<story><title>A Food Shortage Revealed the Cause of Celiac Disease</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-celiac-disease</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaroth</author><text>Stunning it was this hard to pin down an autoimmune disorder which is effectively a food allergy.&lt;p&gt;My daughter has celiac which we caught early (concomitant with T1D) although she is not as hypersensitive as some people I have met, it is still crucial to avoid all gluten as even without overt symptoms it effects overall growth and nutrition.&lt;p&gt;But some of our friends are so sensitive that even minuscule levels of gluten exposure cause intense distress within an hour.&lt;p&gt;You have a “wasting” disease which is clearly non-contagious. Is it not obvious to test various strict diets? I guess in advanced cases it takes months of a gluten-free diet for the intestine to start healing (years for full recovery) so short-term test diets would not have led to full recovery, but even if you just experiment with carb-free that would reduce gluten so much I would think someone would have caught onto this sooner!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lordnacho</author><text>Keep in mind the modern supermarket is a pretty recent thing. We take it for granted that you can get just about anything at any time of year, but it&amp;#x27;s not something most grandparents would recognise. Heck, even I find there are things in supermarkets that weren&amp;#x27;t around when I was a kid (Quinoa for instance).&lt;p&gt;So finding stuff without gluten might have been pretty hard.&lt;p&gt;Also with anything complex like medicine there are just so many confounding issues that until you have the actual cause, many things sound like they could be it. There would be lots of dead ends and things obscuring the the true cause.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Food Shortage Revealed the Cause of Celiac Disease</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-celiac-disease</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaroth</author><text>Stunning it was this hard to pin down an autoimmune disorder which is effectively a food allergy.&lt;p&gt;My daughter has celiac which we caught early (concomitant with T1D) although she is not as hypersensitive as some people I have met, it is still crucial to avoid all gluten as even without overt symptoms it effects overall growth and nutrition.&lt;p&gt;But some of our friends are so sensitive that even minuscule levels of gluten exposure cause intense distress within an hour.&lt;p&gt;You have a “wasting” disease which is clearly non-contagious. Is it not obvious to test various strict diets? I guess in advanced cases it takes months of a gluten-free diet for the intestine to start healing (years for full recovery) so short-term test diets would not have led to full recovery, but even if you just experiment with carb-free that would reduce gluten so much I would think someone would have caught onto this sooner!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>erikpukinskis</author><text>In the beginning, nothing was obvious. New things become obvious every day.</text></comment>