gluten-free musings

This year was probably most dietarily significant for my discovery of a gluten intolerance. The short story is that I had always known I felt queasy after large pasta meals and just assumed it was because carbs weren't good for anyone. After a five weeks carb-free, however, I was feeling great and thought it was due to the exercise and general better nutrition. As exams rolled around, I started eating carbs again. It wasn't until a few days after I started that I got hours-long attacks of fatigue and nausea. My friends were visiting me for my birthday, and I just couldn't keep me head up at the restaurant. This went on into my first week of my new rotation, and I would barely be able to keep myself awake especially after lunch. Finally, one day I ate some veggie sausages and a few minutes later felt extremely dizzy and nauseous. I looked at the ingredients, and found that the first was wheat gluten. Since then, I've cut out gluten from my diet and been feeling much better. It wasn't that hard to do, as I found that I had naturally been avoiding it pretty well on my own.


Though I am morally opposed to dietary restrictions, I was extremely relieved to find an answer to the periodic, nonsensical attacks of nausea I'd been experiencing for a few years. I tried eating more vegetables, acupuncture, exercise, and chinese medicine all to little avail. This morning I thought about how I came to realize this, and thought that perhaps the reason why gluten issues have been rising across the country is that we engage in this frenzied love affair and then desolate rejection with no other food than carbs. We turn to it in mass quantities whether having pasta for dinner or when feeling sad, and then swear we'll never touch another carb again for days. We are perhaps inducing an intolerance to this simply by shocking our systems just when we've eliminated it from our diets.


In any event, I tried what I thought was orzo yesterday and felt surprisingly little. Later in the evening I had some dizziness but it was extremely mild compared to what it had felt like before. Either I had rice instead, had a sensitivity to something other than gluten, or had eliminated gluten really well from my diet just like the first time I discovered this and after a few days the symptoms would return. In any event, diagnosable intolerance or not, my stomach has been so much happier with gluten free products and I've experienced so much less dizziness and nausea overall that I think I'll stick with this for awhile.

- Jane