Hi, It's Eric Bakker the Naturopath.
Thanks for coming back.
If you see me sniffing, I've got a bit of a head cold at the moment, so I do apologize
about that.
It's winter time.
Don't worry, I'm pretty sure you're two meters away.
Don't worry, it's not COVID, all right?
Now, next question we got from a subscriber who has celiac disease.
Eric what do I eat?
I've got celiac disease.
Is it possible to heal my celiacs?
What can I do to control my celiacs?
Well, I retired in November last year.
I'm too old for practice really now.
And I've seen many celiacs over the years.
After 34 years, I saw a lot of celiac patients.
And not only did I see them, I actually diagnosed several of them.
Now, how would I diagnose a celiac patient?
Well, you can spot a non-diagnosed celiac, pretty easy.
They look wasted away.
Some of them look like they've come out of a concentration camp.
That you could literally see the bones, and skinny.
And it surprises me how many I've seen several that weren't even properly tested for celiac
disease.
They didn't have the biopsy, right?
The doctor just assumed that they had some gut problem.
It sounds almost sick and twisted, but it's true.
I've seen cases like that where they weren't tested for celiacs.
They were put on antidepressants.
They were put on all kinds of junk, but they were not properly, really thoroughly researched
to see what was wrong with it.
So now we know better but back in the '80s and '90s, it was still a bit sort of the Wild
West as far as celiacs was concerned.
Now celiacs is a rare disease, okay.
It's less than 2%, I think.
It's a very, very, very small portion of people who've got this.
So what is celiacs disease?
Well, it's an autoimmune disease where your body actually can't handle any kind of form
of gluten at all.
The gluten actually will slowly start destroying the small intestine.
And by the time the person's in their 30s, they could literally die if they haven't been
diagnosed properly.
I've picked up people mainly when they were quite young.
I saw it very early on.
I remember one boy who was five or six, who had been to the doctor multiple times, put
on antibiotics.
They thought he had bowel infections, but he was a celiac.
So when I carefully went over the diet with the mother, it was quite obvious now that
this boy had celiac.
You could see it by the way he was eating and the presentation.
And then we did stool testing and a lot more things became apparent then.
We sent him off to a special pediatrician.
He got tested, and celiac.
And then you can definitely notice the weight coming on there when the gluten was taken
out.
But I'll tell you guys, too many people are jumping on the no gluten bandwagon.
I've seen so many people take gluten out of their diet, every tiny little piece of it,
because they thought it was going to cause them a problem.
In most cases, it doesn't cause you a problem, okay?
Unless you're eating ridiculous of gluten in your diet, you're going to get a problem.
It all depends on the state of your digestive system.
If you've got a very good gut like me, you can handle gluten, you can handle meat, you
can handle the occasional soda.
You can handle a lot of stuff, right?
But you can't pepper the body with 10 slices of bread a day and expect not to pay the price.
Any different that you can't expect to have 10 beers a day, or 10 spinach sundaes, or
whatever you guys drink out there, or three kale shakes every morning.
There was some guy recently in the media, some sports star who stuffed his kidneys up.
I think he was drinking spinach drinks every morning, and he got oxalates.
So he got kidney stones.
I mean, common sense is not common, right?
Now, what was the question again?
Celiac.
So if you are a celiac and you're being diagnosed as celiac, okay, there's no doubt you can't
have gluten.
It's a non-brainer.
But can you have rolled oats?
Yes, you can.
I've been telling people with celiacs for 20 plus years that rolled oats is fine, and
I've been shot in the foot for it so many times.
But now I'm finally starting to see on the internet they're saying that moderate amounts
of rolled oats is fine for a celiac, providing the rolled oats hasn't been contaminated.
So what do I mean by contaminated?
Oats don't have gluten guys, okay.
Oats can contain gluten if they've been packaged with machinery where wheat came in before.
That's where the contamination occurs.
But there are manufacturers who only work with oats and not with gluten containing grains.
So then it will be a non ... You've got a non-gluten grain there, which is oats.
I love rolled oats.
I think it's one of the best foods you can have in the morning, especially winter time.
So do some more research if you're celiac.
The question is, can you heal the gut?
You can.
Can you reverse celiacs?
You can't.
What you can do is you can just keep working on the diet more and more, and refine that
diet.
And then if you have quite intelligent, if you really want to get an outstanding gut,
you do stool testing.
Why would you do stool testing if you're celiac?
Well you want to see what your microbiome, what the bacteria are doing in there, okay.
You want to know if you've got overgrowths.
If you've got too much Klebsiella, for example, a starch loving bacteria.
Have you got too much Klebsiella?
Let's look at the balance of Klebsiella versus other bacteria.
Have you got enough beneficial bacteria?
Are yeast starting to come up?
Have you got candida issues in the gut?
So if you start working slowly and fixing that up before it becomes a major problem,
you find your health will get better and better and better, and celiacs will be no problem
for you anymore, because you're avoiding gluten anyway.
But what you've done now is you've taken your bacterial gut balance to the next level.
You've improved it.
It's a bit like an old geezer like me, a 60 year old geezer, okay.
We'll say 60 year old motorcar is really working on that car slowly over a period of time,
rebuilding the engine and doing the chassis, the bodywork and an old thing can still function
perfectly well if it's maintained.
So that's the point I'm trying to make.
You've got to maintain the gut.
And you maintain the gut by correct ways of living, by correct ways of eating, but eating
properly, eating regularly, and good food regularly.
There's no secrets here.
It's common flipping sense, it really is.
So even a celiac can dig themselves out of the hole further and further until they're
literally on top of the hole, okay.
Likewise, a celiac can get a bigger shovel if they want and dig a hole so deep, they
can never get out again.
Especially if they don't look after their gut health.
I've seen some tragic cases of celiac.
One celiac patient passed away, I had, not that long ago in fact, because he didn't really
understand how he had to extremely be tough with gluten on himself.
So he'd occasionally eat sandwiches.
And this is a single guy, and it was a sad case.
Yeah.
So this is where the emotions really came in and messed everything up.
But you can avoid all that misery by not just avoiding gluten, by regularly assessing the
bowel, and the stool, and the gut comfort and working on refining that, taking it to
a higher level.
There's no reason why a celiac can't have a totally normal, perfectly normal life.
But the issue with a lot of celiacs in the old days, not so much now is they weren't
picked up until the person was up into their teens.
And then they had a lot of developmental delay issues, and that's really bad.
Because if the small bowel isn't working properly, and it's not working for all those years,
it's going to really affect how that person develops and grows, and turns into an adult,
and it's sad.
And I hate to see things like that.
So what to eat if you're celiacs.
You can eat everything, basically.
Meat, potatoes, vegetables, you just need to watch the gluten containing foods.
The fantastic thing for true celiacs today ... And a lot of you guys out there will think
you're celiac, but you're actually not diagnosed a celiac, okay.
Some people believe they've got celiacs, but they're not because gluten plays up on them.
Well, gluten can play up on anyone's gut.
You don't have to be a celiac for gluten to play up on you, right?
Does it make you gluten intolerant?
Yes, it may.
But it also means that you need to get your A into G. I'm not going to translate that.
You need to get yourself together and get your diet sorted, okay.
Because then you don't ... And not just your diet sorted properly, but as I said, do that
stool assessment to see what's messing up your gut, fix it, and you'll find that you
generally, you can have small amounts of gluten without an issue.
I still can't buy this theory from Fasano that even the tiniest amount of gluten will
destroy the gut and wreck it permanently.
I just can't buy that.
I've seen too many people for too long eat small amounts of gluten and live to very long,
ripe ages in many countries.
So sorry, can't buy it.
Anymore I can't buy the theory that tomatoes are going to kill you because of the lectins
and all this junk kind of stuff.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong, but 34 years of practice has told me that maybe I'm not wrong.
All right.
Have a good day.