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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

My hot take: a bunch of shitty gluten free food products have displaced better, cheaper, quality food. The people who think they are gluten intolerant are worse off, the people who are gluten tolerant are worse off, and the .5% of actual celiac sufferers are better off.

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I mistakenly thought that I was better off not eating gluten because I felt much better after going gluten free. I am now fairly sure that the real benefit I experienced came from reducing my sugar intake. Cutting out gluten tends to cut out sugar in tandem: breakfast cereal, cookies, cake, and so on. I wonder if this explains why so many people who aren’t celiac think they see a big benefit from a gluten-free diet. Lots of Americans are flirting with diabetes if they aren’t already diabetic. (And lots of sugar isn’t great for a person even if they are completely healthy.)

I'm pretty sure that's it. But good luck explaining this to a believer.

Gluten is an important dietary protein source for vegetarians and vegans.

What makes it important?

Isn't protein really easy to get from veges? Like chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, quinoa, edamame, lentils, etc

It's crazy to me how all of these examples are either legumes or legume derivatives, and the one exception (quinoa) actually isn't a very good source of protein.

Autistic persons may get complications from eating gluten, because it may not break down completely and instead forms gliadorphin (gluteomorphin), which is a morphine peptide. It causes damage to intestinal villi and reduces gut motility, hiding the damage.

That is theorised to happen to anybody, not just autistic people, and might be the cause of the IBS epidemic and so many people diagnosing themselves as gluten intolerant even if they're not full blown coeliac.

Nobody forces you to buy the gluten-free pasta or whatever, so I can't see how things are worse for the people who neither have nor believe themselves to have Celiac disease.

Yeah, I don’t know what this is about. You can buy stuff with gluten in it. But I can kind of see it as if you had 99 things that meet your preference and 1 thing that doesn’t, then when you move to a world with 900 things that meet your preference and 100 that don’t, you see that as 9% of things being displaced rather than you having additional 801 things.

In fact, I shall call this the Percentage Bias. The Percentage Bias is when you allege displacement by looking at alterations in ratios without looking at alterations in total amounts.

It does come off as a bit kneejerk, huh. There's this like, cultural thing where folks just get mad at people who do things they don't understand, especially when they perceive it as 'dumb'.

My question to that is; why on earth do you care what other people choose to do and why? I get that there was an argument made here to that effect, but for real, nobody is suffering from other people eating less gluten. I know I'm not and I love me a good bagel.

Aside from the pandemic years, which are outliers, food has been consistently getting drastically cheaper for decades:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditure-seri...

What actual spreadsheet are you looking at? "Constant dollar food and alcohol expenditures, with taxes and tips, for all purchasers"? Because expenditure grew.

Look at the FAO food price index, and you see it only decreased since 2010-ish, but on average since 1961 prices grew to roughly match inflation.

https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/hom...

https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/

I am gluten tolerant and my life was absolutely totally unaffected.

Can you give one example?

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