Gluten-Free Diets and Gut Bacteria

by Natasha Chart

categories: Eats, Health

Published May 19, 2009 @ 11:30AM PT

I was a little concerned to read this claim that a gluten-free diet might be detrimental to the balance of gut bacteria:

... According to results of a small study with 10 people consuming a gluten-free diet, populations of beneficial gut bacteria, such as Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus, decreased, while counts for Enterobacteriaceae and Escherichia coli increased. ...

On the one hand, that's a little worrying, because gut bacteria do rather a lot of digestive heavy lifting. Everyone who's ever had their gut flora wiped out by a particularly heavy course of antibiotics knows firsthand that I speak the truth.

On the other hand, what the heck were these study participants eating, anyway? There seem to be a good number of diets in the world based around gluten-free staples like corn, potatoes, rice and teff. Are all the people who eat those diets deficient in gut bacteria? Seems unlikely.

And the participants themselves were healthy, so they were switching away from their normal diet for this trial. I think there are probably too many unknowns for these results to mean anything. What would be both fascinating and illuminating would be a worldwide sampling and study of gut bacteria in a wide range of diets, though the possibility that environment plays a role in what species of intestinal flora you end up with wouldn't be eliminated. You'd have to control for that, I would guess, by sampling people in the same regions and living conditions who had different diets.

Anyway, I'm not going back to eating wheat bread and pasta, oatmeal or spelt just for the sake of some bacteria. The migraines aren't worth it.

Especially when, on looking into this, I found an article on a site for celiacs indicating that a reaction between gut bacteria and gluten in the absence of vitamin D might cause the immune reaction to gluten in the first place. Bastards!

Maybe I should eat more yogurt, or something, though? I do have it now and again.

In other news, a wonderful soon-to-be cousin made me a sample wedding cake over the weekend from a gluten-free mix and it was delightful. (I think it was a Pamela's mix, the chocolate decadence, but it might have been from the Gluten Free Pantry.) I'm sure no one's gut bacteria would approve of it, but it even tasted good to people who can eat normal cake and I'm going to have more of it anyway.