Is Gluten Bad for You? Why Everyone Is Still Afraid of Gluten
Nearly a third of Americans say they're trying to avoid gluten. About 1% have celiac disease. That gap is worth about $8 billion a year, and it didn't happen by accident. So is gluten bad for you? If you have celiac, yes, seriously. For almost everyone else, the research says: not so much.
Is gluten bad for you if you don't have celiac disease?
We trace the gluten-free diet from its unlikely origin in the Dutch famine of World War II to the bestseller shelf. Where Wheat Belly and Grain Brain blamed wheat for everything from belly fat to Alzheimer's. We ask whether modern wheat has actually changed (not in the ways that matter) and what non-celiac gluten sensitivity looks like in blinded trials. We also get into why the real culprit is often FODMAPs rather than gluten. Then there's the nocebo effect: tell people they're eating gluten and plenty of them feel sick, whether they are or not.
Is a gluten-free diet healthier?
A gluten-free label doesn't make food healthier. It makes food look healthier. We cover the health halo research, including a cracker marketed as free of an ingredient that doesn't exist, and what that halo costs the people who actually need the label. We also look at whether gluten-digesting enzyme pills work, and at what happened when cyclists were blinded to whether their diet contained gluten. Their performance didn't change.
Why does bread feel different in Europe?
It's the question everyone asks. Commercial wheat isn't genetically modified in the US or Europe, and gluten is the same protein in Rome and Denver. What's different is the bread, since slow fermentation breaks down fructans. Your life is different too: you're walking everywhere, sleeping in, three spritzes deep. If you have celiac, a croissant in Paris will hurt you exactly as much as one at home.
The bottom line: is gluten bad for you?
Only for people whose bodies react to it in ways a doctor can measure. Celiac disease is real, serious, and mostly undiagnosed. If you think gluten bothers you, get tested before you cut it out, because the tests stop working once you've gone gluten-free. For everyone else, bread is fine. Humans were grinding wild grains long before the paleo crowd showed up, which we covered in our Paleo episode. Find it and the rest of the archive at yourdietsuckspodcast.com/your-diet-sucks-podcast.
We went claim by claim through every gluten TikTok in this episode, and traced where "bread is as addictive as crack" came from, in a members-only post. Come join us on Patreon for that, bonus episodes, and Kylee's weekly nutrition question thread.
Cold open: four to six glutens
Kylee: Welcome to Your Diet Sucks, the podcast where gluten-free doesn't automatically mean guilt-free. I'm Kylee Van Horn.
Zoë: And I'm Zoë Rom. And don't you dare make me feel guilty about loving bread. If that's where this is headed, I'm out. I'm going to tap out now. My gluten consumption today has been pretty high. I've definitely had between four and six glutens. Many servings of gluten.
Kylee: And it's one o'clock and I'm already full of gluten. Have you ever been tempted to try gluten-free?
The Italian eye-reader who prescribed gluten-free for shin splints
Zoë: I have not been tempted, but I think I've told the story on this podcast before. When I studied abroad in Italy, my host family took me to a witch doctor because I was having shin splints. This witch doctor ran no diagnostic tests beyond looking at my eyes and reading my eyes. I remember seeing the printed-off certificate in their office, and my Italian wasn't amazing at the time, but I was like, that looks fake as hell, dude.
Kylee: Wow. So it's not just the US.
Zoë: There's grifters everywhere. So this Italian witch doctor told my host family to make me go gluten-free, and they were like, okay, we'll do it.
Kylee: For your shins.
Zoë: For my shins. That's not what was happening at all. There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life at the time. I was 17. It definitely wasn't all of my other weird little food issues. It definitely wasn't my desire to control things through food, because I was a study abroad student living in a foreign country where I barely spoke the language. So my host family went gluten-free for literally a weekend, and then they were like, fuck this, we hate it, which is the correct take if you are Italian. That was not a real reason. That was a fake-ass doctor making me go gluten-free. It's like going to college and being like, can't wait to be celibate.
Grieving a celiac diagnosis
Kylee: It's heartbreaking when people say they have to go gluten-free, and I'm like, do you really need to? But if you actually have celiac disease, there have been grieving periods with athletes because they're very sad about it. It's super hard. I have a lot of people who say they're going gluten-free just to see if it helps, or their doctor recommends gluten-free for a random condition, like thyroid. I have a lot of clients with Hashimoto's, and there isn't science that supports that. The doctor says go gluten-free, and I'm like, oh, I don't know about that.
Zoë: So the longest I've been gluten-free was a full weekend. Have you ever dabbled with this? Is this something you've experimented with?
Kylee: No. I haven't really had anything where I'm like, I should probably remove gluten. I've had occasional stomach issues, but I've connected it to beer. It's not the gluten. It's probably the yeast or a fermentation thing. But it's so sad.
Why gluten-free never went away
Zoë: I hear about it from athletes a lot. Gluten catches a ton of diet culture strays. I'll almost hear "I'm going to cut out gluten" more than "I'm going to cut out carbs" from people in the world of sport.
Kylee: It's one of those diet things that has persisted. It's not like keto, where it's popular for a year and then something else takes over. Gluten-free has stuck around.
Zoë: It's sort of like Fergie, in that it got absolutely huge in 2008. It hasn't been quite as strong since, but it also hasn't disappeared by any means.
A third of Americans avoid gluten. About 1% have celiac.
Kylee: Interestingly enough, nearly a third of Americans say they're actively trying to avoid gluten.
Zoë: What?
Kylee: But only about 1% of Americans actually have celiac disease. That's a big gap. So in this episode, that's what we want to explore: who this diet is actually designed for, what the actual science is, and what got left behind.
What is gluten?
Zoë: Before we get into the wellness industrial complex of it all, could you break down what gluten is? I'm not sure I could define gluten or celiac disease, because people use gluten-free, celiac, and gluten sensitivity interchangeably, and these are not the same thing. They have pretty specific definitions.
Kylee: Gluten. The name itself.
Zoë: It's a weird name. Gluten comes from the Latin word for glue, which is really interesting, because one of the best pro-gluten arguments is, if you've ever tried to bake gluten-free, you know. The way gluten is shaped, it forms stronger hydrogen bonds, which is why gluten-free baked goods are crumblier and kind of sandy. They don't hold. They don't crumb the same way.
Gliadin, glutenin, and why no one fully digests gluten
Kylee: I need my texture. So it literally comes from the Latin word for glue. Gluten is the name for a group of proteins found in wheat, barley, and rye. As you explained, it's what gives bread its stretch and chew. The gluten proteins form a network, like a web that traps air bubbles from yeast and lets the dough rise instead of collapsing.
Zoë: Bread science.
Kylee: Bread science. There are two main proteins that make up gluten: gliadin and glutenin. Glutenin gives dough structure and strength, and gliadin gives it stretchiness. Physiologically, gluten is a protein your body breaks down like any other protein, using enzymes to cleave it into smaller peptides for absorption. But there's some nuance here. No human, celiac or not, can actually fully digest gluten.
Zoë: Wait, what?
Kylee: Gliadin is unusually rich in the amino acids proline and glutamine, and human digestive enzymes (pepsin, trypsin, and chymotrypsin) aren't good at cutting bonds next to proline. So everyone, regardless of gut health, ends up with certain gliadin fragments that survive digestion intact.
Zoë: Is that bad?
Kylee: Nope. It's normal and not a problem. In people without celiac disease, these undigested fragments pass through and get handled without incident. They don't trigger an immune response.
Zoë: So what is celiac disease, then?
Kylee: Celiac is an autoimmune disease. It's not an allergy, and it's not a "sensitivity." In genetically predisposed people, gluten triggers the immune system to attack the lining of the small intestine itself. Imagine your intestinal lining with little finger-like projections coming out of it, the villi. Your immune system attacks them, and they get flattened. That reduces the surface area for absorption, which can really affect how many micronutrients and how much nutrition you can absorb.
What celiac disease does to the gut
Zoë: So instead of a fuzzy gut with those little fingers waving in the air, it's flat. You do not want a smooth gut. You want a fuzzy gut.
How common is celiac, and why most cases go undiagnosed
Kylee: The global prevalence of celiac is around 1.4%, though estimates vary by region and screening method. Most studies put it somewhere between 0.7% and 2.9% of the general population.
Zoë: And because it's genetic, some places will have a higher prevalence than others because of the gene pool.
Kylee: Exactly. The other component is that most people with celiac don't know they have it. Only about 30% of cases are correctly diagnosed. The other 70% are walking around with an autoimmune disease that's damaging their gut, and they don't even know it.
Zoë: You've worked with a lot of athletes who were diagnosed with celiac, some later in life. Why is this something that feels like an intense diagnosis but is also apparently something you can live with for quite a while?
Kylee: You could, but some of these symptoms, man.
Zoë: Do some people just walk around with a really fucked-up gut? I guess the answer is absolutely. I was looking into a study where they put little balloons in participants' guts and inflated them, and there was a huge individual response in how sensitive people were. I'm an ultrarunner, so I'm used to my stomach feeling fucking weird. Puke and rally is part of my life, so maybe I'm not the best example. But some people had the balloon inflated a very small amount and reported significant pain. Others had it inflated a good bit and were like, I didn't love it, but it's fine. So there's a lot of variation in how severe symptoms seem to people. When people are navigating this diagnosis with you, what patterns do you see?
Celiac in athletes: iron, bone density, and rashes
Kylee: Iron is a big one, especially with athletes. There can be a persistent iron deficiency anemia. People supplement and can't get their levels up, and they feel like they're hitting a brick wall. It's not just your training. It could be celiac. There can be bone density issues as well. If your gut lining is damaged, the nutrition you're eating isn't fully getting absorbed, and that can affect bone density. So people getting stress fractures, or low bone density showing up on a DEXA. Rashes are another one. When people have persistent rashes, I'll ask whether they have any gut issues, because there can be a gut-skin connection. Some of these things might not get brushed off exactly, but the connection isn't made in the doctor's office, or the person isn't making it, and that's where we can miss celiac. So where does the gluten-free diet as a therapeutic diet come from?
The Dutch famine and the birth of the gluten-free diet
Zoë: This one goes back a ways, and it starts with a weird wartime accident. Dutch pediatrician Willem Karel Dicke noticed that during the Dutch famine of 1945, children with celiac got dramatically better when wheat was scarce, then relapsed when bread became available again after liberation. That observation led to gluten being formally identified as the trigger in the early 1950s. So the gluten-free diet was essentially born out of an accidental, war-induced famine. For decades after that, gluten-free eating stayed basically where, in my assessment, it belongs: as a medical treatment for a small, defined population with a diagnosed autoimmune disease. Its pivot to mainstream wellness is much more recent, and it has some very notable names attached.
Gluten-free water and the gluten-free dentist
Kylee: So we went from a medically necessary diet to "gluten-free" stamped on a water bottle. I've actually seen this, on a water bottle or some random food, and I'm like, what?
Zoë: My girlfriend went to a gluten-free dentist. She was certified as a gluten-free dentist. I think there was some explanation about why it might actually matter, but it said "gluten-free" really big on the door of the dentist's office.
Kylee: A lot of these diets we talk about go from a medical necessity to some bigger wellness thing. And a lot of them, I'm like, oh yeah, the 2000s. That's when it popped off.
Wheat Belly, Grain Brain, and an $8 billion market
Zoë: In the 2000s, we were really wilding. And to that point, there were two popular books that really drove this. The first is Wheat Belly by William Davis, which came out in 2011. The second is Grain Brain by David Perlmutter, which came out in 2013. Both are so cringe. They were authored by a cardiologist and a neurologist, respectively. Both were bestsellers, and both made claims about wheat and gluten causing everything from obesity to Alzheimer's, well beyond the celiac and gluten sensitivity research that actually exists. Every single wellness fad has to be some lonely guy's universal theory of everything. I feel like poverty causes some stuff. I don't think it's all bread. And the market size reflects this bloat. The US gluten-free market alone is now worth around $2.27 billion, and the global market was valued at roughly $8.5 billion in 2025, projected to nearly double within the next several years.
The gluten-free aisle and the wellness business model
Kylee: I'll have people who actually have celiac and are grieving, and I'll tell them that grocery stores these days have an entire section of gluten-free products. It keeps getting bigger. It shifts down the aisle. I'm not saying the products are as good as the ones with gluten, but it keeps growing.
Zoë: It always has the energy of the back of Party City, where they keep the stuff from all the old holidays: the sad, wet St. Patrick's decorations, a headless Easter bunny, all 50% off. That's the energy I get from the gluten-free section. The packaging always looks sadder and feels a little medical for no reason. I'm sorry to all the celiac people out there. This is not at your expense. But the interesting thing is the math on who's buying it. One percent of the population has this disease, and maybe another 10 to 12% report some amount of gluten sensitivity. But a solid third of Americans have said in a survey that they're avoiding gluten. I'm not a math wizard, but I do know that 30 is bigger than one. That's basically the entire wellness industry's business model. So I want to know how that gap blew up. One claim we hear constantly is that it's not the gluten, it's that modern wheat has been hybridized into something our bodies can't handle. Modern bread is a toxin.
Has modern wheat changed?
Kylee: That's usually how it goes. Modern bread is a toxin. Modern bread is literally Satan. So, quick fact check: yay or nay on daily bread? If you look at Wheat Belly's claims, be careful going down that rabbit hole.
Zoë: Gross rabbit hole. That book is not extremely well written, I've got to say. I dipped in, dipped out.
Kylee: But we can't totally throw away all the claims there. The research is a little more contested than you might think. You read one sentence of Wheat Belly and decided you didn't want to waste your life.
Zoë: I actually did read it, which is even funnier, because I was reading it on my Kindle at the deli while eating a bagel. It's like jerking off while reading the Bible.
Kylee: On one side, you've got a University of Saskatchewan study comparing historical and modern Canadian wheat varieties, which found no meaningful change, and historically, the gluten protein content actually decreased through domestication.
Zoë: Less gluten?
Kylee: Wild wheat had up to double the gluten of modern wheat. Wild wheat. The complicated finding was a separate study of more than 80 wheat varieties that found modern varieties carry higher concentrations of a specific celiac-relevant epitope, Glia-α9, compared to older varieties. That leaves open a narrower, more specific hypothesis than "modern wheat has more gluten." Early wild wheats had much higher total protein and gluten levels, often 16% to 28%, compared to 11 to 12% in modern bread wheat. But total gluten quantity doesn't necessarily correlate with celiac toxicity. Celiac disease is an autoimmune response triggered by certain epitopes, specific short chains of amino acids within the gluten protein that the immune system recognizes as a threat.
Zoë: So it's less about a dose response than whether a specific type of gluten is present. Even if there's less total gluten, there may be more of the type that certain people's bodies are like, fuck this.
Kylee: Exactly. Where there's more consensus: modern industrial baking favors white, high-protein flour with less bran and fewer of the enzymes that help break gluten down, and most bread, even artisan bread, is made with fast commercial yeast rather than a long fermentation. So when someone says wheat is more processed and more refined than it used to be, that's a defensible claim. When they say wheat has been engineered into a genetically different, more toxic plant, that's the part that outruns the evidence.
Is non-celiac gluten sensitivity real?
Zoë: So wheat has changed, but not in ways we have evidence are significantly worse for the human body. What is different, and potentially worse, is what happens when you scale it up to the industrial level and put it into a bunch of Little Debbies. So what about the people in the middle who aren't celiac but really feel like gluten makes them feel like hot garbage? Is non-celiac gluten sensitivity real? And do I owe my college boyfriend so many apologies?
Kylee: The science gets interesting here. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a real, recognized clinical category for people who test negative for celiac and wheat allergy but reliably get symptoms from gluten-containing foods. It's a thing. So you don't have to go back and apologize. An estimated 10 to 12% of the population reports experiencing it. However.
Zoë: Here comes the petty stuff. I can sense it.
Kylee: In a 2013 study, researcher Peter Gibson retested people who'd self-diagnosed with gluten sensitivity. This time, he controlled for FODMAPs.
Zoë: I think we have an entire episode planned on those in, like, 2027.
FODMAPs, not gluten
Kylee: We plan far out. FODMAPs are fermentable carbs found in wheat alongside gluten. Gluten isn't a FODMAP. It's a protein. These are fermentable carbohydrates.
Zoë: But they often ride together, so people may be unnecessarily blaming gluten when it's a FODMAP thing.
Kylee: When gluten was isolated from these other compounds under blinded conditions, most people's symptoms didn't line up with gluten at all. So gluten sensitivity cases could be caused by the FODMAPs, not necessarily the gluten itself.
Zoë: FODMAPs don't have nearly the same cultural salience. You don't walk into a restaurant in LA and find a low-FODMAP menu, but you can get a ton of gluten-free stuff, which is great for the part of the population that genuinely needs it. But gluten keeps catching strays and absorbing some of the blame, partly because it lives in the shadow of a very real condition. FODMAPs are this huge category, and the name is way less sexy: fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides... No matter how many times I look it up, I can never remember it, and I talk about it all the time. So people in their heads are like, it must be gluten.
The nocebo effect: when expecting a food to hurt you makes it hurt
Kylee: And the hard part is that wheat is a major FODMAP source. If people cut out wheat, it often does reduce symptoms, but they think it's the gluten, and it's not. There's also a documented nocebo effect here: expecting a food to hurt you can make it hurt more, measurably, in blinded trials. So feeling better gluten-free doesn't prove gluten was the problem.
Zoë: Back up. I want to hear about the nocebo study.
Kylee: You know about placebos. You expect something to help you, and it does, even if it's a sugar pill. A nocebo is the reverse. You expect a food to hurt you, and it does, measurably, even when there's nothing to react to. Same brain machinery, opposite direction. There's a key 2017 meta-analysis that pooled 10 double-blind, placebo-controlled gluten challenges with about 1,300 adults, all people who truly believed they had non-celiac gluten sensitivity. When they were tested blind, only about 16% had symptoms that tracked with gluten specifically. So five out of six people who were sure gluten was the problem didn't react to gluten when they didn't know they were eating it.
Zoë: Petty science.
Kylee: And the wild part, the nocebo part: about 40% got the same or worse symptoms from the placebo. Their bodies produced real bloating and discomfort from food that had nothing in it.
Zoë: So they're physically, really experiencing those symptoms.
Kylee: They're not making it up. But "I felt better when I cut it out" and "gluten was the cause" are two different things. And it shows how powerful that psychology is.
Zoë: And how hard it is to control variables in a human life. Any time you make a dietary change, even a small one, there are ripple effects. Maybe cutting gluten means you're eating less processed food. In some cases it might mean you're eating more. All of these ancillary effects make it hard to get a clear read, because you are not Kevin Hall.
Kylee: And then people say, well, I feel better taking gluten out. We're not saying you can't remove it. I do not care what you do with your life. If it works for you, fine. Just don't go to Aunt Karen and tell her gluten is toxic and she should take it out of her diet, and spread the message.
Do gluten-digesting enzyme pills work?
Zoë: What if someone decides to eat gluten anyway, even though it doesn't feel great for them? I've seen pills floating around the internet that claim to have an enzyme that lets you digest gluten. Is this real?
Kylee: There's always a supplement developed to help this thing. Essentially, these pills mostly don't work. With one exception, maybe, with a giant asterisk. A 2021 lab study tested nine commercial gluten-digesting enzyme supplements and found that most left the immunogenic gluten fragments largely intact. If you're taking an enzyme supplement, you'd think it would break those down. That means they're not breaking down the specific proteins that trigger an immune response in celiac. The one product with real randomized, placebo-controlled human data behind it is a caricain-based supplement, a papaya-derived enzyme. Shout-out papayas. Some small trials have shown it helps protect against accidental low-level gluten exposure in people already on a gluten-free diet. But when you look at who funded those studies, it's the company that makes it, and that's not the most trustworthy result. So I'm going to pass on the gluten enzyme supplements.
Why so many athletes go gluten-free
Zoë: For athletes, what if someone wants to remove gluten for reasons beyond a medical diagnosis? To be clear, we're not talking about celiac. If you have celiac, you should obviously remove gluten. Why does it seem like so many athletes are on this train? I see it again and again as a coach. This one hasn't died out.
Kylee: A lot of it comes from an inflammation angle. Athletes go on it because they think they can tamp down inflammation, or that gut issues that could be caused by under-fueling are caused by gluten. There are a lot of reasons an athlete might try it. But there's a lot of danger in that. When you look at the prevalence of eating disorders and under-fueling in the athletic population, going gluten-free gets you into a more restrictive mindset, and that can be tough for a population that's already at risk.
Zoë: Especially in a way that falls into the same traps of moralizing food, but with the veneer of science. This thing is the devil and it's toxic because of whatever bullshit story you've picked up about wheat genotypes from reading Wheat Belly, Wheat Brain, Brain Brain.
Kylee: Grain Brain, whatever it's called.
Zoë: Donut Brain. Whatever your choice is. It demonizes a whole giant swath of foods. And this one creates a perfect storm. It falls into the quasi-religious pure-versus-impure thing, but people also associate gluten with bread, pasta, and simple carbohydrates, foods that are not ideal for an athlete to cut out but are always catching cultural strays anyway. They do have a place in the diet. So you get a bullshit paleo anti-modernity thing mixed up with a low-carb, carbs-are-bad thing, and it becomes a permission structure to eliminate carbohydrates while still letting yourself have muffins, but only if the muffins suck.
The blinded cyclist study
Kylee: Exactly. The research here is relatively limited, but there was a controlled study on non-celiac athletes by Lis and colleagues. Competitive cyclists did trials on both gluten-containing and gluten-free diets, blinded, and there were no differences in performance, GI symptoms, or inflammatory markers between the conditions when the athletes didn't know which diet they were on. Then people say, but I felt better on it. We're not saying that isn't real. Maybe it's because they're cutting out a lot of FODMAPs or changing how they eat. Maybe they're eating fewer ultra-processed foods and eating more intentionally overall. The issue could be real, but we can't say it's the gluten.
Zoë: I'm thinking out loud here. Cutting things out unnecessarily isn't great. Ideally, you cut out the thing that actually doesn't make you feel good, when you have a real reason to, no more, no less. Gluten is such a broad category. For some people, it's absolutely the right category to cut out. But for a ton of people it isn't, and there are downsides, because you're potentially removing a bunch of really good, affordable carbohydrates, both simple and complex, that are good for energy.
Fortification, micronutrients, and gluten-free bread
Kylee: Some people realize how restrictive it is. They grieve when they get diagnosed with celiac because they don't want to give these things up. Other people try going gluten-free, then realize they can't eat anything. Some people see that as a red flag, and others are like, I guess this is just the way it is, and they don't recognize that it may be contributing to disordered behaviors around food. And when you compare gluten-free products to gluten-containing ones, they can have different micronutrient content, because a lot of gluten-free products aren't fortified with iron, B vitamins, and folate. Some people say they don't want to eat fortified products. I'm going to go ahead and eat fortified products. I want my micros. Either that or you take a supplement, which is basically the same thing.
Zoë: We've been fortifying stuff forever. Get over it. We've been doing this since World War II. I'm not impressed with you if you only eat the purest breads. Have fun being the worst person at every party you go to.
Kylee: I know we keep talking about bread, but every time I work with an athlete with celiac, they say there's no comparable gluten-free bread out there. I've had people go through every single one and land on one brand, and it's just not good.
Zoë: It tastes like the idea of bread. The memory of bread.
Kylee: And a lot of these products are so much more expensive, too.
Zoë: Way more expensive. Occasionally I'll have a vegan baked good, or my keto granola, which is seeds. Seeds are going to be seeds no matter what words you put on the bag. It's birdseed. I know what I'm doing. But there's never been a time I've had gluten-free zucchini bread and been like, oh my God, you totally can't tell. It's like a Johnny Depp impersonator in a big city. Yeah, you smell like beer, but you're not Jack Sparrow. And any time you see that gluten-free label, it gives food a health halo.
The gluten-free health halo
Kylee: It's like protein chips.
Zoë: Protein popcorn, protein water. People see it on a label and get hypnotized into thinking the food is healthier.
Kylee: I see that all the time. People say, oh, it said gluten-free, or it said certified whatever, GMO-free or whatever.
Zoë: You could literally write "certified whatever" and Whole Foods would charge $11.99 for it. This is one of my favorite things to look into. The health halo is a super well-documented bias where one positive attribute on a package, like gluten-free, bleeds into a bunch of other unrelated stuff. You see one good word, like non-GMO, fair trade certified, or gluten-free, and your brain instantly upgrades the entire product. Your brain will think it's healthier, has fewer calories, and is less processed. None of which the label promises.
Kylee: To be transparent, I could see my brain making that connection too.
Zoë: I'm very disappointed, but I'm very sure we both have human brains. Which is why we're the best people to report on this. We're not like, all you dumbasses buying food with labels. I ate Simply Cheetos today, homie. These are healthier, definitely. There was a study from Prada and colleagues, which is amazing (I guess Gucci was researching something else), that found identical products labeled gluten-free were rated as healthier, lower in calories, and less processed than the exact same product without the label.
Kylee: Not surprising, but yeah.
Zoë: It's going to be just as processed, if not more. And the halo doesn't just change what you buy. It can change how much you eat. Studies have found that if your brain files a food under "healthy," you feel licensed to have more of it. So a gluten-free cookie that may have more sugar and fat and less fiber than the regular one (and I don't go to cookies for fiber, I go for the sugar and fat) can end up being something you eat more of because the label told you it's the better choice.
Kylee: Or it might not be better, because it probably tastes like cardboard.
Why the halo hurts people with celiac
Zoë: The absurd logical conclusion of this is labels on things that never had gluten in the first place. Like you mentioned, gluten-free water, gluten-free potato chips. It's not lying. And I understand there's utility, especially for people with celiac, because cross-contamination is a thing. But let's be real. Companies aren't thinking, let's watch out for the 1% of the population we really care about. They care about the 29% who now think these potato chips are healthy.
Kylee: We care about that money.
Zoë: It's like fat-free celery. True, but it's just marketing, borrowing the credibility of a medical term that we all get hypnotized into thinking means something it doesn't. For someone with celiac, that label isn't a cute lifestyle choice. It's the thing standing between them and a gastrointestinal fiasco. So when it becomes a health halo for everyone else, cross-contamination gets taken less seriously. I've seen this at restaurants, where someone says they're gluten-free and the server doesn't take it seriously.
Kylee: And you're like, no, really, do not serve my friend gluten. They say they'll check in the kitchen, and you see them go away for two seconds and do nothing. You know they're just about to text their boyfriend.
Zoë: They're not checking anything. Restaurant staff end up treating it like a preference instead of a very real medical need. So the people who actually depend on the label end up paying when the term gets diluted.
The "MUI-free" cracker study
Zoë: My favorite and pettiest version of this research: researchers showed people two identical cracker boxes. One had a gluten-free label and one didn't. People picked the gluten-free box as healthier, which is expected. But then they ran a second version with a totally made-up label that said "MUI-free," free from an ingredient that doesn't exist. And people still rated that box as healthier. Same cracker. They were rewarding the absence of a thing that was never there. Go ahead and slap gluten-free on whatever you want. Okay, one more question, because I hear this a lot. People say that when they go to Europe, they can eat all the bread and pasta and snacks they want and feel totally fine, then they come home and feel shitty again. The explanation I always hear is that European gluten is different, or American wheat has some crazy GMO thing. What's going on here?
Why bread hits different in Europe
Kylee: Which is false. Quick fact check: there's no genetically modified wheat grown commercially here or in Europe. It's the same non-GMO plant on both sides of the Atlantic, and the gluten protein isn't a different molecule over there.
Zoë: That would make sense to me.
Kylee: There are some real regulatory differences. A dough conditioner called potassium bromate is banned in the EU but legal here, for instance.
Zoë: In case your dough gets frizzy. Split ends.
Kylee: But there's no good evidence that's what's making anyone feel bloated. So it's not the GMOs, and it's not the dough conditioner. The likelier explanation is a more boring one.
Zoë: A boring one, for YDS? What if you're like, it's GMOs, case closed?
Kylee: A lot of European bread is long-fermented, real sourdough with a slow rise, and long fermentation breaks down fructans, which are the FODMAP in wheat.
Zoë: That's just good bread baking.
Kylee: Right. Most American commercial bread is made fast with added yeast, so it's still fully loaded with fructans. Same wheat, different bread. Then add that you're on vacation: walking everywhere, sleeping differently, less stress.
Zoë: Exactly. I'm in Europe drinking three Aperol spritzes a day. Shit is different. Are Aperol spritzes a gut reset?
Kylee: If you do it right. Some kind of reset.
Zoë: Something is definitely being reset.
Kylee: So it's probably not that Europe has fixed the gluten problem. They're making their bread differently, and you were on holiday, less stressed and more refreshed.
Diet culture déjà vu
Zoë: Europe does so many things correctly. So much about gluten-free parallels other diet culture topics we've covered, like seed oils. Does this feel familiar to you? I'm having diet culture déjà vu.
Kylee: It's a similar pattern to all the wellness trends we've done episodes on. There's a real, narrow harm in a small subset of the population. Then wellness marketing sneaks in. Then there's a toxin story.
Zoë: We love a toxin.
Kylee: And then billions of dollars of products get sold to people who don't necessarily need them.
Zoë: And denying them the pleasure of very good bread.
Kylee: People self-diagnose, which is also not ideal. They're an N of one, and they go on Instagram and say, I cut out gluten and started feeling better, and you should too. People change their diet significantly, they're doing a bigger elimination, paying close attention to what they eat, and something like gluten gets the credit for the whole effect. Then for the medical population the diet was designed for, celiac patients, it ruins the whole thing. It dilutes the medical diet for the people who need it most. They don't necessarily have a trustworthy label, or something that's taken seriously. And the public ends up with a complete misunderstanding.
Bottom line
Zoë: So what should listeners actually walk away with?
Kylee: What do you think, Zoë?
Zoë: A giant bowl of sourdough.
Kylee: That long-fermented European sourdough.
Zoë: Yes. You're at the table, dinner takes three and a half hours, and for the first 90 minutes you're just vibing with your spritz.
Kylee: Your entire day gets taken up by eating bread.
Zoë: The way God intended. Just me and my Aperol spritz, dousing amazing bread in expensive olive oil.
Kylee: If you suspect celiac or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, I recommend getting tested. If you're going to remove gluten without testing, be cautious, and do a guided elimination diet with the help of a professional. That gives you an outside perspective to help interpret how you actually feel when you remove gluten for four weeks or so, and then when you reintroduce it. And if you've removed gluten and you're convinced it's the source of all your problems, hold that loosely. It might work for you, but do you need to tell other people gluten is a toxin and spread the wellness message? The evidence doesn't usually support that second claim.
Zoë: So maybe don't go out of your way to write a 300-page book about how bread is evil that becomes a bestseller. Why are these all bestsellers, you guys? Grain Brain and Wheat Belly? Just read fairy smut. Read anything. It's just as valuable.
Kylee: The reality is that celiac is an underdiagnosed problem, with 70% of cases being missed. But for most people, if removing gluten is working for you, that might be real, but it's often about other things: FODMAPs, eating less processed food, paying more attention to what you eat. Not a gluten molecule.
References
Biesiekierski, J. R., Peters, S. L., Newnham, E. D., Rosella, O., Muir, J. G., & Gibson, P. R. (2013). No effects of gluten in patients with self-reported non-celiac gluten sensitivity after dietary reduction of fermentable, poorly absorbed, short-chain carbohydrates. Gastroenterology, 145(2), 320–328.
Lis, D., Stellingwerff, T., Kitic, C. M., Ahuja, K. D., & Fell, J. (2015). No effects of a short-term gluten-free diet on performance in nonceliac athletes. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 47(12), 2563–2570.
Molina-Infante, J., & Carroccio, A. (2017). Suspected nonceliac gluten sensitivity confirmed in few patients after gluten challenge in double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 15(3), 339–348.
Prada, M., Godinho, C., Rodrigues, D. L., Lopes, C., & Garrido, M. V. (2019). The impact of a gluten-free claim on the perceived healthfulness, calories, level of processing and expected taste of food products. Food Quality and Preference, 73, 284–287.
Priven, M., Baum, J., Vieira, E., Fung, T., & Herbold, N. (2015). The influence of a factitious free-from food product label on consumer perceptions of healthfulness. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 115(11), 1808–1814.
