doctor is going to have a personal experience that says oh I've seen this before I know what this is and the other doctor may have not and may dismiss it so again more information is always better as long as you don't jump on one direction or the other without getting all of that information first so I appreciate all of you that had Celiac that came to share this because it really adds to this it's just important for your completely 100% stock to that guy it can take over two years for you to heal and right-handed saying considerably close to three months or a year can use socially inclined damage either way don't be afraid of that upper GI you said you were terrified of that well you're asleep right oh really that's the easy that's the easier the two things they just put you to sleep and you don't feel a thing and it's all over you wake up you don't even know what's been done it's there's no prep like the colonel oh okay that's okay yeah you got that you have a choice okay is there any work or I don't know something moving towards the water soluble to the in the non-water soluble to separate you know so that it could possibly I don't know and I don't know I'm sure there are food chemists out there that are trying to sort of separate the two parts of gluten and see if they can still make bread but I don't think that that's going to end up going anywhere I don't you know it's one of those things that probably wouldn't be worth the effort of doing that what I will say is I bet you there is some company out there that is trying to genetically modified foods so that you get the glutenants without the glide-ins but then you run into then there's the anti-GMO crowd so I'm sure there you know there are there are probably wheat cultivars out there that they're trying to make without gluten but that's probably years away you know all that kind of stuff is being studied on a regular basis but without the two things you wouldn't get the same elasticity in bread and then you go back to the gluten-free products are going to have the same different texture anyway so might as well go into one of the different flowers different greens when you started you were going to talk about the associated series of associated conditions that will honestly lead to you I didn't get as far into that as I could because I ended up going more to the Dr. Oz's side and you know the sort of counter and the fat and that part so I didn't get to the wheat allergy and the NCGS and the more details there and again I didn't get that far in my study but yeah there are other things that are related to this you know and then it goes back to getting a proper diagnosis so that's why you want to get the diagnosis in a timely fashion to avoid the other more serious complications and also additional autoimmune diseases because they go in groups Any other questions? Thanks Thank you