It can be said with a certain degree of confidence that those people who order gluten-free pizzas don’t even know what gluten is, what it does, or why they’re actually rejecting it. It’s a fad now, and the health-conscious are paying good money for bland bread, made out of cornflour. But why?

To set the record straight, gluten is a protein composite found in foods processed from wheat. It gives the dough elasticity, helping it rise and keep its shape, while also giving the baked bread a chewy texture. Basically, gluten makes bread, bread.

But now, with endorsements from celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow (whose kids have never had gluten) and Novak Djokovic (who has been known to attribute his success to gluten-free products), the world’s bread markets are demanding gluten-free alternatives. In the past, gluten-free products were very niche, residing only in the dusty shelves of incense-infused health shops. Now they’re everywhere.

Which is good news for for sufferers of coeliac disease, who have an auto-immune response to wheat, where the body believes wrongly that gluten is attacking it. But coeliacs make up only one in 100 of the population, while one in five of us are buying gluten-free products.

Surveys of US consumers show that only five per cent of people buying gluten-free bread are doing it to combat coeliac disease. The vast majority are only really concerned with ‘digestive health’ or ‘nutritional value’ or, and this is the worst, ‘losing weight.’

Guys, we humans have been eating bread for longer than we’ve kept time – with no catastrophically widespread adverse effects. Why demonise the holy loaf?

Nutritionist Ian Marber says that yeast, not gluten, may be the real culprit:

Some people find that when they switch to a yeast-free bread, made from wheat or other grains, their bloating decreases, suggesting that the yeast and sugars used were the issue, not the grain. But, in practice, they stop eating bread, bloating stops, so the conclusion that wheat must be to blame is understandable, but misguided.

Gluten, he claims, is an easy target “because it’s so prevalent.” Many foods that contain gluten, like pizza, cakes and biscuits, are high in calories, so by avoiding them, many lose weight, obviously.

We’re always looking for something to blame for everything that’s wrong in our lives and having a food intolerance is the holy grail.

And you know what? We have research to back it up. The Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics published an article which concluded that: “There is no evidence to suggest following a gluten-free diet has any significant benefits in the general population.”

Boom.

[Source : Telegraph]