You know the old saying, you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die? (In case you were wondering, a peck is two gallons). And most of us have heard (and then tried to forget) how a certain, albeit small, bit of dead flies and rat droppings makes its way into any food produced en masse in a factory. We swallow a lot of things we don't mean to eat--cat hair, soap, anything we forgot to wash off our hands, the particles of viruses in someone's sneeze we didn't manage to avoid breathing in. Luckily, our immune systems can deal with it most of the time. Unless you happen to have Celiac disease, and you have without even meaning to gotten a bit of gluten inside you somehow. Unlike the cat hair and dead flies, you are not going to be oblivious--you are going to realize what happened all too clearly.
For people with Celiac disease, the predicament is that the immune system is reacting to gluten as if it were a germ, and making antibodies to attack and destroy it. That's kind of weird and pointless, like whacking a bush with a sword, but in itself is not the problem. The problem arises because celiacs also happen to have a biochemical signature which makes the anti-gluten antibodies attack their own bodies, usually the cells lining the small intestine. This causes the gut cells to become inflamed and die, and the finger-like projections called microvilli that absorb nutrients from the food we eat to flatten out and become ineffective. This damage begins within minutes of eating gluten for some people and has been observed by an endoscope, a small camera that can watch the inside of your gut. The digestive discomfort, malabsorption of nutrients such as calcium and iron, and lesions that can eventually lead to cancer are due to this attacking of gut cells by the body's own immune system.
Note how remarkable it is that we understand so much about what causes Celiac (even though there is a lot we still don't know, such as what triggers the making of antibodies to something passing through the gut, whereas the immune cells are usually confined to the bloodstream--i.e., in the donut proper, see the previous post). There are a number of autoimmune disorders, including diabetes, lupus, rheumatism, among others, but this is the only one for which we know the trigger. And therefore we have a complete cure, even if a bit onerous in terms of being a strict diet.
So, the immune system is marvelously sensitive, meaning it can detect and destroy invaders--that is, non-self cells in the body--before they multiply enough to be a problem. When you notice you are sick, your immune system has partly failed, but it generally rallies and wins eventually, nowadays with the help of antibiotics as needed. But this backfires when it comes to a Celiac eating gluten, as here the body is overreacting to something that it should ignore. And even a trace amount, a crumb too small to notice, that may fall off someone's hand as they reach across your plate at the dinner table, is enough to make you sick for days, even a few weeks.
Imagine how paranoid that could make you.
Is it even fair to call it paranoid, when the danger is quite real? But as you can imagine, learning how to be careful enough yet not drive yourself crazy with worry is not a simple process. And communicating it to others is quite a challenge too.
To be continued....
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