Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are often among the most severe illnesses that people can suffer from without gaining any sympathy, empathy, or consideration from even the closest of friends and family.
Needing to entirely cut gluten from your diet can often leave you ostracized from any form of social engagement. You can't have a slice of birthday cake or have a beer with your mates. You can't just stop at a coffee shop for a toasted sandwich and a chat. Even the garage pie that was a quick go-to meal on long trips has become off limits. Food is a part of life, and food is a big part of our South African culture. Growing up, you wouldn’t dare refuse food that was offered to you as a sign of hospitality, and now you have to be "that person" who always asks what the ingredients are. And due to a lot of fad diets, many people just assume that your aversion to wheat and gluten is because you want to lose weight, so they might "sneak" in some gluten-containing ingredients (like many spices and sauces) because you are just full of nonsense and won't notice that it is there.
My road to embracing a gluten-free lifestyle was a painful one. My whole life I had always had some stomach issues and chronic pain, but by the end of 2022 my body hit a breaking point. I was deathly sick and retched up everything I tried to eat. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and my blood tests showed significantly elevated ALT (alanine aminotransferase) and AST (aspartate aminotransferase) levels, indicating serious liver injury. My C-reactive protein (CRP) was also elevated, showing that there was inflammation somewhere in my body, but every test for viral and bacterial infections came back negative. Finally, at the end of my rope, I decided to "test" if I had a gluten intolerance like my mother and stopped consuming all gluten products. Miraculously, after a few months I was so much better. The stomach issues and pains that had been plaguing me for years disappeared, and even my general mood improved greatly!
Most celiac and gluten intolerant people have most likely experienced a journey similar to mine, filled with unexplainable illnesses, chronic pain, discomfort and the feeling of being “crazy”. But to me one of the most difficult aspects of gluten intolerance remains the people that scoff at the idea, that insist that it is nonsense, or that “you should just eat gluten until your body builds up an immune system towards it” entirely disregarding the misery we have endured to finally achieve a semblance of a normal healthy lifestyle. It is like telling a diabetic to just eat more candy to cure themselves or someone with a nut allergy to sprinkle some peanuts over their meal. Sometimes, the hardest part of living with an intolerance is not the food we have to avoid, but the people who refuse to understand why.
So let us be kind to each other. For those of us who live with gluten intolerance, avoiding gluten is not a fad, a choice, or an inconvenience we have invented for attention. It is part of the price we pay for feeling healthy. What may seem like “just a tummy ache” to you may represent years of pain and illness to someone else and a little understanding can mean the difference between feeling isolated and feeling supported.