[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?