Gluten-free diet may be a waste of money for some, new research suggests

baffledinbrooklyn:

If I start commenting on this I’ll just end up in a senseless tirade and offend someone.

I’ve actually gone on the senseless tirade in front of friends and neighbors, willy-nilly, without a care for thoughts and feelings or sensitivities.

I have a similar tirade about, well, food sensitivities and allergies.  I am a person with food allergies. I am convinced that there is no such thing as a sensitivity, only a varying degree of allergic reaction.  The degree of allergic reaction can change with every encounter with the food.  Eating almonds might not kill me this time, I might only wind up with an itchy throat, but I could also wind up with full blown anaphylaxis and looking all swollen, blue, and dead-y at your feet.  So, yeah.  I’m allergic, even though most times it might look like I have a “sensitivity”.

Sensitivity is a word people cooked up to make us feel special, to feel like we need to treat ourselves with extra care, and to justify expense.  Hell, it’s a word we use to make others treat us with extra care. “Are you serving carrots?  I have a sensitivity to carrots.  Please don’t make carrots.  A carrot looked at me wrong once and it’s never been the same between us.”

As someone with food allergies, that’s outright ridiculous.  Sensitivity my ass.

Basically: If you think you have something seriously wrong with you that might involve celiac disease, *go to a danged doctor*. You might have something else going on, IBS, Crohn’s, Lactose Intolerance, or any number of food allergies. All of those things have treatment courses.  Some of those treatment courses have very little impact on your wallet.  Hell, avoiding lactose can actually save you cash (though life without cheese makes my little grinch heart shrink three sizes).

Gluten sensitivity has become a bucket self-diagnosis, one that doesn’t even mean anything.

This has been a much watered-down version of the tirade, remarkably devoid of twitching, hair pulling, and angry grunting. I give myself a gold star.

By the way, the Mr.’s rant on this subject is so angry it calls up actual hellfire.  Sometimes, just as a party trick, I wind him up and get him going on vaccines…

-TLOTH

Source: baffledinbrooklyn