Monthly Archives: November 2007

It’s no good, I’m just going to have to comment on this: I refuse to tolerate food intolerances

I read this last night, and was so cross I had to turn my computer off. Don’t post angry, the advice is … well, I’m still angry.

Jay Rayner says (among other things):

I suspect the vast majority of coeliacs are actually attention-seeking frauds

Surely, writing this kind of article, designed to cause comment and controversy, and to raise one’s profile, is the same as the attention-seeking he accuses coeliacs of?

Does he think my 1-year-old was attention-seeking when she vomited at nearly every meal and suffered truly vile diarrhoea several times a day for months? When she refused to eat, because it just brought her pain? Or when she no longer had the energy to play?

Does he think that she was a fraud when I had to put her in the same size nappies as her 3 month old sister, because she’d lost so much weight? Or when her feet didn’t grow for months because of malnutrition?

Does he think the team of doctors who diagnosed her via a series of blood tests and a biopsy decided to confirm her in her fantasy world?

Does he think she should just be quiet, and get on and eat gluten, with all the predictable side-effects of intestinal damage, and with the concomitant risk of cancers, infertility, osteoporosis, tooth decay and all the other results of malnutrition?

He asks:

where were all the coeliacs when we were kids? Where were these battalions of people who couldn’t eat bread or pasta because it made their tummies hurt?

Jay, they died. Probably of what used to be called ‘a wasting disease’. […]

Iron Celiac points us to a medical article claiming that a stem cell transplant eliminated coeliac disease in a 12 year old girl.

This kind of transplant is thought to have improved or stabilised a number of auto-immune diseases, including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and Crohn’s disease.

She had the stem cell transplant from a sibling because of leukemia, but it also apparently cured her coeliac disease. First of all, it is excellent news that the leukemia was beaten … but the side-effect bonus of elimination of coeliac disease is very interesting for us.

3 years 6 months after the transplant, her villi are still not damaged by the gluten she’s been eating since 3 months after the transplant.

That is a long gluten challenge, but not the longest I’ve heard of, so it is possible that the coeliac issues will reappear later. I have spoken to a gastro-enterologist about gluten challenges (because of the long shall we/shan’t we debate we’ve been having in this house) who said that he had had one patient in whom the damage from gluten only started to be apparent 11 years after reintroducing gluten into his diet. Plus, of course, this girl is a teenager, and it seems that some teenagers can experience a remission.

Even so, this is very interesting, and definitely deserves to be investigated further – especially now that scientists can produce stem cells from your skin, which is much easier to deal with ethically than when human embryos were involved.

But the questions that Michael raises are good ones:

• Would you want this treatment? I might be tempted to arrange it for my daughter: diagnosed at only 1, […]
  

The True Lovers Knot is a small inn in Dorset, with just 4 rooms available – but is a finalist in the national Business Innovation of the Year Award alongside such blue-chip companies such as BT and Norwich Union, having won the regional award for Wales and the SouthWest.

This is because of its attempt to cater for all, including:

• Providing deaf awareness training and sign language lessons for staff
• Installing a hearing loop to assist customers with hearing aids
• Providing menus in audio, large print and Braille.
• Investing in vibrating alarm clocks for the pub’s letting rooms.
• Providing gluten-free and sugar-free dishes to cater for customers with coeliac disease and diabetes.

Congratulations to the True Lovers Knot! Don’t you just love to hear about tiny companies competing against the big guys? In my other life I review the websites of big companies, and I can tell you that hardly any of the FTSE 100 provide their materials such as the annual report in audio, large print and Braille. No idea how many of the big companies provide gluten free meals in their canteens, but that would be an interesting survey!