Want a verdict on gluten-free diets? You won’t find it in a study

As a dietitian, I get asked all the time, “Where do you stand on gluten-free diets?”

I take issue with blaming gluten for what ails us.

I take issue with saying gluten-free diets aren’t helpful for anyone who doesn’t have celiac disease.

But most of all, I take issue with all the hype and misinformation out there.

A recently published Harvard study drew some pretty dramatic headlines. It seems that going glutenfree could increase your risk for coronary heart disease, clearly the opposite effect that health seekers are hoping for.

But as with many nutrition studies, the results weren’t quite as groundbreaking as the headlines implied. For example: “If You Want to Avoid Heart Disease, Don’t Even Think of Going Gluten-Free” and “Gluten-free diet should not be eaten by people who are not coeliac, say scientists.”

If you take a look at the study, what the researchers actually say is that a gluten-free diet for people who don’t have celiac disease “should not be encouraged.” That’s quite different from saying it shouldn’t be followed at all. Avoiding gluten isn’t necessarily a health choice; it all depends on what you substitute it with. But gluten-free diets could help a small group of people who don’t have celiac disease, and we need to be open-minded to that.

After examining the study results, we can’t say much about the link between gluten and heart disease risk. This research looked at selfreported data from food frequency questionnaires for more than 100,000 men and women from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and the Nurses’ Health Study collected every four years over an average of 26 years. When the researchers looked at the link between estimated gluten intake and whether the person had a heart attack during the study period, the effect of gluten wasn’t significant.

The researchers then controlled for heart disease risk factors using statistical models. If someone was a smoker or overweight, for example, they controlled for that, canceling out the effect that factor would have on heart disease risk to isolate the effect of gluten. Then the researchers tried controlling for refined grain intake, meaning they were really looking at the link between whole-grain gluten intake and heart disease risk. Only then did they find a statistically significant trend between higher (whole-grain) gluten intake and lower risk of heart disease.

Eating more whole grains instead of refined grains is a good move for your heart, and whether they contain gluten or not is up to you. I’d also argue that now that gluten-free whole grains such as millet, quinoa and buckwheat are more readily available, saying that gluten-free diets are low in whole grains is no longer a fair assumption.