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Here is the response I posted to the Slate article:

I have a hard time believing that people are flocking to a gluten-free diet
because of a placebo-effect that makes them falsely believe they are gaining
benefit. The following article sheds light on the low-compliance (as low as
40%!) in even diagnosed celiacs, because staying on the diet is so
challenging that many people will put convenience above health matters:
http://www.gastrohep.com/news/news.asp?id=106677

Another article, from the About.com forum (
http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/theglutenfreediet/a/Compliance.htm), lists
reasons patients give for straying from the diet. From expensive replacement
foods to social isolation, it is doubtful to me, a 7-year-biopsy-diagnosed
celiac, that people would jump on the bandwagon of a gluten-free diet unless
they had an appreciable improvement in their well-being. Implying that just
because emotional improvement isn't a result of the gluten-free diet just
because it isn't the schizophrenia she mentions as being concurrent to
celiac disease is disingenous. Diagnosed and properly treated celiacs
recover from a huge spectrum of emotional and cognitive problems including
learning disabilities, depression, disorientation and dementia, among
others. Gluten intolerance affects multiple systems in the body including
the brain, the skin, and the entire digestive tract as well as normal growth
in children. In addition, the degenerative effects of the malnutrition it
causes by making it impossible for the digestive tract to absorb nutrients
ranges from severe nerve damage (from B12 deficiency) to anemia, and a host
of other deficiencies.

This article by Dr. Fine includes an instructive diagram that illustrates
the gluten-intolerance spectrum and mentions why awareness of the condition
is in reasonable proportions:
http://members.cox.net/hal.kraus/gluten/prevalence.htm

When an ill-informed author ridicules the efforts of people who are doing
their best to help themselves feel better, he can be very destructive. Most
of us with gluten-intolerance have dealt with our ailments first within a
medical atmosphere, where the answer to everything is the latest and
most-expensive drug. Those of us who don't meet the strict diagnostic
criteria should be applauded for acting on their own to improve their health
in this age when peripheral symptom management has becomes the expensive
norm (In 2005, over 169.9 million anti-depressants were prescribed to
non-instutitionalized patients in the US) . IYou can see why misinformation
can do a lot of damage to the community as a whole as well as the efforts of
those of us who have suffered for years and, often decades, from the
debillitating symptoms of a poorly understood condition.

 Sincerely,

Kathryn Kellison- diagnosed with celiac disease May 1 of 2002.






-- 
Kit Kellison
314-600-5254
co-owner, Off Broadway
www.offbroadwaystl.com
Photography:
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