Coeliac disease and DH

Explaining my diet gets very tedious, so I thought I'd write a blog about it and put it all down in one place. Also, it's lovely when you say the word and people comprehend, it saves long explanations every time.

"Coeliac disease"
The name given to coeliac disease varies depending on the individual or the country you're in - Brits spell it with an O, and Americans spell it celiac (which makes more sense really, seeing as that's much nearer the pronunciation - see-lee-ack - but we just like to complicate matters). Other people call is coeliac sprue but I've never met anyone who says that. Being British myself, I spell it with the O, but it's all the same thing.

Auto-immune disorders
I often refer to my coeliac as an 'allergy' because people are more familiar with this word, but technically speaking my only 'allergies' are to gold and pollen; coeliac disease is actually an auto-immune disorder, meaning it's my immune system that damages my body when I eat something I can't, rather than my body reacting to the 'invasion' itself.

Gluten
The first question is usually "why can't you eat that?" and the second is invariably "what exactly is it you can't you eat then?"
Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, though most people don't recognise that word so my usual answer to question two is 'wheat'. Wheat is the grain that crops up most often anyway, and is the one that the majority of flours are made with. When you grind the grain down to make flour, the gluten is ground in with the rest of the grain, which causes the problem with wheat flour.
Some products marked 'gluten-free' are not wheat free. The gluten is found in the very middle of the wheat grain, and it is possible to remove it, leaving you with de-glutanised wheat. Some coealics can tolerate this, but others can't have even the tiniest bit of gluten in their diet.
Similarly, a lot of products which are 'wheat-free' are not gluten-free.
There is debate over whether coeliacs can handle oats in their diet, but as oat products are generally manufactured in factories full of wheat, rye and barley, if you're sensitive to gluten to general consensus is no. Personally the one time I ate oats I was really ill so I don't eat them.

My intestine vs. your intestine
Probably the easiest way to put it, assuming you have a healthy intestine of course.
If you've ever done the biology lessons on how the intestine absorbs the nutrients from food, you might remember the 'finger like protrusions' described thus in a lot of text books. They're called villi and they're there to increase the surface area of the small intestine to get as much from the food you eat as possible.
When I eat gluten, my immune system attacks the villi in my intestine which causes the damage. Doctors used to think the gluten itself wore away at the tissue - like sand paper - but we know more now.

Symptoms
The symptoms coeliacs experience when they eat gluten are very varied and chop and change a lot, sometimes making it hard to work out if you're feeling ill because of something you ate or you're due a period etc. When I was younger it was easier, but there was less possible causes for it then and the effects were worse.
The general list are:
-fatigue
-interchangeable diarrhoea and constipation
-pain in the abdomen and sometimes the base of the spine
-low mood
-mood swings

Undiagnosed coeliac disease can lead to rapid weight loss, dissinterest in food, reccurant miscarriage or difficulty to conceive, stunted growth and huge tantrums in children, and weakness and joint pain.

If I eat something I can't, it can take a couple of weeks to have an affect on my body, and it'll then take me about 2 weeks to fully recover. I get weak and ache a lot, but with lots of sleep it'll clear up soon enough.

Coeliacs are often misdiagnosed with IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), because the symptoms can be quite similar, but how your body reacts and possibly what it's reacting to are different.

Secondary effects
Living with coeliac itself is fine if you follow the diet, it's living with what it brings with it that make an impact day-to-day. With a damaged intestine comes a difficulty to absorb nutrients from food, leading to problems such as anaemia and osteoporosis in later life. Coealics are encouraged to eat a lot of dairy to give themselves the best possible chance of absorbing enough to keep their bones strong. I also take 600mg of ferrous sulphate (iron supplement) a day, which sounds a lot, but I don't get a lot of it taken in. Untreated iron deficiency leads to feeling exhausted and low all the time, and gives you the attention span on a gnat.
Coeliac disease also gives you a suppressed immune system, making it harder to fight off infections and viruses, so I have a pretty much constant cold. Breathing through the nose is a luxury.
If you live with untreated coeliac disease, the damage to your small intestine can give you an increased chance of developing cancers of the intestines, but once the gut has been given time to repair itself the risk falls back down to that of someone without coeliac disease.

DH
The DH in the title of the blog stands for dermatitis herpetaformis, which is a similar condition to coeliac disease in that it is caused by the reaction of the intestine to gluten, but people with DH come out in an itchy red rash when they eat something they can't tolerate.

...and now Coeliac UK can thank me for raising awareness yay. \o/