Gluten is the protein found in many grain products such as wheat, rye and barley. Some people have a bad reaction to gluten when it hits their small intestine and their small intestine cannot handle it.
This is called the celiac disease and for people who have this disease, the gluten hurts the lining of their small intestine. This injury is very bad for the body and can cause: weight loss, bloating, diarrhea, gas, abdominal cramps, or vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
The way to fix this is to get gluten completely out of your diet so that the small intestine can heal. But it is very tricky to get gluten out of your diet because grains are used in so many things.
Even though it is tricky, it is extremely important though and if you can do it, it would be incredibly helpful to you and your health. It is important to consult and dietitian about starting this diet because it would need to be a life long diet.
Since getting rid of gluten in your body is so important, it is critical that the person that is making food for the victim understands the diet completely and read food labels thoroughly.
Some things that may appear on a food label that probably means the item has gluten in it are: Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, Flour or Cereal, Vegetable Protein, Malt or Malt Flavoring, Modified Starch or Modified Food Starch, Vegetable Gum, Soy Sauce or Soy Sauce Solids.
The Gluten Free diet does not restrict a lot of things, but it is very picky when it comes to anything that may have gluten.
For health, the gluten diet should be rated a ten. It is true that it may be a little hard on your body not to receive some of the nutrients found in grains, but it would be harder on you body to eat the grains.
The fact that this diet is designed to protect your health means that it is a very healthy diet.
As for ease of implementation it is probably about a one. It would be extremely hard to start this diet, not knowing exactly what you could and could not eat. It would be hard to get used to looking for certain things on labels and to get used to cooking meals without grains.
Ease of adherence should probably get a five. If you were just basing the score off how hard it would be to stick with this diet, it might be a one. But if you were basing the score off how necessary it is to stick with this diet, and so the likeliness that people would stick to it, then it would be a ten. So a five is right in the middle.
As for the long term potential, it gets a ten. In the long term your body would be healed and you would be used to eating and finding food without gluten. The long term is very promising.
It isn’t very family friendly or good for a busy life style. Probably in these areas it would get a four. For the family it means trying to cook meals ever meal that do not have gluten and trying to teach the kids what does and does not have gluten. That would be hard work.
For the busy lifestyle it would mean that you could never just stop somewhere and pick something up to eat. You always have to check it out and make sure that it is safe. That would be bard and cost some time.
The gluten free diet would be hard but useful.