Last year I was diagnosed with a food allergy.  The condition is celiac disease, which is an intolerance to anything containing gluten (which is anything made from wheat). Celiac disease is one of a number of food allergies that seem to be causing more and more people problems.   Food producers are responding to the issue, and one of the grocery stores I shop at now has several shelves devoted to gluten-free products.

Because I’m only just now seeing lots of gluten-free products I assumed that celiac disease is a relatively new phenomenon.  However, as Emily Abel points out in her article “The Rise and Fall of Celiac Disease in the United States” (in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, January 2010), the condition received lots of press back in the early to mid-20th century, with help from (of all people) banana companies.  It then fell into obscurity to the point where European doctors were asking why there were so few cases in America.  All of the information in this article is from Abel’s article.

Although public knowledge of celiac disease dates to an 1888 paper written by an Englishman named Samuel Gee (who termed it “coeliac affliction,”), that paper was not popularized in America until after an American doctor named Christian Herter began investigating the disease.  In 1908 Herter published a book that explored the disease in babies, On Infantilism from Chronic Intestinal Infection.  Celiac disease was first noticed by pediatricians because at the time most infant deaths resulted from digestive problems, so researchers paid particular attention to those sorts of problems in babies, and because development of children with the disease lagged far behind other children, making it quite apparent something was wrong with those children.  Herter was instrumental in opening a hospital that specialized in treating celiac disease, among other illnesses, but Herter died only two months after the hospital opened and treating celiac disease rapidly faded from the hospital’s attention.

In those days, though, “treatment” of celiac disease was quite a primitive thing.  It was obvious that children with the disease had a problem—they were often physically smaller than other children that age, and malnourished.  However, the cause was a complete mystery, mainly because gluten hadn’t yet been discovered as a part of food.  By 1900, researchers were aware that food could be divided into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and they knew that food contained energy that could be measured as calories, but beyond that they were groping in the dark.  Gluten is in wheat products, which means it’s usually in carbohydrates, so by the early 20th century researchers concluded that celiac disease was really carbohydrate intolerance.

By the 1920s doctors recommended a diet with three distinct stages.  In the first stage, the patient ate what was essentially curds and whey, the stuff that eventually becomes cheese.  The second stage had the patient switch to an all-meat diet, heavy on eggs.  The third stage reintroduced all other foods, including (unfortunately for the patient) foods including wheat.  The third stage was notorious for not working well.

Soon afterwards, though, an American doctor came along with what he thought was the perfect diet to help people with celiac disease.  It was helpful, and very popular, but it was also very, very boring.  I’ll write more about that diet on Friday, and I’ll talk about how banana companies helped make celiac disease a fairly well-known problem by the 1950s.  Check back then.