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Substituting wheat in the diet
A few years ago I was diagnosed with diverticulitis. I was advised to adopt an elimination diet which included cutting out wheat and would like to know what I am supposed to substitute for it. Bread is such a big part of our staple diet and all my local health shop can recommend is oat cakes or ryvita. The gluten-free loaf is very expensive. Also, can you explain why more and more people seem to be intolerant of wheat?
The solution, according to Ian Marber, a clinical nutritionist who specialises in digestive disorders and who has a lifelong allergy to gluten, is to invest in a breadmaking machine to make your own loaves using wheat-free flours which are now on sale in the supermarkets and good health stores. Since bread is such a big part of your diet you will, he says, soon recoup the cost of the machine.
Marber blames our increasing intolerance of wheat and wheat-based products on a substance called gliadin. This is a protein which, he explains, irritates the sensitive lining of the colon. Wheat contains up to 55% gliadin, rye contains 40% and oats contain just 15%. Rice and corn contain none at all but breads made with alternatives such as rice, lentil or chickpea flour have a more cake-like consistency and the commercial versions are, as you say, ridiculously expensive.
You may also, says Marber, be suffering from an overworked liver which has been stressed by alcohol, chemicals, and other pollutants. When this happens, toxins that the liver would normally breakdown are passed into the gut where they too increase the sensitivity of the colon, resulting in an increase in food intolerances.
As I am sure you have found, if you do decide to cut out wheat and start to read food labels you will be astonished by the number of products where it is not an obvious ingredient. It is present, for example, in both bottled sauces and in confectionary where it is sometimes used as a binding agent. The fact that so many of us inadvertently eat so much wheat so often is another underlying reason for what can seem like a collective and growing intolerance.
Ian Marber (020-7581 5060) is the author of The Food Doctor in the City, which is published by Collins and Brown.