As someone who has Celiac Disease, I’m honestly grateful to the gluten-free trend for a couple of reasons, chiefly for the attention it has brought to grocery stores and restaurants about the need for gluten-free options.
There have also been some negative effects of the trend, though; many restaurants and people do not understand the severity of Celiac Disease, assuming instead that everyone who does not eat gluten has chosen not to and are thus being picky. Even restaurants that do understand often fail to realize the danger of contamination.
In reality, Celiac isn’t an allergy: it’s an autoimmune disease. My doctor has simplified it for me this way: the body of someone with Celiac treats gluten (and anything derived from it) like poison. Gluten the size of a period is enough to do damage to my body; if I ate gluten on a regular basis, I would die.
The best way for me to briefly illustrate this is to explain my diagnosis story. When I arrived at the ER at the peak of my sickness in October 2016, I weighed 95 pounds, had a fever of 104, a resting heart rate of 133, a tanking blood pressure, and I could not stop throwing up and having diarrhea. This is a bit TMI, perhaps, but that’s how sick I was.
The hospital had to pump me full of IV potassium and magnesium, which I was losing at a rapid rate (after several days in the hospital getting IVs 24/7, my potassium level was still only at 2.7 – it should have been between 3.6 and 5.2). Potassium and magnesium run your heart, so they are pretty darn important.
My symptoms were so bad that my doctor thought I had Crohn’s Disease or POTS; he was so certain by the end of my week-long stay in the hospital that, even though the results of my colonoscopy had yet to come back, he started me on steroids to treat Crohn’s right away.
Of course, as with any disease, symptoms and severity varies. Some people do not have to worry about cross contamination very much, but most do to some extent. That’s why it is an issue that many restaurants do not understand the cross contamination risks; a few days ago, I was at a Mexican restaurant trying to order off of their gluten-free menu. The waiter, thank goodness, thought to tell me that what I had ordered was cooked on the same surface as glutinous food.
Food like that shouldn’t be on a gluten-free menu, or should have some sort of marker by it to indicate the certainty that it has been contaminated. If I accidentally eat contaminated food, I end up sick for a full week, living off of Zofran and Tylenol and sleeping twelve hours at a time with three or four hour stretches of wakefulness.
Admittedly, I am an extremely sensitive case, but it is a risk that restaurants need to consider nonetheless. Again, gluten is poison to people with Celiac Disease. That’s not an exaggeration: I can feel it every time I consume even a minimal amount.
So while I know that it might be annoying as a host trying to plan a party, a friend or date searching for a place to eat dinner that offers a truly gluten-free menu (and having to give up your first five choices to accommodate us), or a food service provider taking complicated orders and taking extra steps in the kitchen to avoid cross contamination, many of us do not have a choice in the matter, and we feel bad for the inconvenience we often cause.
We aren’t trying to make your lives or jobs more difficult for the fun of it (as I recently saw a social media post complaining, sparking this article). We are incredibly grateful for the extra steps you are taking to keep us safe and healthy. Believe me, if I had the choice, my dinner would literally be sourdough bread slathered in butter!
Image Credits: Cover, Image 1.