The medical establishment has now agreed there is a disease called non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
Murray explained that gluten sensitivity is a real entity and most likely represents more than one clinical condition.
It is unclear what effect if any gluten-free or gluten-diminished diets might have on people with self-defined gluten sensitivity.
This happens when they learn where they fit on the gluten sensitivity spectrum and discover their own level of gluten tolerance.
There is no reliable test to diagnose gluten sensitivity, according to Murray, so whatever your nutritionist ordered is not medically approved.
Confusing the picture further are private labs that offer tests of stool or saliva that they say can definitively diagnose gluten sensitivity.
The experts also propose a third category for "gluten sensitivity, " in which patients report the same symptoms as celiac disease but test negative for telltale antibodies.
"If anyone claims they have a test that is specifically for gluten sensitivity, there is no such thing, though I'm not ruling it out in the future, " says Dr. Fasano.
"Confusion about gluten sensitivity has been rampant, " says Alessio Fasano, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Celiac Research and a co-author of the proposal, published this week in the journal BMC Medicine.
The second group of patients, categorized as having nonceliac gluten sensitivity, have the same symptoms of abdominal pain, bloating, gas and diarrhea, but do not have antibodies or the genetic predisposition for celiac disease.
So assuming that celiac disease has been ruled out by your doctor (antibodies to the protein TTG are the most accurate, according to Murray) and depending on your symptoms, you may have gluten sensitivity.
Still, greater awareness of food allergies has come as restaurant diners ask for lists of ingredients in meals and preparations and more people know someone with another type of food intolerance such as gluten sensitivity.
Large food manufacturers have noticed that sales of gluten-free products have increased 30% in recent years and have introduced gluten-free lines to address the market that includes an additional 18 million Americans with gluten sensitivity.
And in a study published last year, researchers in Australia showed in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that subjects with suspected gluten sensitivity had substantially fewer symptoms on a gluten-free diet than control subjects who unknowingly ingested gluten.
Several people asked me about gluten sensitivity after I mentioned it in my response on celiac disease several weeks ago, so I thought this would be a good time to expand further on this less well-known and much less well-defined condition.
The field is complicated by the fact that gluten-sensitivity diagnosis and treatment is often patient-driven.
Some argue that anyone with gluten-sensitivity, no matter how moderate, is at risk from a trip to the neighborhood grocery store.
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"It was his sensitivity to gluten that was compromising his lungs, " he adds, citing that in Chinese medicine there's believed to be a relationship between the large intestines and the lungs.
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