gfp

I generally used Gillette razors and have NEVER had any problems...but my sister bought some Bic disposables and she decided she didn't like them and she passed them off to me.

I have never had good luck w/ Bic razors and should have gotten off my lazy shell and gotten to the store before putting myself in a position to only have the Bic razors on hand to use but that didn't happen.

SO...I used the Bic and the result is itchy, itchy, itchy shaved legs!!!

Does anyone know if those little strip things on the razors can have gluten in them and maybe that's the cause of my itchy itch??

Oh yeah, the Bics have been tossed in the trash and i'm off to the store for my Gillettes! See ya!

I doubt its gluten, I think its more of getting what you pay for....???

I read through all pages and I can't find what the hub-bub was about....

My overall impression was

firstly - discussion over to take silver or not

2nd - some doctors are quacks and big pharma wants your money

3rd - is meat acceptable to eat if we read the Old and New Testaments?

I never felt Talilz was pushing a religion at any point. As a matter of fact I was pleased that an adult discussion about this topic was being pursued without any petty arguments, but I guess I was wrong. I too felt that Tailz was asking in earnest about the subject matter and getting responses from those who have information. I've seen threads get hijacked to stupider subjects than discussing OT law.

I could say more but I won't

The difference is when you mix them all together and start talking about them altogether and justifying it with fictional books like the bible. (Most of the world sees the bible as fiction) ...

Once you go down the christian-judaic-islamic equivalent of the promethius/pandora myth and start saying diseases are just a punishment from God then

If we would follow the Bible, we wouldn't need Western medicine. I guarantee smallpox and polio got their beginnings in something man did.

The rest has been deleted

Gina, I dont understand where your anger is coming from???

Again, you have added things to a post (mine, in this case) that were never said, made assumptions, etc -

When someone takes your quote and adds to it or removes parts to make it look stupid out of context then most people are going to be irritated.

I have talked to her about the issue in private. I see no need for you to bring it out into the open, for your own personal satisfaction.

I don't see this as gloating or personal satisfaction. Taliz took what gina said and twisted it in public and attempted to tarnish her repuatation. This IMHO demands a public correction especially since it seems eKatherine was the only person to actually support her view that the whole thread was ""wishful thinking is always better than demonstrable facts". When someone is defamed publically the logical redress is public correction of that defamation.

Whenever people are allowed to quote their own beliefs as fact this is a likely outcome and Taliz certainly started this when she said "If we would follow the Bible, we wouldn't need Western medicine. I guarantee smallpox and polio got their beginnings in something man did. "

Now the really sad part is Taliz could have benefited from our help, who will she turn to if her Lymes test is negative AGAIN? Moreever perhaps she was partly correct, we certainly don't know enough to discout a link between lymes and celaic developing.

However IMHO anyone who starts posting creation myths (which is what most mainstream Christian and Jewish scholars think of Genesis not even getting into the majority of the world who do not have monthesic beleifs) in relation to medical advice and blaming everything on the fall of man is not debatable with, they let uninformed belief override factual evidence and simple good common sense.

On the complaining issue, I don't feel we have a right to complain if we get glutened unless we can easily see how it happened; i.e., server was terrible and making mistakes all over the place.

Otherwise, we have no right to complain. They put a disclaimer on their menus stating that there is no way to guarantee gluten free and that we eat there at our own risk. I agree with this.

Complaining just ruins it for others. It's not the same things as complaining because your steak is too raw, or you never got your diet coke. Those are legitimate complaints.

But complaining about getting glutened is ridiculous unless you can tell with the naked eye that they are being negligent. Because the fact is, even the most dedicated staff can still gluten someone on accident.

Then how will they know that their efforts are inadequate?

You can eat a steak completely raw and it won't make you ill, when you order a steak you are just professing a preference not a health reason.

If a resto messes up how you want your steak or gives you diet coke instead of non diet then that indicates they are not doing enough. In the case of phenylketuronics (sp) getting a diet coke is damaging to their health.

Just because you accept the risks doesn't mean you should put up with sloppy service and educating them politely is not spoiling it for other celiacs but helping them. IMHO the ones who spoil it are those who do not complain politely when they make obvious mistakes because then they think that celiacs are just playing at being intolerant to a single crumb!

Kristen, boy are you lucky... you enjoy cooking and know how. So many people don't.

There is very little can't be made gluten free except convenience food like pizza and pasta and then you can use substitutes but there is a whole world of naturally gluten free food waiting to be discovered.

Why don't you make a list of what you like and let us help you through the transistion and tell you what to watch out for.

I can't eat much, so I miss a lot of things but the only food that I really, really miss are tortilla chips (they have too much fat for me to digest).

According to the USDA cornmeal has (per cup = 122g)

Total Fat 4.4g 6%

Saturated Fat 0.6g 2%

Polyunsaturated Fat 2g

Monounsaturated Fat 1.2g

Cholesterol 0mg 0%

Sodium 42.7mg 1%

Potassium 350.1mg 10%

Total Carbohydrate 93.8g 31%

Dietary Fiber 8.9g 35%

Sugars 0.8g

Protein 9.9g

Real tortilla chips are just cornmeal (treated with an alkaline), water and salt.

6% fat is very low.... so I can't see how it could be the fat.

Firstly I doubt a nearly gluten free diet will affect your biopsy.... you only need 1 crumb thiough it may make it harder to find a good sample.

Secondly why not just get a full celiac panel?

Finally if you want to know how your villi are doing then you can have a biopsy without drugs, I for one wouldn't take the amnesiac cocktail they give and my biopsy was drug free excepting lidocaine local spray on my throat and this was 10 yrs ago with an old style endoscope which was at least 2x the thickness of the modern ones.

>The numbers indicate otherwise, the numbers point more towards therapy alone or therapy AND drugs, >but not therapy OR drugs. Drugs only cover up a symptom. Without finding the cause you are just asking >for trouble. That cause could be chemical or could be phychological or both.

I think this is something we can both agree on. Therapy and drugs are equally effective, but only therapy relieves depression in the long term and treats the underlying cause. Many patients however go into remission after drug therapy. By the way, I wasn't aware lactose intolerance is linked to depression, or did you mean fructose intolerance.

Depression is rarely the only symptom of malnutrition. For example B12 deficiency produces megaloblastic anemia before it produces depression. Thiamine deficiency produces paresthesias, angina, peripheral neuropathy. So I guess my point is that when there are physical causes of depression (which is uncommon), they always produce other charatherisitc signs besides just the depression and can be easily identified in the vast majority of the cases.

>Oh, and prove this to me "Most of the time depression is just depression without a physical cause." I bet >you can't. Especially given how little we really do know about the brain and body.

Actually I can prove it. Most patients, about 65-70%, who are depressed improve significantly with their first antidepressant trial or therapy. 35% do not improve significantly with one antidepressant and for these agumentation therapy has been used. Also switching to another class of antidepressants is also helpful. This reduces the number of people who are treatement resistant to about 5% or less. These people (the 5%) usually have physical causes of depression.

Define "improve significantly"?

Certainly a large percentage of patients taking psyhctropics change significantly but that doesn't mean they improve. They probably certainly complain less and are probably less assertive with their GP but that doesn't mean they have "improved significantly".

Indeed some classes of anti-depressants carry a fairly well defined increased suicide risk and most of them carry high dependancy risks and withdrawal.

Open Original Shared Link

Britain's biggest drugs firm has caved in dramatically and revealed research which shows a leading anti-depressant can cause children to attempt suicide.

In an astonishing u-turn, Glaxo-SmithKline finally published full details of nine scientific studies and two clinical reviews which expose the dangers posed to under-18s who take Seroxat.

Children on Seroxat are twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts than those on a dummy pill, it emerged.

Alarmingly, one study showed six youngsters on Seroxat wanted to kill themselves, compared to just one taking a placebo pill.

The drug was also linked to distressing side effects including hostility, insomnia, dizziness, tremors and emotional irritability.

I think jcc already covered B12 deficiency but

when there are physical causes of depression (which is uncommon)

As Mike said, is SAD physical?

Indeed I find it hard to beleive any cause of depression does not occur due to a chemical inbalance which is physical. Just because we don't understand the physical mechanism doesn't mean its not physical.

100 years ago (and less) we used physical lobotomies and today we use chemical ones.

We are still only incrementally closer to understanding the human brain than we were 100 yrs ago.

Anti-depressants "cure" all sorts of diseases because a patient without the energy to actually get out of bed doesn't continue calling thier GP.

Well, I certainly didn't complain even though she was "annoying" for the simple reason she obviously "believes" Lyme is a cause or the cause of celiac.

However my opinion is perhaps it is? I mean for all the threads with MD's and research we still don't know why some DQ1 people get celiac and other's don't and we don't know enough to say.

For me the point is that when someone is in distress and obviously she has good reason to be in distress then an effort should be made to support that person. I was under the impression that she had been posting about Lyme for a week or so and that seems like a short time for people's patience to wear out.

This is pretty much my opinion. For instance we as a group often say things like take the enterolab tests which is still unproven research.

Rinne, if tailz had problems logging in under her original name, why didn't she let us know who she was, when she started posting under her new identity? Why didn't she approach Scott, asking him to fix the problem, or at least post under the "Board/Technical help" forum? The fact that in one post she called somebody older 'child', creating the image of somebody who was a lot older than herself, shows that she was trying to create another image and that she was also trying to make people believe that BreeZy and tailz were too different persons. That was obviously deceitful.

I think she probably thought she had been "unofficially banned", that is she thought she had been banned in order to force her to eMail Scott and then she could be told to shut-up. I'm not saying this is what happened but perhaps it is what she thought had happened. Obviously the board has had some technical problems and I would guess when she couldn't log in she thought it was deliberate.

Now, Tailz still has the opportunity to e-mail Scott and apologize and explain why she came on under another name, and that she didn't mean to deceive anybody (I am not sure she didn't, but I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt). It is then up to him to decide what to do.

If she believes that she was being singled out then that is rather unlikely to happen.

I saw a post a few days ago by Scott saying there was no proof of a connection between Lyme disease and celiac in response to one of her posts.... and then I saw her post some links (I didn't follow) which I guess were some "proof" of sorts...

I guess the bottom line is its Scott's board and he chooses to run it the way he wants. Its plain that the mod's are not consulted over banning people and the final decision rests with Scott. Its also plain he doesn't want to write down the unwritten rules so this sort of thing will keep happening so the mods have to operate in some gray space second guessing the unwritten rules.

Its also clear that a team of Brits or Aussies will defeat any US cricket team that gets put together from big baseball hitters so long as they don't understand the rules of cricket anhd these rules are kept from them, (come to think of it who does ?)....

On a personal level I hope her tests come back positive, who knows how lost she will be if her tests are negative!

I'm sure I'm not pregnant. Besides, my nausea was much much worse with pregnancy. I have been a little stressed lately, which could also have an impact on it.

And definitly forget the eggs! They make me super sick!

The only medicine I take is nexium. My doctor doesn't like prescribing too much since I have so many allergies to foods and drugs. I have to be really careful. I've taken anti-nausea medicine a long time ago and it caused severe depression for me. It was compazine. I've been kind of scared of them since.

Hmmm I can't take Nexium because I'm a poster child for the adverse reactions (even though it works very well for me) but I can take generic omeprazole??????

However just as importantly I no longer need to take either.

I think this is 80% being gluten-free but I also have an extra secret weapon which I use when I need that bit extra which is food combining. I really suggest you give it a try because it really helped me and one thing I do after an accidental glutening is food combining and I find it helps me settle my stomach and digestive system faster.

I first read a book called "Fit for Life" and to be honest they are a bit over enthusiatic for me (in a Venice beath sorta way) and later found a book called "The Kensington diet" ..

p.s. I was put on the Nexium "to give my stomach a rest" but I find that the diet works much better and I don't get all the side effects!

LOL! At least you made me laugh.

Usually the best therapy for feeling down ....

My stomach still hurts but at least I didn't spend the majority of the day in the bathroom, so I'm doing good. Does anyone else get really nauseous from gluten on top of everything else? I do. I have no appetite and feel so depressed. My eczema has been worse too. But I feel like I am slowly recovering.

I think you might be aggravating it by not eating and having an empty stomach perhaps.

Obviously take your GP's advice.... as well but just consider eating some bland, mainly water containing foods (like crudites) just to keep your stomach happier.

You could try prescription anti-nausea meds ...

One I use (rarely) is from a friend who's a cancer patient and has belladonna. I take it very rarely but it seems to really settle the stomach. You can get a viscous cycle with the stomach.... once its all angry you don't wanna eat and that in itself makes it angrier.

Depending on state you might also find other prescribable anti-nausea meds.

CRP is the test that they use to measure inflammatory responses in your body. Given that my joints are typically red, hot & swollen, they always draw that one . . . and it's always fine! Go figure.

With regard the prostate cancer issues in your family: when my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1993, his PSA was 143. Normal is under 7. He had a long talk with my cousin, who was in his late 30's at the time, told him to make sure that he had his PSA checked regularly once he turned 50. My cousin was so scared, that he went to the doctor and insisted on a PSA. Oddly, he DID have prostate cancer. With your family history, I would begin PSA testing VERY early. Just a suggestion.

Am looking up the rest of the values in my books and will get back with you tomorrow . . . .

Many thanks for all that research and knowledge.

I took a fair amoiunt of NSID's (Ibuprofen) and the original pain has really gone.

I have a funny pain tolerance though so when I say something hurts it usually really does.... my girlfriend always tells a story about me spearing my finger with some chrome flake right through the nail to the bone and me saying "ow" and then "no really ow" so usually by the time I say something hurts it really does...

I intend to mention the prostate issue with my GP... I'm sure she will get onto it, she is really proactive to the point where I tell her not to panic and calm down but its really just because she feels so much for her patients.

Well at least its treatable

Anyway, just because ots not you doesn't mean you can't keep spreading the word

Also I think your observation that its frustrating because its not something you can control is a very good one.

I miss.....

• the convenience of eating whatever I want, wherever I am while shopping, etc
  
• the ability to get carry out for supper after a long day (without worrying about CC)
  
• being able to sit down and order a meal without having to talk with mgmt and explain gluten and choose carefully and still worry about whether or not I'll get sick
  

I also miss Pizza Hut pizza crust (Pamela's Amazing Wheat Free Bread Mix makes great pizza crust, but it's not the same as Pizza Hut). I miss the luxury of a good hamburger/hotdog bun that I don't have to make myself. I miss flour tortillas (and haven't found a corn tortilla yet that I can eat...although I can eat all other corn products). I miss being able to walk into a grocery store to buy whatever I want.

I don't miss being sick.

Have you tried real latin american tortillas?

Soaking the maize in lime water is important because it liberates the vitamin niacin and the amino acid tryptophan. When maize was brought back to Europe, Africa and Asia from the New World, people left out this crucial step. People whose diet consisted mostly of corn meal often became sick with the disease pellagra, which was common in Spain, Northern Italy and the southern United States.

But overall isn't it funny we miss junk food? Everything else is mainly WHERE we can eat not what except junk food.

Yes!!! I forgot about those. There's nothing that comes close to that in texture and ease of use. I like the Food for Life ones quite a bit for flavor, but they're hard to work with. I end up just taking the pieces and putting a bit of whatever filling I'm using on each piece and rolling and eating as I go. Works okay, but not the same.

Nancy

This is one thing I definately don't miss... nearly every tortilla dish tastes better and has a better texture (to me) with pure corn tortillas.

If you want them bendier and can't be bothered making them then they can be brushed with water and stuck in a micro on low heat for a short time.

The Dogtorj article made a lot of sense, just skimming through it I noticed the exact things I was thinking about, it just made sense.

I've been worried about what the big companies have been doing to our food for some time. My grandmother couldn't buy seed that would regenerate with the next crop. A family friend had an orchard and Coles told him what to grow, he had to graft their (Monsanto had a hand in this) strains into his crops or they wouldn't buy them, he could not guarantee his crops would not be cross pollinated tainting both his organic crop and their bogus crop, then they used a propoganda campaign to claim the new strains were the only ones suitable for commercial comsumption, imagine that centuries of hortoculture wiped away in one foul sweep by a multi national, of course their product is nutritionally inferior and tastes like it's been sitting in the back of my feezer for 10 years but hey it has a higher yeild. The farmers here are still at war with the compaines who want to introduce GM canola siteing that even if they don't grow it cross contamination from GM crops in the area will destroy their crop, the companies have even come under suspicion for releasing GM crop and growing it under the disguse of the real thing in order to do just that. It's a serious problem, what happens if all our natural crops end up being wiped out and then we have no choice but to eat food that will harm us?

With the tastelss food, packaging and processing I wonder how like it will be before we are mimicking bad 70's sci-fi popping steak and three veg pills instead of eating real food.

I'm getting off topic here but I wonder if they can get away with doing that, what else has slipped by.

I think its pretty much endemic and pervasive to the point that most people never read a label, let alone wonder what they are eating.

Before diagnosis I was firmly in the "a few additives can't hurt" camp. Just having to read labels made me aware just how much additives are in food but it goes way beyond this. Food has become a battle to sell the lowest quality products cheaper than anyone else. Its over abundance in Europe/US has stopped us appreciating it as a 'luxury' item and reduced it to for many people an inconvenience.

I recently posted that most "fresh" fruit is kept in biologically sterile cold stores and sprayed with many things (including candida) just to keep it in a place it can be distributed in the most efficient way but this isn't isolated, the whole food industry is based on putting things in tins and packets and adding chemical preservatives because it saves cents on distribution over fresh produce.

Next I support the soldiers - that doesn't neccessary mean I support the Iraq war....to me it is two different things.

Of course, let me qualify because I wasn't going to add the postscript and it came out worse than I meant when I tagged it on the end.

What I mean is that should be your decision. It shouldn't be up to either of us for judging someone over whether they are sending packages or not. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this war it is not a situation of "clear and present danger", its elective so I don't see why a companies choice of supporting or not supporting should matter, its an an individual and personal decision, even if that person is a corporation and I really don't see it as a clear cut patriot or traitor situation. I'm not in anyway saying you shouldn't do as you see fit but I don't think its so simple that people should judge a company or individual for supporting or not supporting or for divorcing supporting the troops from the war or not.

Steve, you live in Europe, of course you don't like Starbucks! The US is the only country on the planet it seems that has no clue as to what a good cup of coffee is!!! I much preferred the coffee I drank as an exchange student in Mexico and that I drank in Italy -- but here, Starbucks is about the best we've got!! It's even managed to improve the coffee at gas stations and places like McDonalds!

Well here's the thing, obviously Paris has a decent coffee reputation but London has/had a terrible one. Before the Starbucks craze London had very few decent coffee shops and those it had were largely immigrant families runing a family business. However once coffee started taking off in London we started to get increasing decent coffee places which is right when Starbucks stepped in and took over the market effectively killing the developing coffee market and replacing the family businesses.

My real problem though is that Starbucks have managed to make a business out of selling the cheapest nastiest coffee (which is also worse for you). Any coffee officianado will tell you there are two types of bean, arabica and robusta and that arabica is much harder to grow because it has far less caffine.

A good coffee is 100% arabica but even some Italian coffee's (cheapest) have up to 25% robusta.

After this officianado's argue over the specific blends but the absolute 1st thing for coffee is the type of bean. Starbucks manage to come up with lots of fancy names for their specific blends and don't ever mention the single most important fact... the bean.

Every analysis shows starbucks to be the highest caffine so it seems they only use robusta, the bitter high caffine variety and it is the fact they managed to prevent most people realising this that I think is bad! I can speak for London and say that largely the present reason London has such bad coffee and low expecations is due to Starbucks and I think the US is largely the same. The coffee business would have eventually led to decent coffee had it not been for market dominance of companies like starbucks selling the cheapest coffee more efficiently.

Whenever you get an email with negative info about a person or company, take a couple words from that email along with the words "urban legend" and google. You will see whether it's true or false. Most of the time, they are false.

In the case of Starbucks, they traces where the rumor started and contacted that person directly. There actually was a misunderstanding behind it and a problem with corporate policy. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, the troops would read the same rumors we do!! Good for you Mamaw in supporting them, that's a very charitable and appreciated thing you're doing.

I have never had a problem with drinks in the store. They're all gluten-free except for the frapps that have chips in them. Be sure they wash the blender out carefully if you get a frapp so that you don't get chip residue. Also, I always order in the store to be sure the person getting my coffee isn't getting a danish, then touching my lid. I've asked for a new lid twice -- which isn't much considering how often I used to go there (now I'm off all but the most healthy foods till I get better).

Well you can multiply this by 10 because anyone knows anyone serving in Iraq wiill forward it to them!

Personally I detest Starbucks largely due to their poor coffee and putting real cofffe places out of business and I boycott them for that but a 50th hand eMail is not a good reason!

Indeed, please patronise them in the US and get them to realise that we don't want them and they can make more money at home... please .....

Another valid point is that by sending items to Iraq they are supporting the war... I would be the first to say that the soldiers who are just doing their job shouldn't be the ones held up to randsom over this but your government got them into it so perhaps ... it is up to them to send them decent items from home.

I say this in the spirit that yes these are your boys and some girls but the life of the average Iraqi has spiralled to the point where for many their idea of a luxury item is clean drinking water or anitbiotics (last study over 100,000 extra Iraqi's had died ;largely from lack of drinking water and basica medical items as a direct result of the war).... and yes I realise that many of the troops do share what they get with some local people and they are not all war mongering monsters but hey shouldn't the pentagon be sending the packages?

I just wanted to point out that they published the structure of DNA, based on data that was in part stolen from Rosalind Franklin....

Don't get hung up on what's known.

Hey I'm trying to moderate my inbuilt "correctness gene" here

It might interest you to know I have followed her around... Kingston on Thames (bachelors degree), Paris (now) and as part of my MSc. thesis I used the XRD at Birbeck.

I am for obvious reasons avoiding the US...

However I don't think its fair to say stolen since Crick and Franklin worked together and Franklin was a close family friend.

Chevy's Tortilla Chips. Their salsa is gluten-free. But the chips are fried in the same oil as other things. Those chips were so good. Nothing else is quite the same.

KFC is a big one for me too. Really just the loss of anything that is convenient.

I mean, I like the side effect of this being that I'm eating healthier, but my gosh. Sometimes you just want to go through a drive-through and get on with your life.

I miss microwave chicken nuggets. Having to stand over a hot frying pan at 11am to make homemade chicken tenders for lunch for my kids is starting to wear thin. Especially since they both have variable appetites. At least I've gotten pretty good at it and whatever they don't eat now I can.

As far as recipes, I've found that making your own seasoned breadcrumbs is easy if you have a food processor. That expands your options quite a bit if you like breaded or fried food.

There isn't much that I've found is difficult to do as far as converting recipes. The only things I've ran into pretty tough roadblocks with are cheese crackers and filled pastas such as ravioli.

By the way, www.topsecretrecipes.com is a great resource, even just to get inspired.

Nancy

This describes me perfectly....

I never ate much junk food but sometimes when your friends all just wanna get something and move on it can be a pain. Don't have kids but I do make sure my girlfriend doesn't miss out with things like battered prawns or pizza and in return she doesn't bring gluten into the appartment but spending 5 hours marinading, then cooking then peeling and battering and deep frying, dripping sweat I starrt to wonder why I just can't eat out.

If Im on vacation with my girlfriend we plan the day around me eating and thats OK but when you are in a larger group (like last night at a concert where people wanted hot dogs and I couldn't) it gets inconveneient for them to be able to eat and not you.

I have yet to make a decent gluten free ravioli.... (sorry jcc if you're reading...) I even got tapioca flour but I had been so put off by bad attempts at gluten-free ravioli sticking to the pasta machine like glue I havn't had the heart....

The ravioli receipe sounds interesting but what do you mean by boil on stovetop and flip over? If you boil them, why the need to flip? Do they float - is that the reason to flip them?

Yep.... and I'm guessing they are more fragile than wheat ones... I had limited success with a similar method but getting a really good even pasta like from the pasta machine is ...beyond me!

Its not just that but when I made real ones I would adjust the recipe according to filling vis egg yolk vs whites and xx flour to plain etc. wheras now I m just trying to get anything that holds together!!!!

AAAHHHHH

I think its a whole combination, simply by saying its very very rare stopped diagnosis of many...

Also because of the way foods are manufactured today its impossible to miss it out.

When I lived in Africa I was mostly gluten-free because 99% of what I ate was fresh fruit, meat and veg so I only got gluten in large doses... so if you stop eating bread and pasta for a week in an environment like that you notice wheras if you try gluten free in the West today ytou are not gluten-free because of all the hidden gluten so this makes it even more evasive. This is not even including pharmacuticals containing gluten !!

One thing that kinda helped me when I little, If someone asked what my allergy was I only say Celiac. I refuse to use the word disease, adding that made feel like I had someting catching. You all probably think I'm mad but it helped me so I thought I'd share lol.

Hey, thats not mad, Ive had people move away like they are going to catch a fatal illness from being in my proximity and others who think gluten-free food must be bad for them...like a non diabetic shooting insulin or a photographer shooting children....

shia... keep your chin up and count down the days not up

I don't know where you got that impression from but I am genuinly trying to help. There's a reason why I dislike enterolab so much. First, I want to tell my personal story because this might put things in perspective. So sorry but this is going to be a long post.

I think you, or maybe someone else asked me what my personal interest in this board is and I said that both my mom and brother have celiac disease, well that's not entirely true. The truth is that my mom and to a lesser degree my sister had depression that they thought was celiac disease. I think their story is all too familiar.

I am going to describe my mom because it was more serious for her. She had diarrhea every day, fatigue, inability to get out of bed, sometimes insomnia, lack of motivation and anxiety. So of course my mom constatntly went to the doctor who found nothing wrong with her, including negative antibodies for celiac. They tested for hyper/hypothyroidism/Addison disease/Cushing syndrome/ pituitary tumor, in other words everything. I think she saw about 10 different doctors in about a year, and all of them told her that she has anxiety or depression. It seemed pretty obvious to us that she had major anxiety and she wasn't as happy as she used to be. Unfortunately she was the only one not to reognize this. At this point she started researching on the internet and found celiac disease and started on a gluten free diet. This diet worked miracles, unfortunately only for the first 2 weeks. After this she thought her food was being contaminated by wheat from the dishwasher, and that other foods besides gluten were making her sick, like casein, and than later corn cereals. She even stopped eating eggs. All of this continued for 2 years, until one day when she felt especially bad and went to doctor to try antidepressant as a last resort. After about a week and a half of taking antidepressants we noticed that her mood returned to normal, she started eating gluten again, her anxiety and diarrhea were gone. She took celexa for a year and latter enrolled in congitive-behavioural therapy, and never had diarrhea/depression/fatigue since (maybe a little bit of anxiety). Later she told me that sometimes before the treatement she was thinking about commiting suicide and was pretty close to carrying it out!

Now don't get me wrong there are some genuinly sick people here with ataxia, growth stunting, neuropathy, hypothyroidism, failure to trhive not to mention classic celiac disease, but it is also my personal opinion that about 30% of the people on this board have depression/anxiety disorders and not celiac disease. I am saying this because most the of the stories I've read are exactly like my moms, and I am saying this to help people not to insult them. It makes me feel sad to see other people go through what my mom did and not even recognize it.

Unfortunately in mild/moderate depression people don't even realize that they feel sad instead they feel all their symptoms are physical and then they start to look for physical causes and this leads to a dangerous spiral. Doctors are trained to reognize people who are anxious or depressed by the way they look, dress or talk, and many times, another person, like a doctor or a friend can tell things about a person that even he/she might not be aware of.

This brings me to why I dislike enterolab so much. I feel its misleading people into thinking that they have a physical disease, and makes it harder for them to recognize the real cause of their problems.

Thanks for being up front over that, it really does help.

One thing you experienced, albeit through your mother is the merry go round of uninformed GP's. In your mothers case it was something else but most celaics have gone through similar and many of us have after 25 yrs and more of being ill finally been diagnosed.

Obviously I don't know your mom but I know mine and being assertive and telling MD's which tests to run is not her, especially if depressed. Also many of the people are diagnosed "officially as well"... myself and my mother included.

The real problem for your mother was in a way not being able to be tested officially both for depression and to rule out celiac disease. In many ways its sad but the way many actually get officially diagnosed is by telling their MD they have a positive enterolab and then the MD has to balance malpractice against just ordering a set of blood tests! In my mother's case she had already been referred to physchiatrists for treatment of hypochondria BEFORE her blood tests were positive and then her biopsy and I'm sure many here share that experience.

Susan,

I think your right on and very reasonable.

Me too....

My opinion is that restaurants do not have to say "this is gluten free" but they can indicate on their menu something which can state "we can't guarantee that cc won't be present, but to the best of our knowlege these selections are best for those on a gluten-free diet" or something like that.

There is a halfway point here.

Well its almost more than halfway because if they actually understand CC you are automatically in a better position.

if they state seperate preperation areas tha't even better.

I'm also happy to have an allegern free prep area, even though I can eat peanuts and seafood I'd rather forgo the peanuts etc. and just have an allergen free food.

I am with you on the AD-12 theory too, anything is possible. Maybe one idea is right, maybe both are, maybe neither are.

I can say that with our current medical standards, most people who do not EVER test positive (including borderline elevated) for Celiac in ANY way, shape, or form, do not have Celiac. The new tests are very specific. I agree testing frequency is poor for this disease, but my point initially was that most people who have autoimmunities DO NOT have Celiac. Steve posted a great snippet saying 12% in a group of those with Addison's have Celiac. Yes, that is a lot. But what about the other 88% that DON'T have it? Which was proved within the study? This could just demonstrate the genetic link some people seem to have, in which they are prone to multiple autoimmune diseases and have a defective immune response.

That depends what you mean by do not have it.

Do not have elevated AgA, AgG and transglutamase or one of the three OR biopsy? or were not tested etc.

Just bear with me and I'll try and put it all together...

I also think it needs to be made clear that those who say they have gluten intolerance and have no autoimmune diseases weren't necessarily protected from the gluten-free diet.

If we start off with a presumption that they cannot then we will never test....

I can point you to old studies on h. pylori where the same arguament is used. The big arguament was always but sme people with jugedenal ulcers don't have h pylori. Once testing was routine and methodology was brought in and people got used to looking for h pylori then the numbers went up.

BUT some people still don't have h. pylori however many DO benefit from antibiotics.

They generally don't have the genetics to get autoimmune diseases in the first place. They say they react to gluten, but they are not Celiac. If they have no autoimmune or genetic markers for Celiac, I am saying that the risk of additional autoimmunity is the same as the general public.

It's like saying that Type 2 diabetics (a NON autoimmune disease with the same name) have the same risk of additional autoimmune diseases as Type 1 (autoimmune) diabetics, even though they are completely different diseases complete with different genetics. As I said, I (and the whole medical community) don't really know what the mechanism behind "gluten intolerance". It doesn't seem to be autoimmune Celiac, though. I am NOT saying that the gluten-free diet is not beneficial to them, just that the autoimmunity issue is not there. I personally can admit I do not know much about non-Celiac gluten intolerance.

I think this is not surprising because nobody seems to know much about it. The studies just have not been done. Lets face it the oats issue is still not conclusively proven either and yet oats contain no gliadins.

Why, because the studies that have been done have been done on specific groups and in relation to biopsy proven celaic (or other criteria)...

I do want to point out that some people (fairly rare) have innate antibody deficiencies. This might explain those who test negative but react or have intestinal damage on biopsy with negative bloodwork.

I don't think Alba is working on a cure per se, but university researcher centres are. There are a handful of scientists searching for fame, fortune, or maybe have a child with Celiac and just really want to help. A cure can make money as well. Think about how much people pay for cancer treatment hoping to be free of disease. I live in Canada, but I can just imagine.

Yes but almost all cancer research is privately funded. This is a rather different ballpark to trying to get a grant on say studying human sexuality (just watched Kilnsey again )

Hey gfp, don't you have a PhD in Organic Chem? If anyone is going to "cure" Celiac, it might as well be you! I'll be your lab gopher....hehe....

Unfortunately for this its organic geo-chemistry. Most of my "patients" have been dead for 300ma, liquified and turned into oil....

However on to the whole thing....

Medical science is somewhat at the same stage as physcis at the start of the 20C.

Watson and Crick did not dicover the relevance of DNA until 1953 and common day uses of genetics are still expanding but this is in science, not medicine because over the same time medicine started double blind long terms trials so even after scientifically cigarettes were proven to cause cancewr it took 50 years of clinical trials during which time many people died.

I pretty much think that diseases are still looked at as symptoms based.

That is GI diseases are classified as such... but also that we clump diseases together in historical ways and this prevent links being noticed.

The effect of this is that in some cases more than once disease or with different causes is called the same thing and the same disease with different symptoms or manifestations is not recogniosed as the same disease with a different expression.

In the same way the commonality of diseases in different patients is not recognised partly due to it being in different specialisms but also simply due to most specialists ignoring what the patient tells them.

The non linking of GERD and celaics being one...

This doesn't mean all GERD is caused by one mechanism either ... and lets not even start with IBS.

I know what you mean about shades of gray, but docs think in absolutes. When I was pregnant, they checked my hemoglobin every couple weeks. It needed to be above 12. If it was 11.8, it was a crisis we needed to address; if it was 12.2, I was okay. Docs need to think and not just do what they're programmed for.

Were you actually pregnant or just borderline pregnant?

more tomorrow when I am sober.... (hope you realise the above is rhetoric)