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>Um...how it can it be a psychological effect when I ate it
>accidentally? In each case, I had the reaction and then
>discovered that vanilla extract had been used. No problem
>with vanilla from beans or extracted from non-gluten sources.
>I suppose we could try our gluten-testing kit on some vanilla,
>but frankly, it was so expensive I hate to waste it on something
>that I *know* affects me.
>
>Wendy, [log in to unmask]

Wendy,

I don't disagree with most of what you say.  I think it is entirely
reasonable for any one person to pay attention to what seems to cause a
problem for her or him and act accordingly.  Nevertheless, psychological
effects are real, although the sorting out of what is psychological and what
is not may be extremely difficult and, consequently, probably not worth
bothering about.

I do have concern about what I see is a very strong tendency for each
individual celiac to ascribe his or her own responses to all celiac
patients--to celiac disease in general.  I have talked with celiac patients
who seem to eat (pure!) buckwheat with no problem (what I would expect from
taxonomical relationships) and yet some celiac patients claim they have a
terrible problem with buckwheat. These people who do have a problem seem
unwilling to consider the possibility that their problem has nothing to do
with celiac disease.  I would caution people to be careful about extending
their own experiences to others.  As far as we know at present, the only
substances that cause problems for celiac patients are wheat, rye, barley,
and probably oats.  I suspect there are a great many celiacs following
unnecessary dietary restrictions because of this tendency for individuals to
generalize.

    This business about alcohol being a problem is indeed puzzling to me.
It is not expected that the peptides responsible for celiac disease would be
sufficiently volatile to carry over in a distillation process. Accordingly,
I would not expect even grain alcohol from wheat to contain any peptides
that would harm a celiac patient. Perhaps it would be a worthy goal of some
of the celiac patient groups to actually set up some double blind tests on
controversial food items  with sufficient numbers involved to make the
results meaningful.

    Anyway, supposing, for the sake of argument, there is some carryover in
distillation.  Celiac disease itself does not seem to involve an instant
reaction to wheat gliadin peptides.  This creates a problem in challenging
people in that some people go for months or even years eating a normal diet
before any evidence can be obtained of harm.   Those people who have instant
reactions to foodstuffs pose an interesting question.  Is this another
immune response, perhaps more characteristic of allergy, rather than the
immune response characteristic of celiac disease?  We don't know the answer
to this question because we don't understand the mechanisms involved.  But
just remember that there are true celiac patients, properly diagnosed, who
can eat a couple of slices of wheat bread and never notice any effect. These
certainly would never notice the "residue' in alcohol used to extract
vanilla beans.

Donald D. Kasarda