Is Gluten Making You Moody? 

I decided to give up gluten last year during my elimination diet to figure out what was making me so sick. Turns out, it was dairy. But just for a second, let me turn this car around.

Because guess what? Even though I didn’t feel the same severity of effects with gluten, it never made me feel good. I’ve always felt heavy and anxious after a high gluten meal.

When I expressed this, I was met with some criticism.

I blame that on the fact that going gluten-free has become a huge trend over the last couple of years. Perhaps I appeared was simply ‘paranoid’, or maybe it looked like I was jumping on the bandwagon.

But just ask my boyfriend: it’s real. And sometimes my reaction is so severe I can be reduced to tears, only hours after eating gluten, with no explanation why. I just know I feel upset and that my gut doesn’t feel right.

Also I want to ask: isn’t it possible that this is a trend for a reason? Are some people not noticing that they simply feel better without it? And I’m not talking about celiacs, who absolutely and undisputed have a allergy to it.

Anyways, gluten never made me feel right. So forget what people are saying; what does science have to say?

Well, science has a name for my experience: Non Celiac Gluten Sensitivity. NCGS has been studied in relation to some psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, as well as irritable bowel syndrome. NCGS is not uncommon, but it is more frequently self-diagnosed, as there is no standardized test for gluten sensitivity. Self-diagnosis is usually determined through an elimination diet.

But truth be told, I couldn’t find much regarding the relationship between any other disorders, aside from the aforementioned. Another study I found tried to link gluten sensitivity to depressive disorders, but simply concluded that although promising more studies were needed to support this theory.

So perhaps the science just isn’t there yet. As for my own personal opinion, I’m going for my gut with this one: gluten just doesn’t sit well with me.

What about you guys? Can you tolerate gluten, or does it make you moody?

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Non-Celiac Gluten sensitivity: the new frontier of gluten related disorders. Nutrients. 2013 Sep 26;5(10):3839-53. doi: 10.3390/nu5103839.