Quoted Text

a similar story myself!
Slight variationes, such as antibiotics-made illness - probably a trace of my paternal grandmom's standing for 900 days in blocked St. Petersburg in 1941-1943 'on the diet' of 100 gr. of ryebread, half with wooddust, per day only.
Remember Dr. D's HongerWinter example!
Had an awful life before BTD!

wow you beat him to posting and letting us know it thanks

Yes, this blog does explain a lot about our genetics and why we have the weaknesses/strengths we do.  Thankfully there is hope.  Great testimony to you too Lola!

A History Lesson from A DIFFENT ANGLE SLIGHTLY

If it is a fact that there is a form of gluten in every grain, why do we believe that wheat, rye, barley, and sometimes oats, are the only glutens we need to avoid? Would you believe it all comes down pretty much to a tiny study of 10 people done at the University of Birmingham in 1952?

The symptoms of CD have been known for a very long time, as far back as 300AD, but research into the cause didn’t really pick up until the 1900s. Before the 1952 study, people with the symptoms of coeliac disease were treated very successfully with a starch-free diet, which later became the ‘specific carbohydrate diet.’ This involved removal of all grains and starch-containing foodstuffs except bananas (Haas, 1924; Andersen, 1947; Sheldon, 1949). (10)

During World War 2, Dutch researchers (Dicke et al, 1950, 1952 and 1954)(10) noticed that many of their digestive ‘coeliac’ patients got better during the grain shortages that plagued Holland at the time, and that their patients worsened when Allied planes dropped bread supplies. Dicke went on to research why and this led to the first proposition that villi damage was related to gliadin, the gluten in wheat. This was backed up by the findings of the team at the University of Birmingham who had tested just ten patients with coeliac disease. They concluded:

“Gastro-intestinal function was investigated in 10 children with coeliac disease…The removal of wheat flour from the diet resulted in rapid improvement, both clinically and biochemically. Deterioration followed the reintroduction into the diet of wheat flour or wheat gluten, but wheat starch had no harmful effect.”(9)

Almost overnight the belief that carbohydrate starch was the issue changed and gluten became the culprit. This flew in the face of all the previous research, but amazingly, the coeliac diet was changed to removal of the main wheat gluten, gliadin, and many sufferers began to fall into a diagnostic no man’s land.

“Unfortunately, only a few of the many patients ill with digestive complaints fit the exceedingly narrow celiac criteria. …Patients waited an average of 11 years for diagnosis if they were ever diagnosed at all. Many of these unfortunate sufferers were labelled with a catch all term, ‘Irritable Bowel Syndrome.’” (10)

How true. Even the NHS website admits that many, many more people may have some form of gluten issue (although they see that as CD mainly):
“In many cases, coeliac disease does not cause any noticeable symptoms, or it causes very mild symptoms. As a result, it is thought that at least 50% or possibly as many as 90% of cases are either undiagnosed or misdiagnosed as other digestive conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).” (11) That is a lot of people!

Quoted Text

Great testimony to you too Lola!

the quote isn't mine......the reason it is a quote

I think PC posted this in the wrong thread?

in the right link it was the link with the war and the dutch famine

Like like this longer exposition of the Hongerwinter, with the military-historical context.  It connects the story with the other pieces of war history that  I know and stops the piece from a more detached, vignette feeling.