“What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others.” — Lucretius

By Nadine Grzeskowiak
For Mid-valley newspapers

What is gluten intolerance?

What is celiac disease?

What are these weird- sounding medical conditions, and why should you care?

You may want to educate yourself because these disorders are two of the most undiagnosed and misdiagnosed conditions in America today.

And yet, if you ask your doctor for information you may find that the doctor thinks celiac disease is a rare childhood condition that goes away as children get older. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Gluten intolerance is the body’s inability to process the protein found in wheat, barley, rye and sometimes oats.

One in 10 people is gluten intolerant. Symptoms can include abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea/

constipation, gas, eczema/

psoriasis, irritability, depression, headaches, weight gain or loss and chronic anemia.

Celiac disease is a genetic auto-immune response to the proteins in wheat, barley, rye and sometimes oats. People who develop celiac disease typically are gluten intolerant their whole life and may not realize it because their family members may have the same symptoms and thus everyone just accepts them as a family trait.

At some point in life, and it can be at any age, people who carry the gene for celiac disease experience a trigger event, causing the auto-immune response to begin destroying the intestinal villi. This can be any event that causes stress to the body: pregnancy/childbirth, infection, a heart attack, surgery or injury.

The destruction of the intestinal villi causes problems in every organ in the body, which can be confusing as you try to figure out why you feel sick. The destruction of the villi leads to malabsorption of all nutrients, which causes malnutrition.

One in 133 people in the United States has celiac disease. That is roughly 3 million people. Only 3 percent of those people are diagnosed correctly. That leaves a stunning 97 percent undiagnosed and/or misdiagnosed.

This disease is very well recognized in the rest of the world. It takes approximately two to three weeks to get diagnosed with celiac disease in Italy; in the United States, on average, nine to 12 years.

As they wait, patients suffer needlessly and endure medical treatments and drugs that don’t help and sometimes make symptoms worse. The treatment for celiac disease is a life-long adherence to a gluten-free diet. That’s right, a diet change.

What are some of the symptoms of celiac disease? Some of the many symptoms people experience are headaches, diarrhea/

constipation, abdominal pain and bloating, fatigue, painful joints, itchy skin, infertility, depression, numbness and tingling in fingers and toes, and bruising.

The tricky aspect of celiac disease is that some people don’t have any symptoms. From this list, you can imagine how people get misdiagnosed with migraine headaches, IBS, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, allergies, thyroid disease, gastric reflux and the list goes on.

My goal is to get everyone educated, correctly diagnosed and treated appropriately.

Nadine Grzeskowiak is a registered nurse, certified emergency nurse and gluten intolerance and celiac disease educator. She operates RN On Call, Inc., in Corvallis and can be reached at 602-1065.