To my dear friend, who I like and respect in every way but this one: You do not have a gluten allergy. You just think you do. Neither does your child. I have gone along with all of your various life-changing fads-of-the-moment (remember the Atkins diet?), but this one has gone too far. I am sure you think you feel drastically different now that you have eliminated wheat from your diet. It’s called a placebo effect. Look it up. And it’s not just you. So many other people I consider(ed) intelligent have told me their naturopath “diagnosed” them as gluten intolerant. Now there is a whole section in QFC for gluten-free products. Now your child shows up at birthday parties with her own gluten-free cupcake. She can’t eat birthday cake with the others. That’s almost cruel. Who the hell diagnoses a 3-year-old as gluten intolerant? We are all born intolerant to everything but mother’s milk. Somehow we get used to it all along the way. I was once intolerant to wine. That sure changed. Anyway, it’s your life. Just don’t expect me to provide gluten-free food at a party. And let’s just let the conversation move to something other than your gluten intolerance after half an hour. It’s really not that interesting.

—Anonymous

133 replies on “I, Anonymous”

  3. Hey, you know what’s gluten-free and easy to make big portions of for a party, and which also happen to be delicious and good for you? Beans. Just make a big pot of beans. You can even make two pots, one with bacon or ham and one without. That way, the non-glutens have something to eat, the vegans have something to eat, and you don’t look like an inhospitable ass.

  4. Also “I’m allergic to sulfites and I get headaches when I drink red wine so I only drink white wine.”

    ARRRRRRRGHGHGHGH There is usually twice as much sulfite in white wine than in red. You are NOT allergic to sulfites! If you were really one of the less than 1% of people who are legitimately allergic to sulfites, trust me, you’d be feeling it after a glass of white and we’d be looking around for an epi-pen. Same goes for you eating cured meat or spinach for that matter.

    You may legitimately get RWH (red wine headache) which is considered to be a product of the various tannins, polyphenols, oak aging, etc that go into red but not white wine thanks to the maceration on the grape skins, stems, and seeds. But that is not a sulfite allergy.

    It’s also quite possible that what you technically have is simply called a “hangover.”
    End.Rant.

  6. @3: Or, just do as I do, and don’t invite people over who do not have the exact same values, desires, preferences, tolerances, tastes, political perspectives, and interests as I do. It makes the party into a much more manageable size.

    Yep, just me and my sock puppet pal, Tony. And Tony doesn’t eat much, which is a nice bonus.

  7. @5 Birthday cake, beans, what’s the difference. Besides, it’s easy to blow out candles when eating lots of beans. My own children love this game. You just have to make sure Birthday Kid does not have a lot of flammable lint on her pants.

  9. I think the whole food allergy thing has gotten way out of control (I used to wait tables at a Mexican restaurant and people would always tell me they were allergic to cilantro. Not sure if that’s even possible and if so, don’t go out for Mexican!) That being said, Celiac disease is a real disease that makes it difficult for the body to break down gluten. Those who have it get terrible digestive issues when they eat gluten, and if they continue to eat it, it will permanently damage their intestines and greatly increase their chances of getting colon cancer. Presumably the person this I Anon is talking about does not have Celiac disease, but others do and should not be judged for something totally out of their control. Some even might say they have a gluten allergy to avoid having to explain Celiac disease and to avoid discussing what’s going on in their colon, since to some the happenings in our colons is private.

  11. So, Anon, you’re positive it’s the placebo effect? There are plenty of people who give up wheat/gluten and feel better due to the placebo effect. But there are plenty of people whose lives and bowels have been made miserable by gluten. As long as they eat it as a regular part of their diet, they feel sick most or all of the time, and they’ve probably felt that way most of their lives without knowing why. When they stop, and get it out of their systems, they say, “Wow, this is how I’m supposed to feel?” And when they accidentally eat it again (or do a “damn the consequences, I’m having a bagel this morning”), they feel sick again.

    Want to know which category your friend and her daughter are in? Feed them something you say is gluten free but isn’t. If they get sick in the next day or so, you’re an ass. If they don’t, your friend’s a drama queen. But even if she is, nothing you say or do is going to convince her she and her kid are just fine eating cake with the rest of the kids.

  14. My sister always tells me how she is alergic to garlic, while she’s shovleing my garlic mashed taters in her pie hole. Haven’t seen her swell up yet. But I just smile and nod with a concerned look on my face. (I’m guessing she doesn’t even know what garlic smells like)

    Hint: offer ice cream to the child. She will enjoy the party without cake. Cake is aweful anyway. Just smile and nod.

  18. #11 – There are also many people who go on worthless eating restrictions and end up feeling better because it is the first time in their lives when they are not thoughtlessly shovelling junk food down their gullet. What happens is:

    1. Person is told they might have an allergy to gluten (or whatever) and they should eliminate all products containing gluten for one week.

    2. Person stops eating doughnuts, muffins, cookies, chips and other crap. When they think about eating, they stop and consider their imminent actions. Maybe they instead have a carrot or an apple, or maybe they decide they really aren’t that hungry after all.

    3. After a week, person is feeling much better: less bloated and less overcarbed. Person says, “Aha! I must have a gluten allergy!”

    I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

  19. There is definitely both a broader understanding of celiac disease, and a gluten free fad going on in this country. It’s absurd to take sides on this post because there’s really no way of knowing whether the author is right or not.

  20. I’ve been informed that EVERYONE is gluten-intolerant, but only some people have it bad enough for it to affect them. The person who told me this said it with a straight face.

  21. @9 cilantro tastes absolutely horrible to me. Even the tiniest speck makes me well-up with the enormous urge to spit it out ASAP. It’s different then just not particularly liking some food. It’s like an intense awful reaction in my mouth. I imagine it’s hard for some people to explain that to waiters so they probably opt for “I’m allergic to cilantro” as the quickest/easiest way to keep it off their plate.

  23. Yes. Celiac’s is one thing, but all this gluten allergy bs is ridiculous. How on earth did humans survive until now with all these dangerous food allergies out there??

  24. I love gluten. I add it to the bread I make in my bread machine, which is one of my favorite appliances (yeah, I’m so early 1990’s). If I don’t use gluten, the texture of the bread sucks.

  26. “Yeah, fuck all the people who don’t describe things with complete accuracy. There is nothing more repulsive and despicable than someone who describes food that makes them sick as an “allergy” The nerve. They should either get the language impeccably correct or just suffer alone. fuck all you people who can’t eat some things without getting sick”

    It is interesting how being pedantic and uncaring seem to go together.

  27. techbear@18, i suspect you are on to the actual mechanism behind this fad. but “just stop eating crap,” doesn’t make people feel as special as “you have a gluten intolerance.”

  30. Well, I’ve got a gluten allergy. I can eat it, for about a month or two, with only a bit of bloating and indigestion, and then the indegestion starts getting really bad, and then, well, there was that time I farted and it turns out I’d pooped my pants. In class. In college. No, I should just eat wheat. Its obviously all in my head. The total lack of symptoms when I dont eat wheat is just imaginary.

  31. I don’t blame individuals for this – although some of them really ought to know better. I blame alternative medicine generally, naturopaths particularly, and, at a deeper level, American culture’s particular hospitableness to cranks, quacks, and magic-bullet “wellness” solutions.

    Have you noticed how the symptoms of gluten intolerance are typically the symptoms of worrying about eating gluten? Funny.

    A certain wackadoodle member of my family has launched full-on into alternative medicine and particularly into food crusades, which means that half the time we agree on bad foods no one should eat, and half the time we’re at each other’s throats because I think it’s fucking silly to say “All grains are poison” or “GMO crops will cause organ failure.”

  32. Thank you Granny Smith for a slivver of sanity in this ridiculous post.

    Seriously- the vitriol spewing from the typings of the letter writer and subsequent commenters about something that has literally NO EFFECT on their lives if they choose not to prescribe to the idea is baffling.

    Don’t believe in Gluten Allergies? Great. Then eat whatever you want. If someone tells you you should avoid gluten tell them to fuck off. But guess what? People get to tell YOU to fuck off if you try and call their reactions to gluten/lack of gluten ridiculous.

    A friend of mine was told by her physician that she should try avoiding gluten because she seemed to be adversely affected by it. She tried it out. Not by cutting out sweets and carbs- but by only going for carbs/candies that didn’t have gluten. It worked. She lost weight significantly, her skin cleared up, she suddenly had more energy.

    She didn’t alter her food intake- she just shifted her bread/carb intake to something that didn’t use wheat. And it worked. Does this mean I think everyone claiming a gluten allergy are actually allergic? Nope. But it DOES seem to exist pretty clearly for some.

    And if those people try it and see positive effects regardless of whether it is an “allergy” or not- good for them.

    So yeah. Get over it. Griping about something this trivial is petty. Really, really petty.

  33. I don’t think what the I, Anon was mad at had much to do with the person not eating gluten– it had more to do with them talking about it all the time and expecting to be catered to at all times.

  35. I have celiac disease, the kind where your small intestine is withering up in preparation for its mid-life cancer, and where you eat 10,000 calories a day without gaining weight … before I was diagnosed and got things under control.
    The fad has certainly been good for improving the GF selection in stores, but it’s embarrassing to be associated with.

    I don’t make scenes about my diet. Most people wouldn’t know if they didn’t cook with or for me. When going out, I always assume that I will work around the food selection somehow, or eat later … it is, after all, MY PROBLEM. Other celiacs I have known also seem to want to keep things under the radar.

    Selection bias at work here, but I tend to think that the people making scenes in restaurants and stores are not among the truly gluten-intolerant, but the fashionably wheat-free, having found their latest seemingly irrefutable excuse to be rude to strangers.

    Having said that, I did once work with a young woman who claimed to have celiac disease, and who so oppressed our officemates that they were afraid to bring non-GF snacks (for themselves!). She was an aggressive moocher and was abusive to anyone who had food she couldn’t eat. She would also give herself ‘wheat holidays,’ which is difficult for me to fathom, because as much as I loved bread and other wheaty foods before I figured out they were poison to me, the misery is not worth it. At least not to someone with real celiac disease.

    In summary: Thanks for bullying the supermarkets into having a gluten-free section, but stop being such manipulative assholes in public.

  36. I’m pretty sure the only way to conclusively prove celiacs/any allergy is a biopsy. Haven’t had one? Then I’m going to have a hard time believing you.

  37. For what it is worth, my family fits the description called out by Anonymous. Here’s why: my six year old son has celiac disease. Diagnosed at age 3. Thanks to the earlier postings starting @9 differentiating between a gluten allergy and celiac. But we are the family that brings a GF cupcake to a birthday party, that hosts dinners at our house rather than at friends so as to make food safe to eat, and has to tell our kid that he can’t just eat the candy from Halloween without us reading the fricking label first.

    And it sucks.

    And it sucks more when inconsiderate assholes pass off this auto-immune disease as a diet fad or something they don’t think is serious. And if you know that my son can’t eat gluten, and choose to feed it to him anyway because you think we’re some diet-of-the-month family, then your selfishness is truly amazing.

    I don’t need others to accommodate our dietary needs if they aren’t willing to do so – we’ll bring our own food and try not to talk about it too much – but hopefully a little empathy and understanding can be brought to the table from the other side.

    You’re an asshole, Anonymous.

  38. @32, it really has more to do with psychogenic gluten intolerance being a fad that’s swept through American cities in the last few years, and with the fact that like any fad, people who are into it just loooove to talk about it and make a big damn deal out of it.

    There’s also the matter of co-opting medical science and self-diagnosing with something that, were it real, would be a serious problem; and the accompanying damage that does to the public understanding of science and lack of understanding of placebo. Furthermore, the rash of self-diagnosis of a nebulous “intolerance” does a disservice to the tiny minority of people who actually live with a condition or allergy.

    Anyway, tl;dr – a diagnosis should never be a fad, nor vice versa.

    @35, sympathies. Autoimmune problems suck.

  39. @37, that is another tip off, people who really have intolerance to gluten usually don’t want to talk about it endlessly….like the person the LW is complaining about.

    Another thing….just to add to the rant….is to mention that you have a “condition” of some sort, irregular periods, strange bump on your tongue, whatever… and have the person you shared that with immediately recommend a) macrobiotic diet, cause it worked for their aunt, b) gluten free diet, cause they saw it on Dr. Oz, or my favorite, c) the blood-type diet, which is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. Honestly, blood-type diet belief is the litmus test for idiots.

  40. I’ve never been diagnosed or tested, but I feel much better and my body/intestines works better when I don’t eat wheat. It’s embarrassing since it does seem like such a fad, so usually I’d rather eat what’s put in front of me and feel terrible for a week than talk about it.

  41. People who get mad at other people for what other people choose to not eat, for whatever reason, are assholes. Look at they way they hate all over vegetarians who never did them any harm. “That guy three tables over didn’t order steak! Aaaargh!” What an asshole.

    Are you a paid flack for the Wheat Foods Council? A lobbyist for the American Meat Institute? Do you pay the rent with checks written by some other agribusiness front group? No? No? And no? Then what the fuck do you care?

    Mind your own business and quit being such an asshole.

  42. @33,

    Since the kid shows up to parties with her own gluten-free food, it looks like the parent doesn’t expect anyone to cater to them. And anyone who throws a party and explicitly refuses to offer *something* a guest can eat is a shitty host and a fucking asshole.

  43. Isn’t it funny how nobody who lives in a third-world country has a food allergy? I’m just saying.

    Isn’t it funny how people with no scientific or medical knowledge like to postulate bullshit on the Internet? I’m just sayin’.

    Third worlders don’t have food allergies (or allergies of any kind, really) because they have far less hygiene. Allergies are the result of living in sanitary conditions. The cleaner a society becomes, the more allergies people have. And not washing your hands isn’t a solution. You have to be inundated with (mostly) harmless micro-organisms as a child to get immunities from allergies, which means living in an almost literal shit-hole.

  44. I am totally on board with this, Anon.

    My family members have been dealing with celiac disease (the real thing) for more than 10 years.

    I get irritated with all these pseudo-gluten-phobes – why on earth would anyone choose to eat that way?

    But then I think of all the fun faux-wheat products my family gets to eat now because of the consumer demand from these fad dieters/hypochondriacs…

    …and I keep my mouth shut.

  45. My favorite thing to do to friends who say they are “gluten intolerant” or whatever the hell they call it, is to make some flour free cake, make sure they eat it and say “You’re gonna DIE!!! That had FLOUR in it!!! HAHAHAHAHA”

  46. less than 0.1% of the population has a gluten allergy. so, either they all moved to seattle or the a**hats at bastyr are hacks and telling everyone their diet abnormalities are probably a gluten allergy.

  47. Not everyone with an allergy puffs up, needs an epi pen, etc. I’m not allergic to sulfites, but I’m sure sensitive to them. Wine, beer, pickles, etc…oh, the headache. As for MSG, depends on the concentration. I used to love “Puffcorn” from Frito-Lay, but within 20 minutes I would have VICIOUS migraine, and about the only ingredient in the list I’ve ever had trouble with has been MSG, and most of the time not even Chinese food bothers me, so how much is in Puffcorn? Yeow! I’m allergic to the nickel in a lot of jewelry, as are a lot of people. I don’t puff up, etc. I break out in itchy bumps that then weep and scab. Ick. But, no puffing up, no breathing problems, no throat closing up.

  48. @26 I have read that 30% of us are gluten intolerant. In Italy they test everyone. I love wheat, but cutting it out has done wonders for my MS. (7 year remission!) I try not to mention it unless I have to. And I usually don’t, not that hard to work around.

    I don’t know what anon’s problem is.

    BTW, @17: How much bread/pizza/cookies/bagels do you usually see people eating in third world countries? Yep.

  49. In fairness, keshmeshi, the Hygiene Hypothesis is still, well, a hypothesis. That doesn’t mean I don’t personally buy it – I think it’s plausible and pretty compelling – but the data’s still not quite strong enough to lay it down on people with some righteous wrath, like it’s something they ought to just know already.

  50. @47, there are definitely different classes of allergic/hypersensitivity reaction. The classical version that everyone thinks of is anaphylaxis, but in immunology I had to memorize a chart of types I-IV hypersensitivity. Damned if I can remember which is which now, though.

    @48, “I have read” is a pretty weak citation. I’ve read some really outrageous things from some pretty flagrant quacks on this topic, and I think I’ve heard more people smugly self-diagnose gluten “intolerance” than Asperger’s.

    I wouldn’t care to speculate about the precise cause of your anecdotal experience. MS has such a broad range of symptoms, and autoimmune conditions are notoriously responsive to placebo – but on the other hand, they’re also notoriously complicated, and celiac disease is autoimmune too, so you might well have something going on there. Who knows? I’m not your doctor. Still, I think it’s safe to say your case isn’t typical and if avoiding gluten is helping you, well, good.

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