But although I rarely get blank stares, I do sometimes catch sardonic looks exchanged between staff. When my wife explained his condition to one chef, he replied: "Oh so he actually can't eat gluten then. Most people, when I show them the allergy menu, change their minds and ask for something off the normal one."

So check it: my wife doesn't have celiac disease. She is not lactose intolerant. HOWEVER, when she eats too much wheat or dairy she gets massive flare-ups of eczema. This was determined by

(1) Eating a normal diet most of her life and dealing with pretty bad eczema

(2) Taking a $400 allergy blood panel that determined she was pretty well allergic to wheat and dairy

(3) Completely eliminating wheat and dairy from her diet and having her eczema disappear

(4) Eating pizza once every six months because that was about all her skin could handle

That's been since about 2006. Her tolerance of gluten and dairy went up over time; by the time she was pregnant in 2012 she could eat gluten once or twice a month without issue. Pregnancy suppressed her autoimmune reactions, as it often does, and she ended up being able to eat wheat and dairy without problems. Important to note: she still avoids it most of the time so she's not really testing things but it's safe to say that post-pregnancy her sensitivity has gone down (but not disappeared).

My daughter, on the other hand, is very sensitive to gluten (but not dairy). One wheat pancake and she's scratching at her hands for two days. In this house, only daddy eats "itchy bread." I figure as a two-year-old there isn't a whole lot of psychosomatic placebo effect stuff going on, especially since her reaction to wheat is about as speedy as her reaction to peanuts, and nobody gives us shit for saying our daughter is sensitive to peanuts.

But articles like this? yeah, this is pretty much our experience. "Oh, you don't eat gluten? You must be some fad-centric follower of Gwennyth or some such bullshit, you dirty hippy. Oh, and you're a naturopath, too? here, have some death threats courtesy /r/skeptic."

Something that isn't mentioned much is that wheat has experienced radical amounts of selective breeding over the past 50 years in order to maximize the amount of gluten in grains. More gluten, more shelf-stable bread products. The more gluten you have, the more durable your bread and the less flour you have to use. The Chinese in particular have been growing robustly high-gluten wheat, which a lot of mainstream bakeries are using. We had an interesting experience back in 2008 or so when my wife made cookies using some crazy-high-end single-batch $7/lb local flour. It didn't do anything to exacerbate her allergies. n of 1 and all that, but it was an interesting data point.

Part of the problem, I think, is that much of the demonization of gluten is just an extension of the demonization of carbs, which is accurate when you're dealing with sedentary people that don't need the energy burst carbs give you. Unfortunately people don't really cotton to the whole "calories in = energy available" equation and they make it up on sugar and fat, as the article indicates.

But there is a real problem where if you aren't celiac you're a poseur and worthy of scorn.