Why do people chose to eat gluten free?

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  • FredDoyle
    FredDoyle Posts: 2,273 Member
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    Why does it matter what other people eat? Why do some people feel the need to pour some thinly veiled scorn on folks that choose to eat in a way which has no impact on anyone else's life in any way? I don't know where this food bigotry came from but it's rife among weight loss/fitness communities and I think it's bizarre, unnecessary and totally non productive.
    Nobody cares what you eat, or at least I don't.
    It's when people make unsubstantiated claims that they get challenged...and they should. The diet and fitness industry is rife with pseudoscience.
  • CardiacKev28
    CardiacKev28 Posts: 172 Member
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    I choose to eat GF since my wellness coach suggested that it might help with my asthma and it has. I can breathe so much better and I don't have to take the inhaler as often. Plus Rudi's GF bread is delicious!
  • KnM0107
    KnM0107 Posts: 355 Member
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    I also think that our bodies struggle to digest gluten

    YOUR body might struggle to digest gluten, mine has no problem at all.

    Op: some people have medical issues that prevent them from eating ANYTHING with gluten.

    Some people feel better when cutting it out because they just feel better without it.

    Some people believe the hype and they assume everyone should cut out gluten because they read something somewhere saying it's bad for us.
  • arrseegee
    arrseegee Posts: 575 Member
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    Many people trying to lose weight come up with some sort of restrictive diet they like to follow - they say it makes them feel better, they're healthier and they swear by the diet. E.g. vegetarian, vegan, paleo, no-carbs, Atkins, no-gluten... I guess meat-avoidance can often have other reasoning behind it but it all achieves the same outcome - your overall pool of things you can eat decreases, so you eat less, and voila you get weight loss. For this reason the Atkins diet was very successful when it first got popular because there wasn't much you could eat, but these days there is so much Atkins-marketed food that people on an Atkins diet can easily stick to the diet while eating too many calories, and then they gain. In the early 2000s all you could eat was cheese and meat and it got old quickly, so it's no surprise that people lost so much weight on it.

    My sister is Coeliac and finds it very frustrating that so many people choose to self-diagnose that the need a wheat-free diet, because in her case she can never ever eat gluten, whereas some people doing it for fun will still choose to eat gluten if they really want to. I have worked in a cafe where staff in the kitchen were *****ing about people going on gluten-free diets, and making jokes about sneaking flour into something just to trick them. If my sister ate that stuff she'd be violently ill, yet someone on a voluntary gluten-free diet would likely have no side effects. Gluten-free has become another fad and the problem with that is that people don't take an actual gluten allergy seriously, which can have disastrous consequences for those for whom it is a real problem.

    That said, it is anyone's choice to go on a random diet but god help me I have known many many people through my work (nutritionist) who go on random restrictive diets only to find that it's boring and they eventually revert to a normal diet. It makes a mockery of real vegetarians when you know vegos who will still eat, same for vegans who will eat cheese, and gluten-free adopters who don't check labels and will still eat tasty foods with gluten in them when it takes their fancy.

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