T-minus six days raw

As I said, I love experimenting in the kitchen.

About three years ago I embarked on a nutritional odyssey for my husband’s health. This was a discovery that I made, again, through a link to a link to a link. I was looking at something not very closely related to my original search, and found myself on a Celiac website. I started reading and was fascinated by what I learned. The symptoms of Celiac as described on this site, sounded like some of the health issues my husband had been suffering for years. He had chronic G-I issues like cramping & diarrhea, and also suffered from migraines that would send him to urgent care an average of 4 times a year. (Once on New Year’s Eve! Whoopee!)

So on a whim, I decided to put Hubby on a 30-day trial gluten-free diet, to see if that would make any difference with his G-I problems and his migraines. I devoured all the information I could about cooking gluten-free, and I completely eliminated wheat from his diet.

Almost immediately his issues nearly disappeared. His migraines decreased in frequency, and his gut was happy for the first time in many years, to the point that he didn’t have to take twelve Imodium pills every day.

Hubby has not been clinically diagnosed with Celiac disease, frankly because the test is rather unpleasant... yeah, it involves a biopsy of the inside of your intestine, ewww. But I reckon a biopsy would be superfluous, wouldn’t it? I mean, either it comes back positive, which would confirm what I already suspected, or it would come back negative, which wouldn’t change the fact that Hubby is still gluten-intolerant.

I don’t know all the chemistry behind Celiac disease or gluten-intolerance. All I know is that gluten is a protein that can erode the inside of your intestine and negatively affect your digestion. I have heard it said that more folks are gluten-intolerant than realize it, to some degree or another. However, in most people the symptoms are either too mild to bother with, or they’re blamed on something else. I have heard gluten-intolerance blamed for everything from autism to infertility to attention deficit disorder to Chrone’s to dermatitis to fibromyalgia to lactose intolerance to irritable bowel syndrome.

Would we all be healthier people if we didn’t eat wheat? I don’t know. What I do know is that Hubby’s G-I complaints went ignored or poo-poo’d by doctors (the best they could do was recommend an OTC medicine for IBS), and that he found real relief when I took the initiative to change his diet.

So, is there healing in the food we eat? I can’t doubt that.