Many people suffer from abdominal pain, fatigue and weight loss due to the inability to properly digest and absorb minerals and vitamins from their food.
It is important to note that celiac symptoms can affect practically every system in the body. For instance, your joints, hormones and skin can be adversely affected. Acid reflux and heartburn is a common occurrence, which can lead to vomiting and eventually cause ulceration inside of the mouth.
Strangely enough, some people discover they have celiac disease by visiting the doctor with what seems to be an unrelated issue at the time, such as anemia.
Once you have been diagnosed with celiac disease, it is forever. Adopting a gluten free diet is important in order to avoid long term health complications. For instance, there has been a link to a higher incidence of certain kinds of cancer with celiac disease.
Thankfully, the majority of your symptoms typically resolve by following a strict gluten-free diet. The majority of your gastrointestinal symptoms will disappear once you adapt to eating gluten free foods and are no longer irritating your intestinal lining.
Many patients report huge improvement in additional minor ailments. There are many symptoms that are associated with celiac that are not intuitively connected by the patient. An example is that sufferers skin conditions often improve after eliminating gluten from the diet.
Celiac disease affects people differently and remission will also vary from patient to patient.
Sometimes, even those individuals who religiously follow a gluten-free diet may continue to suffer from specific symptoms their entire life such as osteoporosis or irritable bowel syndrome.
This is due of course to the damage incurred prior to removing gluten from the diet.
Gluten Sensitivity or Intolerance
Many people are discovering that they suffer from some level of gluten sensitivity or even a complete intolerance. It is vital to stop consuming foods that contain gluten if this is your reality. The majority of baked goods such as breads, pizza dough, bagels, muffins, cakes, cookies etc. have copious amounts of gluten.
Many of these foods consist of simple carbohydrates and may form a large part of the regular diet. When a gluten-free diet is undertaken, many people with Celiac Disease find that they lose weight as better food types are consumed.
Celiac Disease and Malnutrition
It is also common for many undiagnosed individuals with Celiac Disease to be quite thin due to the malnutrition their body has suffered. This can be in spite of consuming reasonable or even large quantities of foods regularly.
The gluten they consume on a regular basis interferes with their intestinal lining and inhibits their ability to absorb nutrients, vitamins and minerals from their diet. Instead, they simply excrete these needed substances through their stool.
Over time, they may suffer from stunted growth; have low bone density and seemingly unrelated neurological problems. This obviously proves to be problematic on numerous levels and they can become quite ill and rundown as a result.
Thankfully, once the diagnosis is made and a gluten-free diet adopted, many health improvements can be noticed in very short term, providing the diet is sustained.
