Gluten-free products: arsenic instead of gluten
Larissa Melville completed her traineeship in the editorial team of . After studying biology at Ludwig Maximilians University and the Technical University of Munich, she first got to know digital media online at Focus and then decided to learn medical journalism from scratch.
More about the experts All content is checked by medical journalists.People with celiac disease cannot tolerate gluten. You therefore have to do without cereals that contain the adhesive protein for life. But now many healthy people are also opting for gluten-free products. They believe that these are healthier - the opposite could be the case.
It has long been suspected that people who eat gluten-free are more exposed to arsenic and mercury than others. One possible reason for this is that grains containing gluten are being replaced with rice flour in many gluten-free products.
Rice, however, is particularly easy to absorb arsenic and mercury due to the way it is cultivated in water and its physiology. These metals, found everywhere in water and soil, are toxic in large quantities and can cause cardiovascular diseases, cancer and neurological complaints.
Doubled arsenic load
Maria Argos from the University of Illinois in Chicago and her colleagues have now examined blood and urine samples from almost 7,500 people for the toxic metals. Of the study participants, 73 said they had a gluten-free diet. The rest did not do without wheat, spelled and Co.
The result: subjects who followed a gluten-free diet had an arsenic concentration in their urine that was almost twice as high as those who followed a normal diet. And the mercury level in their blood was also a full 70 percent higher.
"These results show that a gluten-free diet could have unwanted consequences," says lead author Argos. But before one can finally say anything about the health risk, further investigations are required.
Limit rice consumption
The Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) also warns of high arsenic levels in rice. It therefore also recommends that people with celiac disease eat little rice and instead include more corn, millet, buckwheat, amaranth or quinoa in their diet. But you don't have to do without rice and rice products entirely.
The BfR has a tip for its preparation: The arsenic content can be reduced somewhat by washing the rice well, boiling it in plenty of water like pasta and pouring off the excess cooking water.
Expensive trend
In Germany, too, many healthy people use gluten-free products - even though they are significantly more expensive. Although only around one percent of the population suffers from celiac disease, in a survey from 2016 around five percent said they had bought gluten-free food in the previous week.
There is no scientific evidence that gluten in food makes you fat or even promotes illness.
Sources:
Press release of the University of Illinois at Chicago from February 13th, 2017: Gluten-free diet may increase risk of arsenic, mercury exposure
Bulka C.M. et al .: The Unintended Consequences of a Gluten-Free Diet. Epidemiology.doi: 10.1097 / EDE.0000000000000640
Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, www.bfr.bund.de, accessed on February 15, 2016
