I try to remain open-minded about Dr. Oz but wow sometimes I see things on his website that make me think “uh-oh”.

So today I saw this under the heading “The Gluten-Free Diet Plan”:

“It’s a surprising statistic, but a study found that 81% of people suffering from celiac disease (gluten intolerance) who followed a gluten-free diet gained weight. That’s because there is a common misconception that anything labeled “gluten-free” must be good for you.”

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/gluten-free-diet-plan

That’s not the reason most Celiac patients gain weight. What they fail to tell you is the majority of patients that truly have diagnosable Celiac Disease suffer from malabsorption. So they can’t absorb nutrients such as vitamin D, iron and often suffer from chronic diarrhea. My mother is a fine example. She is lucky now to weigh over 100 lbs. She would never go gluten-free despite a positive test for antibodies to Gliadin because a gastroenterologist did a biopsy from one site of her small intestine that was read as normal. It’s recommended now to biopsy 9 sites but we didn’t know that then. My mother now is 4′ 10″. She used to be 5′ 4″ and weighed 135 -145 lbs.

If she had gone “gluten-free” before losing more than a couple inches of height and 30 lbs of weight she very well could have maintained or even gained weight. So the reason most Celiac disease sufferers gain weight when they go gluten-free is not due to lack of reserve when it comes to eating gluten-free food, it’s because now they absorb all they eat after their intestines heal.

I’m just saying.