While some people really liked my last blog post, one commenter asked me to writer a shorter post next time. So here's a shorter post.
A commenter on Paul Jaminet's blog recently suggested that the reason I developed some arthritic symptoms including a limp during a brief stint eating two to three sweet potatoes per day was not because they are extremely high in oxalates, which was my guess, but because wheat is giving me leaky gut, allowing the lectins in sweet potatoes (and all other plant foods, he suggests) to cause an autoimmune reaction.
I actually don't consume a whole lot of wheat and most of my gluten comes from rye that has been soured for 24 hours, which is likely to be pretty low in gluten.
However, I believe I had been gluten-free for over a year before the sweet potato incident. In looking back at past emails and posts on various lists, I find that I went gluten-free and casein-free back in July of 2005 and that the sweet potato incident happened mid-October, 2006. Although I do not have any record of the exact date I reintroduced the 24-hour soured rye bread, the earliest record I can find is a post I wrote on November 23, 2006 saying I reintroduced it “recently.”
Although my memory of what I ate four to five years ago is not perfect, I believe the reason I was eating so many sweet potatoes to begin with was because I was trying to do the FAILSAFE diet while also remaining gluten-free and casein-free, and I was finding it difficult to obtain sufficient calories without using lots of vegetables or starches as a vehicle for fat. So I feel pretty confident I was gluten-free at the time.
In any case, given the two recent studies showing that gluten and wheat do not cause leaky gut in people without celiac, I'm not sure why anyone would propose that I would have a leaky gut from eating wheat, even if I were actually eating a substantial amount of wheat.
As I pointed out in my last gluten post, a recent paper by gluten researcher Dr. Allesio Fasano and colleagues found that intestinal permeability was even lower in people they judged as having non-celiac gluten sensitivity who had been eating gluten under supervision for four months when they compared them to control subjects, whereas those with active celiac disease had greater intestinal permeability.
Likewise, the recent double-blind, placebo-controlled gluten trial found that six weeks of gluten consumption did not cause any change in intestinal permeability in subjects the authors judged as having non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
I realize these studies are new and these findings may not be well known, but it seems that it is time to stop assuming that gluten causes intestinal permeability in anyone except people with celiac, unless some contrary information emerges. It is, of course, possible that some subset of people without celiac exists in whom this occurs, but one would think that if it occurs in anyone without celiac, it would be in people considered to be gluten-sensitive.
If anyone knows of clear evidence that gluten alters intestinal permeability in humans without celiac, please post a link to the study in the comments.