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Reply to Linda Blanchard from Don Kasarda, Albany, CA.

Linda,

Some of your questions are not easy to answer, at least for me.  There
may or may not be a difference between wheat intolerance that shows up
mainly through intestinal damage and celiac disease.  However, both milk
and soy have been shown (scientific journal articles) in at least a
couple of instances to produce the flattened mucosa (damaged epithelium)
that is characteristic of celiac disease.  Does this mean that milk and
soy allergies (?)  are no different from celiac disease?  So, it at least
seems possible that there may be two different disease mechanisms at work
in the case of gluten damage to the intestine, one that represents true
celiac disease and the other, a form of wheat allergy, the latter
response perhaps mediated by the IgE class of immunoglobulins (usually
involved in allergic reactions), which is not usually thought to be
involved in celiac disease responses.  Perhaps, the former cannot be
outgrown and the latter can be.  I don't know the answer--just noodling
around.  I am not an immunologist so someone more sophisticated might
care to comment.

Your question about beer is easier to answer.  Beer may have barley
hordein peptides; these are equivalent to wheat gluten (gliadin)
peptides.  Beer is not distilled as is alcohol--what ferments and becomes
soluble in water (and dilute alchohol) is what you get.  So when the
fermentation process breaks down the proteins of the barley into small
pieces (polypeptides or peptides), some of those small pieces may still
be big enough to contain the harmful amino acid sequence(s) that cause
damage to the intestine of celiac patients.  I would say this is pretty
likely in most beers, but at present a clearly toxic peptide sequence
derived from beer has not been described in the literature (just a
cautionary note and not to be taken as indication that such a peptide
isn't there).  In addition, these peptides are much more soluble than the
parent proteins.  The heavier and more tasty the beer, the more likely it
is that it contains harmful peptides.  There is a recent paper
demonstrating gliadin-like (probably harmful) sequences in malted barley
(Ellis et al.  1994.  Demonstration of the presence of coeliac-activating
gliadin-like epitopes in malted barley.  Int.  Arch.  Allergy Immunol.
104:308-310).  Also of interest is the paper by Kauffman et al.  (1994.
Immunological characterisation of barley polypeptides in lager foam.  J.
Sci.  Food Agric.  66:345-355).

Don