More from the Gluten-free Gourmet: Delicious Dining Without Wheat

This foreword is written from my viewpoint as a pediatrician, nutritionist, and celiac. I and others have benefited from the identification and avoidance of the celiac’s “poisons”—collectively called glutens.
Celiac sprue was first reported in the first or second century by Aretaeus, a Cappadocian. He noted that bread did nothing to stop the wasting away of the sufferers. Samuel Gee accurately detailed the disease in 1888, and prophetically suggested, “if the patient can be cured at all, it must be by means of diet.” In 1918, Still lectured that “one form of starch which seems particularly liable to aggravate symptoms is bread.” In 1950, William Dicke, a Dutch pediatrician, reported that the symptoms of celiac disease (CD) “are elicited or aggravated by certain types of flours, especially wheat and rye flours.” Treatment of children with a diet without wheat, rye, barley, and oats spread rapidly and replaced the popular ten-bananas-a-day diet, but it took years before the gluten-free diet was accepted for adults.
The most recent landmark in CD history was 1989 when Holmes and his coworkers reported the significant reduction of gastrointestinal malignancies and lymphomas as the remarkable benefit of a gluten-free dietin patients they had observed over twenty years.
Gluten-sensitive enteropathy, or celiac disease, is activated by unidentified environmental and genetic factors at any stage of life from infancy to adulthood. CD is characterized by a primary small intestine mucosal injury associated with the ingestion of specific protein fractions in wheat, barley, oats, and rye causing malabsorption of most nutrients. Today’s research tends to target the cause to be an unusual, enhanced, complex immune response recognized primarily by jejunal mucosal injury of the small bowel in genetically susceptible individuals, primarily of northern European heritage.
The common clinical CD symptoms are a painful, often rumbling, gassy and bloated abdomen with the classic foamy, foul, pale floating stools, or uncomfortable nagging constipation with excessively bulky stools, or years of a myriad of vague symptoms of undue fatigue, irritability, anemias—both iron and folic acid— bone pain, burning feet, muscle weakness, and depression or lassitude. Headaches may occur after the ingestion of any of the celiac-toxic glutens....