Meet the inner-better person inside everyone.

Author Frann Leach
The medical profession, as usual, is taking a while to catch up.

You don't have to take my word for it. Surf the net for a little while, looking for the words "gluten intolerance", "gluten and depression", "gluten and health", "gluten and obesity", and so on. There are many studies, stories from sufferers, and a few doctors and other medical types saying it's all a load of rubbish.

I guess it's understandable that doctors don't want to put a health warning on wheat, barley and rye - after all, they've already warned us off almost everything else - though they do seem to change their minds quite a lot. What would their patients eat?)

It's well known that a deficiency in certain vitamins can result in serious health problems. Because gluten based products form such a high proportion of most people's diets, which many of them can't digest properly, malnourishment is becoming common in the West - even in the chronically obese.

Despite what some in the medical fraternity would have you believe, gluten intolerance is not a fantasy. The most severe form, coeliac disease, is a very nasty disease. If you're happy to accept irritable bowel syndrome, arthritic symptoms and depression in exchange for a bowl of pasta, you're braver than I am! I used to suffer from all these problems, until I cut gluten out of my diet. I wish I had known about it before.

If you do have symptoms like the ones listed at the top of this article, it's important you try and find out the cause. Gluten is a prime culprit. And there is quite a bit of evidence to link gluten to bowel cancer, as well (which has been increasing steadily for years).

How should you go about this? There's little point in going to your doctor, because even if he doesn't laugh at you, the only form of gluten intolerance that can be detected (sometimes) by a blood test is coeliac disease. So you need to do a bit of detective work for yourself to establish whether or not gluten is a problem for you.

The easiest way to check this out is to cut gluten out of your diet for two or three weeks and see how you feel at the end of it. There will most likely be changes, though some symptoms may take quite a while to fade away completely. But at the end of the trial, go and get a pizza or a sticky bun or something, just to see what your body's reaction is (but don't go overboard - it may be a stronger reaction than you expect).

Gluten intolerance is much more common than people realise. Don't be a victim, check it out. You're worth it.
Frann Leach lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sign up for her new Gluten Factsheet with a new gluten-safe recipe and article every week: Gluten Factsheet