The medical profession is continuing in its efforts to define non-celiac gluten sensitivity: this week, the Annals of Internal Medicine published commentary from two Italian doctors acknowledging that the condition most likely exists, and suggesting ways to diagnose it.
The problem wasn't the medical journal commentary itself, which actually characterized the state of gluten sensitivity research pretty well (you can read the abstract here). The problem was with the media coverage of the Annals commentary. Wow, was it ever negative.
"Gluten Sensitivity Elimination Diet Not Always Warranted," huffed the Huffington Post. "Questions Raised About Gluten Sensitivity," claimed Everyday Health. And "If you've jumped on the gluten-free bandwagon, you may be wasting your money," opined Men's Health.
Now, I think it's critically important for researchers to develop an accepted test for gluten sensitivity so that everyone can agree that it exists and on how to diagnose it. But it's premature (to say the least) to report that many people currently eating gluten-free don't need to follow the diet, and it's absolutely inaccurate to say that this commentary (which wasn't a medical study) "questioned" either gluten sensitivity or the gluten-free diet.
The commentary did say that there's plenty of advocates for the diet (which I think we can agree on), and that lots of U.S. consumers want gluten-free foods. However, the authors were careful to point out that we don't yet know how many people might have gluten sensitivity, and so we don't know who might benefit from the gluten-free diet.
The physicians who wrote the commentary clearly suspect people are following the gluten-free diet who aren't truly gluten-sensitive ("'Sense' should prevail over 'sensibility' to prevent a gluten preoccupation from evolving into the conviction that gluten is toxic for most of the population," they wrote). But they rightly and fairly concluded that we need more research to determine how many people do have gluten sensitivity.
They didn't draw conclusions from the medical research available because you can't -- there's just not enough data.
Sad to say, the news media did draw conclusions. Not every story on this bashed the diet and those who follow it without an official, physician-sanctioned diagnosis, but lots of them did.
What's depressing about this type of negative news coverage is the fact that it could discourage people from trying the diet, even if they might actually benefit. And there are plenty who fall into that group: if even the most conservative estimates in my new article How Many People Have Gluten Sensitivity? turn out to be true, we're looking at 22 million Americans with either celiac disease or gluten sensitivity -- about one in every 14 people.
If the more outlandish-sounding estimates prove true, we're looking at one out of two people who would benefit from eliminating gluten.
That's why I hate negative coverage like this. It's bad enough when messages like this come from the medical profession (which they do, all too frequently), but in this case the negativity came more from the media than from the physician authors of the commentary. And it was completely off-base in way too many instances.
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