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>Many people seem to contract celiac disease late in life, after thriving on
>wheat based products for most of their early years.  This would seem to imply
>that their body produced digestive juices capable of breaking down glutin but
>then something happened.  What was it?

My understanding is that the gene can be activated by some event as simple as
the flu and as complex as pregnancy in those who get celiac late in life.

>Has anyone examined the digestive juices of celiacs to see if it difers from
>that of non-celiacs either by omission of some substance or by the
>overabundance of another.

From reading what Dr. Kasarda has written, I gather that that was the first
theory of the origin of celiac, but no one has ever found evidence of a
missing component (enzyme) in digestive juices.  The celiac process appears to
be complex and indirect, perhaps having to do with a "toxic peptide" from
gluten. This peptide may activate antibodies that destroy the cells that
mature to form villa before they have a chance to grow.  Thus the villa are
blunted. And malabsorption occurs since the villa provide the surface area
where most nutrients are absorbed.  But this is a matter of active research.

Since the peptide is already quite small (peptides are pieces of proteins,
which are part of the food we eat, in this case gluten), taking an enzyme
orally may not make much of a difference - from what I know as a biochemist,
this peptide appears just hard to cleave. Second, an enzyme may not make it to
the small intestine for the digestion to take place (the stomach acidity is
quite unfriendly to most enzymes and the enzyme could be inactivated there.)
And third it may take only a few molecules to activate the immune system
response (antibodies) to produce the effect on the villa.

I had wondered about this myself.  Seem like good questions to me.

                      Martha Teeter, Concord, MA and Boston College Chemistry