Besides being in this forum, I also subscribe to a few email mailing lists focusing on celiac disease. In one of these mailing lists the subject of oats was brought up this week.
I chimed in with a message to the effect that some scientific studies had found that eating oats caused no harm to the people that completed the studies. I also mentioned that I eat oats without any apparent consequences, apart from a very satisfied feeling in my gut. I usually mix in some frsh or cannned fruit, by the way.
A lady replied to my message, warning me that I was putting my health at risk by eating oats, and asserting that celiac.com says we (celiacs) should not eat oats.
I do not doubt at all that this well meaning lady did in fact see such a message on celiac.com. I myself have seen the warning to avoid oats on a number of websites, possibly including celiac.com.
So I decided to try to shed more light on the subject by injecting more facts into our conversation. That's really the story of my life, exposing more facts to solve the problem.
So I went to Google because, as everybody knows, Google knows everything. I searched for +celiac +oats +study hoping to finds the details of one of the many studies on this subject.
The second hit in the search results led to celiac.com. It was an artiucle about a 5 year medical study that concluded oats were safe for people with celiac disease. Here is the link:
http://www.celiac.com/st_prod.html?p_prodid=207So here we have a case where the very source used to refute my claim about oats being OK for me, also provided a reference to a scientific study that found oats are OK for me.
Here is my point, don't believe everything that you here about the celiac diet. Be skeptical. Nothing is better for your physical and mental health, in my opinion, then being skeptical about every absolute statement that you hear.
By the way, more recent studies than the one referenced on celiac.com have found that there are inded some celiacs that cannot tolerate oats. see this article:
http://my.webmd.com/content/article/95/103344.htmThe current consensus seems to be that some celiacs can tolerate oats while others can not.
Steve
