[ajross]

Um... The whole point here is that unscientific nonsense needs to be killed. And specifically that non-Celiac gluten sensitivity has no real evidence for it.

So your response is to trot out an equally unfounded (AFAIK) hippie-inspired pseudo-theory. Seriously?

[logfromblammo]

The only acceptable way to kill unscientific nonsense is to test the hypothesis it advances, no matter how ridiculously untestable it seems to be, and then publish the raw data without redactions.

This one actually seems testable. Get a bunch of volunteer non-Celiac "gluten sensitives" and put them on a controlled diet. Measure some objective physiological metrics. Blindly introduce gluten to random subjects. Determine which metrics, if any, change in response to gluten.

And then, to check out placebo/nocebo, you tell all the subjects that gluten will be introduced into their diets that day, and continue monitoring the metrics.

A similiar experiment could be performed on a random sample of ordinary people, with glyphosate.

[learnstats2]

Why is it so urgent to kill this?

It does nobody harm if some people choose to avoid gluten, and greatly benefits coeliac sufferers who have increasing good nutrition options.

[zo1]

Because it's part of a much larger "anti-science" movement, and it's slipping underneath a lot of peoples' noses by sounding semi-plausible (or some other reason). If it is indeed a myth, and without merit, then it needs to be clumped together with all the other pseudo-science type stuff out there like homeopathy, chemtrails, acupuncture and chiropractors.

[nroach]

anecdote: my wife has had exema her entire life. after a particularly bad episode, we eventually we tried an elimination diet methodically eliminating one food category at a time. it took about 2 months to rotate through all the possible suspects but in the end, eliminating wheat completely cleared the problem. then, one morning we had meatless sausage and she had a bad reoccurrence. first ingredient on the sausage? wheat gluten. (this was before allergy labelling in the US, and we just didn't think it would contain wheat).

On the other hand, we've had other family members try avoiding gluten because they perceived it was 'bad', without a causal linkage to any symptoms.

So, is non-celiac gluten intolerance rare? Probably. Do most people avoid it for the wrong reason? Probably. But to make the blanket statement that intolerance doesn't exist is misinformed and denigrates the very real problem that a small subset of the population does have.

[batbomb]

Important note on anecdotes (especially on HN):

There are many thousands of active users on Hacker News. If there are 50 active users over an hours time looking at a given topic, and those 50 active users know an average of 50 people fairly well, that means there's potentially ~2500 anecdotes for any given topic.

Say something happens in .1% of the general population, but it's noteworthy enough to be an anecdote. For any given topic, it's quite possible to drastically over represent that anecdote, as it's quite possible that there will be ~3 such anecdotes for any given topic and the normal case, which isn't especially noteworthy, gets no mention.

Lesson: At a large enough scale, one-in-a-thousand anecdotes can occur several times for a given topic.

[dllthomas]

I wonder if there's an important distinction to be made between allergy to gluten and allergy to wheat. Does your wife react negatively to other gluten-heavy grains?

[ajross]

It's a fair point. Personally I don't feel any urgency, the complaint was mostly aesthetic. But if you want to talk practicality of holding unscientific beliefs: I see your harmless gluten-free food industry and raise you a measles outbreak...

[Spooky23]

Because ass hattery like this actually drives people's behaviors. Missing in the hysteria about gluten, corn syrup and carb consumption is the witch hunts in the 90s for fat and chlorestrol.

Kids loading up on sugar filled, "whole grain" frosted flakes today were eating eggs 30 years ago.

[blacksmith_tb]

Unfortunately, that isn't quite true. Many GF products substitute rice for wheat, which is lower-fiber, lower-protein, and contains potentially dangerous levels of arsenic, e.g. http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm352569.ht...