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Dear All,

Sorry to have been silent on the literature search front
for a bit.  It is our seasonal conference period and I've
been away a fair bit, which has not left a lot of time to
pursue my reading.

As promised, directly after I had Radiation Safety Audited
Chris, I got him to dicuss the whole area of coeliac and
animal diseases which mimic the disease to see what
information which may be of help to coeliacs there is to
find.  I'm afraid the short answer is "not a lot".  Very
little seems to have been done about minimum levels of the
problem substance in the diet.  For farm animals the
decision is pretty straightforward - either you feed all
animals on a diet which does not contain the offending
substance, or you put down the animals which are not
thriving (farmers are excessively pragmatic).

What he did do was to lend me a little "light reading"
entitled "Food Allergy and Intolerance" edited by Jonathan
Brostoff and Stephen J Challacome from 1987 (so the data
will probably be from 1985 and before).  This piece of
bed-time reading is 7 cm thick!  I charged through the
chapter on CD (a mere 0.25 cm thick) over breakfast this
morning an d this has confirmed for me the near certainty
that the studies on Lymphoma and CD, when describing a GF
diet DO mean a diet containing purified wheat starch.  In
other words, if there is a causal link between this
particular lymphoma and CD and, as the studies indicate,
eating a gluten-free diet protects you, then eating a GF
diet containing the Codex Alimentarius purified wheat
starch IS sufficient to protect you.

There seems to be general agreement that any coeliac should
be able to eat up to 10 milligrams of gluten per day
without any measurable problems.  Child onset coeliacs fed
100 milligrams in one day showed measurable biochemical
changes.

One interesting question is whether cooking reduces the
damaging effects of gluten.  It certainly makes it more
difficult to detect in the laboratory.  When you eat normal
bread made from flour which contained 6 grams of gluten per
100 grams flour, this is clearly a completely moot point.
If 95% of the toxicity were removed, there'd still be
plenty to make you sick.  However several papers which
purport to show problems with the CA flour, appear to have
been done by feeding raw flour to the study group (with no
double blind and a number of other problems in the
structure of the test there are problems with these and
many other studies).  Certainly a recent paper on the
measurement of gluten in food (especially CA GF food) found
big difficulties measuring the gluten known to be present
in the sample to the same accuracy as the raw flour.  My
question is immediately "Is this because cooking interferes
with the test or is it because cooking significantly
reduces the amount of 'gluten' in the food?"

Sadly for coeliacs, most of the research being done is
looking at the complex mechanisms lying behind the disease.
(The sort of rather boring work on safe doses is not
something that will get anyone a Nobel Prize).  This is
naturally a rather wide statement and there are people out
there doing this work.  (Please all of you working on this
area, shout at me because I'm finding it hard to find
your publications, and I'll then be able to ask you where
to look :-)

To sum up.  The CD and lymphoma studies do not define
"gluten-free diet" but it is nearly certain that the
coeliacs in the study will have eaten CA purified wheat
starch as part of their diet.  This diet PROTECTED them.

There is very little information on safe doses and unsafe
doses of "gluten".  10 milligrams per day appears to be an
agreed safe level for all or nearly all coeliacs.

Regards to all (I'll keep looking)

David

David J Walland
University of Bristol Radiation Protection Adviser
[log in to unmask]
Tel +44 (0)117 928 8323
Fax +44 (0)117 929 1209

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