Where does gluten intolerance really come from? It turns out the genes that cause it can be tracked down to northern Europe. Peter Green, the director of Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University, explains the myths surrounding gluten-free diets. Following is a transcript of the video.
I'm Peter Green. I'm the director of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University.
Celiac disease is actually a disease of Caucasians. The genes that are involved in celiac disease are northern European genes.
Now, they've been spread all around the world, but if you look at which ethnic groups have celiac disease, it's much less common in black people and Asian except South Asian. In the study that we did, the ethnic group with the greatest prevalence of celiac disease in this country was individuals from Northern India.
It's common but there is an ethnic predilection for it to be in Caucasians.
So to have celiac disease, you've got to be ingesting gluten, and 99% of us are doing that and you got to have these particular northern European genes, and 40% of us have those genes yet only 1% have celiac disease so that suggests that there are environmental factors and other genes, about 30 other genes have been described that can be factors in the development of celiac disease.
But we think environmental factors are very important.
There are a whole number of risk factors like antibiotics, PPI or the proton pump acid-reducing drugs, being born by cesarean section increases the risk.
We need to do a lot more research to define what the risk factors are and then the mechanism of that so that we can prevent this increase in celiac disease that has been observed over the last 50 years worldwide.