Against The Grain

As many as 100,000 New Zealanders, many of them undiagnosed, are afflicted by coeliac disease. But treatments are on the horizon.

- Nicky Pellegrino

Saturday night was always pizza night for Jules Armishaw and her family. Sunday mornings were far less fun. “I’d be an emotional wreck,” she recalls. She felt extreme tiredness. “Crying, mood swings. I couldn’t work out why.”

After the birth of her second child, the Auckland make-up artist and stylist was so bone-tired that a doctor suggested testing for coeliac disease. Armishaw discovered her blood markers for the condition were skyhigh. Gluten was her worst enemy and she had been poisoning herself with all that pizza.

That was about 13 years ago. “Looking back 20 years, if I ate bakery food I’d feel terrible. Pies or doughnuts left a metallic taste in my mouth. I just assumed it was the same for everyone,” she says.

It actually is the same for many people. Wheat, rye, barley and to a lesser extent oats cause gut problems for about 1% to 2% of the population. It’s estimated that in this country 65,000 people are unaware they have it, some because they aren’t showing signs, others because the symptoms are so diverse the condition hasn’t been diagnosed.

This is a problem, because gluten damages the small intestines of coeliac sufferers. Biopsies show their villi – finger-shaped outgrowths of the epithelial lining of the intestinal wall – have disappeared or flattened, dramatically reducing the surface area that absorbs nutrients from food.

The nutritional deficit that results is obvious, but in the longer term this can lead to other complications: early-onset osteoporosis, infertility and miscarriage, liver failure and even cancer.