Discussion Board

Do any of you have tiredness and lack of mental focus caused by gluten?

My 15 year old son has been having these problems for several months and I have reason to believe that he is being affected by a food intolerance. Several days ago we ran out of bread and he was eating mostly potatoes for a couple of days and then the next day he was feeling better, then the past couple of days he has been having my home made pita bread and he has been feeling worse. So now starting this afternoon he is going gluten free for a while so we can see if it helps him.

Yes. I had brain fog and extreme fatigue.

RRC

I alaso had teh brain fog from teh gluten nto to mention a host of other issues I would never have known were gluten related including sever athletes foot and acne

Today after staying away from wheat for only 24 hours my son is feeling much better again. (This is with 5 grams of vitamin c and 500 mg of niacinamide, which together help with allergy symptoms IF there isn't too much exposure to allergens in our experience). It seems like a pretty short time to get results, but his symptoms are marginal. They mostly only interfere with his piano practice, which takes a very high level of focus, concentration and energy (he is playing advanced classical music). The thing is he wants to have music as a profession and he needs total focusing ability now to reach his goal.

I am working on discovering gluten free recipes for bread, etc, that he will like. He already tried corn tortillas and liked them for his bean burritos.

Definately yes to your question.

Udi's makes an amazing sandwhich bread, out of all the gluten free breads out there, it is the only one, that tastes like 'real bread'.

Udi's bread has egg white and oil in it.

RRC

the only bread i liked was the rice wraps at trader joes. they have oil in them though but its not a lot. i like corn thins as bread the most.

i felt a lot better going gluten free myself. i could focus better at work when i did this.

Thanks to all of you for your replies. He is now on his 3rd full day without gluten and he has been improving every day so I think we have found the answer. I have started experimenting with gluten free baking and I made some biscuits that he liked. They did have butter in them, but I cut the amount in half. I am not so concerned about him being 100% McDougall at his age and weight, but I am going to try to make things as McDougall as I can. I am going to try making bread from a gluten free mix today.

Here is our story for those who are interested. From January till June it seemed like he was catching one cold after another with a short break between. After the first couple of colds he never seemed to be well even between colds. He was always more tired than he ought to have been. He was tested for mono in April, I think it was, and it came out negative. I took him to the doctor's again in June and he said he had a sinus infection so he was on antibiotics for 3 weeks for that and it seemed as if the antibiotics were making him even more tired. After those antibiotics he felt somewhat better, but he was still too tired and couldn't focus enough to do much piano practice and this made me feel that something else must be going on so I took him to his regular doctor this time and he ran blood tests and this time he tested positive for mono so that accounts for part of the tiredness, but I am thankful that I had already decided to try taking him off gluten before the test results came back (because I might have just thought it was simply from the mono) because he is greatly improved now, although he is tired by the late afternoon, which I think is a leftover from the mono and will improve with time. When he ate gluten he was so tired even in the morning. I am wondering how long this has been going on; it might be that he has been affected for years and it has been taking the edge off his focus or maybe he developed the gluten problem recently, but I know he was having trouble with it before he had the mono. I wonder if it could have made him more susceptible to colds?

Now on the 6th day he is really doing well this morning. It is amazing how much more awake and how much more energy he has; he is almost like a different person. He did have a setback a couple of days ago after I tried making some bread and I don't think it was cooked enough so that the yeast was killed and his stomach bothered him the next day (gluten doesn't seem to bother his stomach, it just makes him tired, so I don't think it was from contamination of the pan). I think I need to use a smaller pan. The large pan I used to use for wheat bread just makes too big a gluten free loaf to cook properly and the loaf was gummy even though I followed the directions for cooking. I bought some Udi's bread yesterday (I noticed they use a small pan) and he did fine with that.

I know that Udi's isn't McDougall, but I am not as concerned about him being 100% McDougall at his age and weight. He eats McDougall for a lot of his food, though. I am going to try making McDougall compliant gluten free pizza myself, now that I know that yeast isn't a problem, it just needs to be cooked enough and a thin pizza crust shouldn't be too hard to cook properly.

Udi's is my son's favorite store bought bread. I've made some at home with the Bette Hagman recipes, and although he got tired of it for a while, he now says he likes it again. It has bean flour in it so needs to be baked in smaller loaves or, like I like to do it, in hamburger buns. I got some of the English muffin rings and put those on parchment lined pans and scoop the batter in with a muffin scoop, flatten with dampened fingers.

I would like to find a good bread recipe that I could make that was brown rice flour and less of the bean flour though. The King Arthur stuff is nice, but I haven't had good success with it when I omit oil and eggs.

I find low fat vegan gluten free baking really tough. I've had some real flops. Never tried to make bread. I can't take the disappointment right now. For bread I will sometimes make a batch of pancakes from either chick pea flour or quinoa pancake mix (Gogo Quinoa). It works. The sandwiches are round, but I kinda like that.

RRC

Wow, I can see we are really going to have to be careful. He has had two days where he was tired since we started and I just realized today that it was because I had gotten some soy milk that has barley malt in it and the tired days came after he had some of the soy milk, not even very much of it! I was thinking that since his symptoms aren't very pronounced and the only symptom really is tiredness, that a tiny amount of gluten wouldn't have much effect, but it does. I now have quite a bit of gluten free bread stocked up in the freezer, and bean burritos with corn tortillas have become a staple item.

If he has Celiac, even a tiny amount will cause a reaction. The only outward sign is tiredness but inside all kinds of things are happening. If he has Celiac then his body will be attacking itself, flattening the villi in his intestinal track to protect itself from the gluten, making it difficult to absorb key nutrients such as iron and calcium and folate among others. This leads to all kinds of systemic problems of which the tiredness can be a sign. This can go on for years without any overt symptom such as gut pain, gas, bloating etc.

The safety of gluten free products is measured at below 20 parts per million, and some people suggest it should be even lower. From Living Without magazine: one part per million is equal to: one penny in $10,000, one minute in two years, one dime in a mile-high stack of pennies, four drops of ink in a 55-gallon barrel of water, one milligram in a thousand grams.

Those amounts are not even measurable. There really is no safety in just a little bit of gluten.

RRC

Thanks, RRC. We don't know if he has Celiac or not, but I don't think we will get him tested because it won't make any difference in what we do. We realize that we have to completely remove gluten from his diet. Since this last trouble was caused by barley malt we know it isn't just a wheat allergy; it must be gluten. Since the tiredness is so frustrating for him he is very compliant and has no wish to eat items with gluten even though he can still function OK in most ways, except for his music studies, and he doesn't have any of the really nasty symptoms.