Will Gluten-Free Make You Feel Better?

Marcos Castillo/Shutterstock

Controlled studies show that healthy athletes do not improve because of gluten-free diets (Med Sci Sports Exerc, 2015;47:2563-2570), yet as many as 60 percent of North Americans believe that a gluten-free diet will make them feel better (Dig Dis Sci, 2014;59:1080-1082). The $4 billion gluten-free food industry bombards us with:

• paid advertisements from athletes implying that they won events because they gave up gluten, • celebrities who say they feel better on a gluten-free diet and • overweight people who claim that they lost huge amounts of weight on gluten-free diets.

Health Benefits From Gluten

Gluten is a chemical in wheat, rye and barley that causes about two percent of North Americans to become sick: those with celiac disease or gluten allergies. In spite of all its bad publicity from authors of popular diet books, gluten may actually offer health benefits to the remainder of the population. Gluten may: