by Primal Docs Advisory Board Member, Catherine Shanahan, MD

To Cure Celiac Symptoms, Auto-Antibody Levels Must Drop and You Must Develop “Tolerance”

The results you get from cutting gluten from your diet depend on how far your antibody levels drop. The reason some celiac patients feel better after stopping gluten is that the antibody levels have already dropped. The reason others don’t is that the antibody levels have not dropped.

To get auto-antibody levels to drop faster, farther, and potentially even permanently, you have to eliminate not just gluten, but all foods that cause inflammation. And again, the most common are vegetable oils that promote random free radical formation, and carbohydrate-rich foods that promote random tissue glycation.

While the idea that a person with celiac disease may someday even be able to eat gluten again is so-far untested, I have reason to believe it is at least theoretically possible.

We know that, thanks to the built-in “intelligence” of the immune system, auto-antibodies can be recognized as unnecessary and deleted. So a person who once used to make, for instance, IgA antibodies to tissue-transglutaminase, no longer makes these antibodies and auto-immune attacks stop for good. Though this presents reason for hope, I have to say that at this point I would not recommend anyone diagnosed with celiac disease by antibody testing or who has definite joint pains or rashes after eating gluten take the risk of re-exposing themselves.

A Healthy Diet To Recover From Celiac: Three Steps

As I’ve said, avoiding gluten is an essential step in recovering from celiac disease, but it is not enough. You also need to avoid factors that caused the faulty antibody production associated with celiac disease (and other food allergies) in the first place. The first two-steps for making a full recovery from celiac disease are:

Step One: Avoid vegetable oils, and keep your total carb consumption under 100 gm per day.

Step Two: Retreat to ‘safe” starches

The antibodies that cause gluten intolerance and celiac disease were made by mistake and you must eliminate them to eliminate symptoms of celiac disease. Avoiding gluten is an essential step. Many gluten free recipes make use of so-called “safe starches” (a term first coined by the authors of The Perfect Health Diet).

I define safe starches differently for celiac disease sufferers, or anyone with persistent digestive difficulties that could represent celiac disease, than I do for people without these health challenges. Safe starches for the general population are high-carb foods with one or more of the following traits:

• They contain a relative abundance of anti-oxidants (i.e. carrots or beets)
• They are low in protein (ie potatoes, rice)
• They are not commonly used in infant formulas or other processed foods.

Even if you do not have celiac disease, these kinds of starches will still be better for you. For celiac sufferers, or anyone with persistent digestive difficulties that might represent celiac disease, I add the fourth trait:

• They are gluten free.

Step Three: Promote healing.

For optimal recovery, I advise my patients to eat superfoods that promote rapid digestive recovery into their diet. Two of the four pillars of world cuisine defined in Deep Nutrition promote optimal digestive health, and these are collagen-rich bone broths and probiotic-containing live-cultured, fermented foods like yoghurt, kimchee, real pickles and sauerkraut.