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I received a lot of feedback about my questions. Here's a quick recap of
my questions: Did anyone notice when going on a gf diet that their
symptoms remained for a few days? Did they get worse? I am wondering if
his body is just getting rid of some residual gluten, if that makes
sense. Maybe I just need to get him tested, but I don't want to do
anything too intrusive. Does anyone else have the symptom of insomnia
when ingesting gluten?

First of all, thank-you to all of you who replied! I got a lot of
responses and some were very extensive. Many people said I should go
ahead and have him tested, just to be sure. Especially since to do the
gf diet "right" you have to be pretty strict and there's no point in
doing that if you don't have to. I agree and am going to go ahead and do
it--and also have it done on my husband, since he has had insomnia for
the past three years and we have tried everything to find the cause. It
was interesting to find out that many other people have insomnia when
they ingest gluten. I received a wide range of opinions on the amount of
time it can take for all the gluten to leave the body. Some said a few
days, others a few weeks, and some said it could take months or years!
So, it looks like this is a very individual thing. Other people said it
does not stay in the body after it is digested, which I would have to
question since our bodies absorb nutrients from food, so why would
toxins not be absorbed, also? I alluded to enzymes being part of the
problem with celiacs and many of you corrected me. I think I misread the
Celiac FAQ and got confused about the fact that many celiacs do not have
an enzyme to digest dairy. So, thanks for pointing that out to me.

As for my questions at the end of my original post (that were somewhat
rhetorical) about the cause of celiac and whether or not a gf diet is
really an adequate "cure" one person said they "are the stuff Nobel
prizes are made out of," which I thought was a funny way of putting it!
But, some people proposed that the cause of celiac disease is in fact
known. They said it is genetic. However, I want to remind you all that
having a "genetic predisposition" is not the same thing as having a
genetic condition. A disease such as sickle-cell anemia would be genetic
whereas, a disease such as cancer would be something one would have a
genetic predisposition to. Since celiac disease can just appear at any
time, due to a number of possible factors, it is a disease that one
would have a genetic predisposition to. As I understand it, the actual
cause is not yet known, though there seem to be known triggers. I did
find the article someone recently posted about some new research that's
being done very interesting (the one about the T cells). Thank-you to
whomever sent that! I'm sure there's more out there on the internet...I
just need to start looking. Glad I found this support online, as well!
Thanks...

Danielle in Charlotte

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