If you are unaware of what gluten is, it’s a protein found in wheat. Many people will say their kids have been tested by an allergist, but they don’t test all aspects of your immune system against all the proteins in wheat. They may only test IGM or IGE response and not even look into an IGG response which is also an inflammatory response to gluten. They could also not be sensitive to gluten but could be sensitive to another protein such as wheat germ or wheat bran. So, unless the tests taken have ruled out responses to IGE, IGM, IGG, and all other response testing, you really don’t know if they have a sensitivity or allergy to wheat.
This is why I focus on elimination diets when it comes to diet modification. If you remove the food for 2-3 weeks and you see symptomatic improvement and then you reintroduce that food and see symptoms come back or worsen, you know that they are sensitive to gluten. I do this a lot with kids in our office, the majority get put on elimination diets with gluten, dairy, eggs, or all of the above for a period of time and then I re-examine their brain in 2-3 weeks on the diet and see massive changes in how their brain functions. Their eyes start to track better, their balance has improved, their primitive reflexes start to go away, and their behaviors and learning improve, all when we remove those foods. It typically all stems from gluten.
Let’s get into the reason why gluten seems to be a big issue in kids. Usually, kids that are sensitive to gluten have a “leaky gut”. If we compare food from 50 years ago to food today, our food has a much higher concentration of gluten. Gluten is a protein that makes things stickier, and it tastes good, so food processing companies put lots of gluten into different foods to make the food more addictive. When we eat gluten, our bodies release gluteal morphine. So, when you eat gluten, your body releases morphine into your system, which makes it highly addictive. This is why kids are so highly addicted to processed wheat containing foods. It’s not really the food they are addicted to, but they are addicted to the response of morphine their body gets from eating gluten. The same thing happens with a protein in milk or dairy called casein. While kids are addicted to the morphine release from these foods, their bodies are struggling to break down something that is not easy to digest which leads to gut inflammation. This gut inflammation can lead to the breakdown of the guts lining, where we get what is known as “leaky gut”.
Limitless Child 