Identifying the Origin of Your Gluten Allergy Symptoms

When trying to improve your health, you need to eliminate any possible food allergies or any food intolerance causing an autoimmune response in your system. A common yet often undiagnosed set of variables result in gluten allergy symptoms. If you're interested in the role of gluten in your life, first you need to determine if you are suffering from a wheat allergy or a gluten intolerance.

What Is A Wheat Allergy?

If you have a wheat allergy, when you eat wheat you experience an almost immediate allergic reaction. Sometimes that allergic reaction can be difficult to identify while other times it can be severe. Your body perceives wheat in its system and attempts to isolate and eliminate it. This is different from what happens in a gluten intolerance situation.

Once you have isolated your condition to being a wheat allergy, you can probably get away with just avoiding wheat products. You do not have to hunt down every trace of gluten in your diet like someone must do if he or she has celiac disease.

What Is A Gluten Intolerance?

Gluten intolerance, or its clinical name, celiac disease, is an autoimmune disease, not an allergy. This means when you consume gluten, that gluten triggers your body to attack itself. While the results of this autoimmune response can be severe, it can take a long time for those results appear, sometimes even years. So don't mistake a gluten intolerance for a wheat allergy. An allergy is not an autoimmune disease.

The autoimmune disease family includes conditions like multiple sclerosis and diabetes. Understanding celiac disease's relation to those diseases helps you understand how different from a wheat allergy it is. Like with a gluten intolerance, these diseases also feature a leaky gut and raised antibody levels.

Treating a gluten intolerance is much more difficult than treating an allergy to wheat. In addition to eliminating wheat from your diet, you must also eliminate rye, barley and spelt. And to make it even worse, you must also watch various food labels closely because gluten is often used to help give sauces and similar foods texture. It can even be used in vitamins and over-the-counter drugs as a filler or binder. All products using gluten in this way must be avoided.

What Next?

Now that you can distinguish between a wheat allergy and a gluten intolerance, what do you do if you are afraid you are suffering gluten allergy symptoms as a result of one of these conditions? You go to your doctor and discuss the matter with him or her!

A bad allergy can cause more severe reactions than you may realize and gluten intolerance, if left untreated, can have dire long-term consequences.