001 grain brain the surprising truth about wheat, carbs, and sugar your brain's silent killers

At the time, however, no one could pinpoint which ingredient was the culprit, so recommendations in dietary changes in search of a cure were far from accurate. Dr. Gee, for example, banned fruits and vegetables, which wouldn’t have posed a problem, but allowed thin slices of toasted bread. He was particularly moved by the curing of a child “who was fed upon a quart of the best Dutch mussels daily,” but who relapsed when the season of mussels was over (perhaps the child went back to eating toast). In the United States, the first discussion of the disorder was published in 1908 when Dr. Christian Herter wrote a book about children with celiac disease, which he called “intestinal infantilism.” As others had noted previously, he wrote that these children failed to thrive and added that they tolerated fat better than carbohydrate.

Then, in 1924, Dr. Sidney V. Haas, an American pediatrician, reported positive effects of a diet of bananas. (Obviously, bananas weren’t the cause of the improvement, but rather, the banana diet happened to exclude gluten.)

While it’s hard to imagine such a diet enduring the test of time, it remained popular until the actual cause of celiac could be determined and confirmed. And this would take another couple of decades, until the 1940s when the Dutch pediatrician Dr. Willem Karel Dicke made the connection to wheat flour. By then, carbohydrates in general had long been suspected, but not until a cause-and-effect observation could be made with wheat in particular did we see the direct connection. And how was this discovery actually made? During the Dutch famine of 1944, bread and flour were scarce, and Dr. Dicke noticed that there was a dramatic decrease in the death rate among children affected by celiac— from greater than 35 percent to virtually zero. Dr. Dicke also reported that once wheat was again available, the mortality rate rose to previous levels. Finally, in 1952, a team of doctors from Birmingham, England, including Dr. Dicke, made the link between the ingestion of wheat proteins and celiac disease when they examined samples of intestinal mucosa taken from surgical patients. The introduction of the small bowel biopsy in the 1950s and ’60s confirmed the gut as a target organ. (To be fair, I should note that historical experts have debated whether or not Dicke’s earlier anecdotal observations in the Netherlands were