Our first line of defense in maintaining good health is our digestive system. Your immune system, triggered by gluten, unintentionally destroys this defense. An immune reaction to eating gluten is not an autoimmune disorder.
The body’s immune system is not attacking your healthy intestinal cells. It’s attacking the gluten protein. An immune reaction to gluten is an inflammatory illness leading to inflammation and damage to a person’s duodenum – the upper part of your small intestine.
While inflammation is a vital part of a healthy immune response. When there is chronic inflammation, the result is tissue damage. Your duodenum is the first part of the small intestine to receive partially digested food (chyme) from your stomach.
An immune response to gluten causes the inner surface of the duodenum to become inflamed and swell. This, in turn, results in damage to our villi – tiny hair-like projections lining the wall of the duodenum. It is through our villi that we absorb the nutrients from the food we digest.
Our immune system will launch an attack on any gluten being absorbed through the villi. As a consequence, inflammation is sure to follow. The inflammatory response causes the villi to either fall off or lay flat.
The duodenum was never the intended target of our immune system. Thus, the unintended damage described above can be viewed as collateral damage. The collateral damage is the result of inflammation.
Inflammation (via gluten) also produces an outward appearance of a bloated stomach. But thankfully, say it loud and be proud, the human body is amazingly resilient – believe it. Villi damaged or destroyed will regenerate in a few days once gluten is completely eliminated from your diet.
Please know this, a digestive disturbances associated with an immune reaction to gluten may result in malabsorption. Children suffering from malabsorption (aka poor nutrient absorption), are more likely to experience stunted growth and be underweight. Malabsorption is an illness that can be physically and mentally disabling, even life threatening.
If left untreated (gluten-free diet), acute malnutrition may develop as a result of malabsorption of nutrients. A constant supply of macro and micro nutrients are needed for children to develop normally and for adults to stay healthy.
Celiac – a term that refers to an area of the body where your duodenum is located – hence the name Celiac disease. But it’s not a disease; simply put, it’s an illness that should be called duodenitis.
Signs and symptoms common to a number of illnesses can easily be used to fabricate a multitude of diseases. The term disease broadly refers to any condition that impairs the normal functioning of the body. Because disease is a broad term, the Life Science Industry (LSI) was able to inflate millions into billions and billions into a multi-trillion global healthcare market at our expense.
Doctors diagnose and then treat diseases that cause patient suffering with prescription drugs. That said, doctors can’t just label an illness as a disease in order to prescribe medication for a patient without a proper diagnosis. A proper diagnosis can be viewed as nothing more than a formality doctors comply with to avoid medical malpractice.
But, if disease wasn’t a broad term, there would be constraints on what doctors could label as a disease and thus prescribe medication for. If that was the case, the multi-trillion LSI global healthcare market that exists because disease is a broad term would shrink into the billions. To protect the bottom-line revenue of the LSI, disease is and must remain a broad term.