THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 35

pro teams followed. In 2010, Lance Armstrong's RadioShack crew rode gluten free all the way to its
overall team victory in the Tour de France. 2
This story repeated itself in other elite endurance sports, but by the late 2000s, it wasn't just pro-
fessional athletes who were going gluten free. Celebrities, ranging from Hollywood darlings Gwyneth
Paltrow and Zooey Deschanel to cable news tough guy Keith Olbermann, praised the benefits of avoid-
ing gluten: the diet aided weight loss, unleashed untapped reservoirs of energy, stabilized insulin levels,
and even promoted mental acuity. Already familiar with the low-carb Atkins diet, soccer moms every-
where and affluent residents of the East and West coasts followed close behind. According to one widely
cited market report, 15-25 percent of American consumers wanted to purchase more gluten-free foods
in 2009. 3
In just a few years, the market for gluten-free products had emerged as one of the grocery industry's
fastest-growing sectors. Topics with titles like Going against the Grain, Grain Damage, The Grain-Free
Diet , and Dangerous Grains filled bookstore shelves. Cable news programs warned that wheat might
inflame joints, worsen autism, lead to cancer, or send insulin levels soaring. If you visited an alternative
health care specialist with sore knees or digestive trouble, you'd have been almost certain to hear that
giving up wheat might help.
To me at forty, dogged by my own seemingly endless sports injuries, all this sounded really appeal-
ing. So, in the middle of researching and writing a topic about bread and despite my obsessive love of
baking, I went gluten free. This meant a lot more than just giving up bread, as I soon learned. Other
grains—rye, barley, spelt, and sometimes oats—contained gluten. Worse still, in our industrial food sys-
tem, gluten had found its way as an additive into thousands of foods, from powdered spices to ketchup.
Really going gluten free required constant vigilance, endless research, difficult sacrifices, and ceaseless
self-control. I only lasted two months—but in that time, I felt real results. I felt energetic and sharp, and
during the first weeks of the diet, I experienced what can only be described as euphoria. Reading gluten-
free websites and online testimonials, I discovered that my experience was not uncommon: many people
reported feeling euphoric in the first weeks after going gluten free.
My experience didn't synch with the findings of mainstream science, however, or my gastroentero-
logist's recommendations. According to most mainstream medical experts, gluten should rightfully con-
cern only about 1 percent of the population—the percentage of people thought to be afflicted with celiac
disease, a serious autoimmune disorder. For people with this disorder, consumption of even tiny amounts
of gluten causes the villi of the small intestine to literally smother themselves in mucus. The result is
damaging inflammation and impaired ability to absorb nutrients, leading to seriously elevated risk for a
wide range of cancers, neurological diseases, and other autoimmune disorders. 4 Except for that 1 per-
cent, gluten was harmless, my doctor assured me (and mainstream medical research confirmed). So I
got tested for celiac, and the results were negative. I was free and clear—but why did giving up gluten
make me feel so good?
The historian in me came up with what I thought was a good explanation: over the past hundred
years, relentless fine-tuning of individual health through dietary discipline has become something of a
national obsession. Whether through rigorous dieting, intense exercise, or almost religious attention to
the latest missives of nutrition science, rituals of control over one's body are a key marker of elite status
and responsible personhood. 5 And nothing made me feel in control of my body more than following
the challenging strictures of gluten-free eating. I knew that my various aches and complaints probably
stemmed from the daily grind of self-imposed pressures, work and family stress, and the accumulated
trauma of decades of competitive sports more than they did from my diet, but I didn't feel that I could