Wanna stay healthy? Just follow these simple guidelines!

So you or someone you know has been diagnosed with Celiac Disease. I’m sure you’re wondering just how this disease is treated? I’m going to explain just that.

The simplest and most efficient way to have a vast improvement in a patient’s symptoms is to follow a strict gluten-free diet. A patient’s health care provider will typically refer their patients to a specialized dietitian or nutritionist. These people will teach their patients how to successfully avoid gluten while still maintaining a healthy and nutritious diet. These instructions include learning how to read and identify ingredients that contain gluten in food and product labels, how to make healthy choices about what type of food to eat, and how to design specialized meal plans.

People with Celiac Disease can still eat a well-balanced diet with a variety of foods. They can use potato, rice, soy, amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat, or bean flour instead of wheat flour. They can also buy gluten-free bread, pasta, and other products from stores, or order products from special food companies. Meanwhile, meat, fish, rice, fruits, and vegetables without additives or seasoning do not contain gluten, so people with Celiac Disease can still eat these foods.

Most people with Celiac Disease can safely eat small amounts of oats as well, as long as the oats are not contaminated with wheat gluten during processing.

People with Celiac Disease should always read food labels carefully, especially canned, frozen, and processed food labels, for ingredients that contain gluten. They should also avoid ingredients such as hydrolyzed vegetable protein, also called lecithin or soy lecithin. In addition, they should ask restaurant servers and chefs about ingredients, food preparation and whether a gluten-free menu is available. The following image illustrates some recommendations for a gluten-free diet.

For most people, following a gluten-free diet will stop their symptoms, heal their existing intestinal damage, and prevent any further damage from occurring. Symptoms may improve within days to weeks of starting the diet. Complete healing of the small intestine can take several years in adults, and 3-6 months in children. Once the intestine heals, the villi will start absorbing nutrients from food into the bloodstream normally again.

In some cases, people will continue to have difficulty absorbing nutrients despite following a strict gluten-free diet. People with this condition, called Refractory Celiac Disease, have severely damaged intestines that cannot heal. Because their intestines don’t absorb enough nutrients they may need to receive nutrients via IV. Research is still being done on medications that will treat Refractory Celiac Disease. (NDDIC, 2015)

So there you have it. The only effective way to treat Celiac Disease is by not eating foods that contain gluten. Upon starting a gluten-free diet a patient’s intestines will heal over time. In my next blog post I will be taking a look at several different websites that can provide useful information to those with Celiac Disease. See you then!

Works Cited

NDDIC. (2015, June 25). Celiac Disease. Retrieved from The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases: http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-topics/digestive-diseases/celiac-disease/Pages/facts