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Hi. Sorry this has taken so long. I had asked a question about a
possible enzyme therapy for celiac disease that was discussed in a
publication of the Health Sciences Institute. The article was entitled
'Enzymes offer a promising new therapy for gluten intollerance'. It
goes on to say that a plant-based enzyme is being considered as a
potential treatment for celiac.

The HSI seems like a respectable enough place but since the source
quoted in the article dated from 1977, one of the comments said
basically that that should speak for itself. If the writer of the
article can't quote from studies any more recent than that, then
apparently the idea never really worked. The theory of developing some
substitute for the missing enzyme in celiacs has been discussed for
ages. Not new.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, here is what was said about the Health
Sciences Institute:

  > The Health Sciences Institute (HSI) is dedicated to keeping members
  > informed of cutting edge health discoveries from around the world.
  > The HSI panelists have been leading Americais iundergroundi world of
  > research and discovery for almost half a century. This expert
  > advisory panel of alternative doctors, researchers, and health
  > practitioners from around the world alerts HSI members to
  > breakthrough curative substances that can drastically improve
  > peopleis quality of life.
  > From: http://www.namebank.com/International/HealthSciences-Intl.html

One woman said that she gives her son Original Papaya Enzyme which
seems to counter the gas he usually has when he eats beans, but she
wasn't willing to take the risk and see if it would be effective in
countering CD. She says her son is totally GF, so I guess this is not
much of an experiment to see if the papaya works by itself. She added
that she also gives him 'barley green' and as a result, he's made up
for the lost time in growth, as if he never had celiac.

Another woman said she took lots of enzymes and they never did her any
good.

Don Wiss said that in 1991, an article came out entitled "Alternatives
- For The Health Conscious Individual" (by Mountain Home Publishing).
It quoted Gut magazine apparently stating that after ingesting papain
(enzyme derivitive of papaya), one can eat gluten with no side effects
since it presumably digests wheat gluten.

Someone else who had read the article critiqued it like this:  In
answering the question about the paper on papain digestion of gluten by
Messer et al in Gut (5), 295-303 (1964), the paper does not suggest that
eating papain will allow a celiac person to eat gluten.  The authors
confirmed an earlier report that long PREdigestion (42 hours) of gluten
with a huge excess of crude papain would make it non-toxic when ingested
by a celiac.  They showed that pure papain did not detoxify gluten and
suggested that detoxification was brought about by an enzyme, a
contaminant in crude papain, that released ammonia from gluten.  This was
one of the early bits of suggestive evidence that glutamine-containing
peptide sequences were important in accounting for gliadin toxicity in
celiacs.  **Since the authors indicated that the detoxifying enzyme was
both inactive and unstable in the highly acid conditions existing in the
stomach, there is no way that papain ingestion will permit celiacs to eat
gluten-containing food.**

One comment on that was:
What the article said is this, the gluten protein with this enzyme is no
longer digested in the intestines, instead it is broken down in the
stomach.  With this happening the intestines can't react to gluten,
because, it's already been broken down into a form the body can use.  I
would not suggest this as if any of the proteins get past this neat
little enzyme you are back to square one and you have a reaction.

Another person said that it may help void the effects of small amounts
of gluten, but would be ineffective if large amounts (as in what you
would normally consume in a day if you didn't have CD) were consumed.

That is the sum total of the responses I got. In short, it has not been
proved that papain or any other enzyme can counter the damage, either
before or after gluten consumption. Enzymes will boost your immune
system response but **they should not be tried at this stage as a
replacement for the strict GF diet.**

How I wish things were different! Insulin is such an easy solution for
diabetics. Why can't something like it be developed for celiacs?