Why Is A Little Gluten A Lot?

[ItchyMeredith]

Welcome!

I

[tom]

That IS a buncha Qs!

You are in one sweet location! Any neighbors selling? j/k

Does this rule apply to everyone even if your symptoms are mild(er)?

My viewer on milder, is it's sort of "milder so far".

I think ppl rate their own concern over cc (cross-contamination) w/ phrases like "very sensitive" and "not so sensitive" et al.

So for some it does matter greatly.

Why doesn

[tarnalberry]

The reason that quantity doesn't matter is that it's chemistry in your gut. The autoimmune reaction is a mostly-self-sustaining chemical reaction. Once you get it started, it drives itself. It doesn't matter if you have 100 molecules of gluten (that's a really really small amount), or 100,000 (still a really really small amount), you still kick off that chemical reaction in your gut that damages your villi.

Symptoms... symptoms simply don't strictly correlate to damage. Damage isn't a strictly negative equation. It's not

(healthy gut) - (damage from gluten immune response) = (total damage).

It's more like

(healthy gut) - (damage from gluten immune response) + (repairs from immune system) - (damage from oxidative stress) + (this other thing) - (that other thing) + ... = (total damage).

And we don't know what all of those things are that go into all that.

Symptoms are even worse, from an analytic standpoint. Yeah, there's symptoms from the damage, but what about symptoms from the inflammation, symptoms from stress, masking of symptoms from positive emotions, masking of symptoms from other conditions, etc.? There are a whole host of variables that interplay in symptom manifestation, even more so than physical effect manifestation.

At the end of the day, the only thing we can do is do our very best to keep all gluten - including contamination - out of our system. Yes, we have to be realistic and realize that we are likely to get some cross contamination somewhere. But we have to do our best to minimize that and make it as infrequent as possible.

[Crystalkd]

It is alot to wrap your head around. I've noticed that this week hasn't been so rough. I'm in week five of the diet and I noticed Saturday it wasn't so hard to pass up a piece of my friends wedding cake but it was really hard to pass up the cinnimon rolls her mom made the next morning! CC is a big issue for some in term of thier reaction. I worry about it but I'm thankful my reactions aren't as bad as some. Take it one day at a time and don't beat yourself up during the bad days. It is a major life style change that is hard at first. Even on my bad days I don't feel as bad as I did 2 months ago!