During the 1944-45 "Hunger Winter," a man searches for fuel and food at an illegal rubbish dump in Amsterdam-Zuid. The term “gluten-free” seems to be everywhere these days: food labels, restaurant menus, cookbooks, even water bottles. While it’s become trendy to avoid gluten — a protein found in popular foodstuffs like bread and pasta — humans have safely and enthusiastically consumed it for thousands of years.
People with celiac disease can literally starve to death in the presence of food. Their reaction to gluten blocks absorption of what nutrients they can safely consume. It would take the wartime famine to provide the final clue for how doctors could help patients with celiac disease. "No bread was to be had in the cities, with the rare exception of black marketeers offering a barely edible product at extortionate prices,” says van Arragon. “It wasn’t a wheat shortage so much as an absence of wheat.”
The connection was enough to get Dicke to rigorously investigate the relationship between diet and celiac symptoms. Over the next roughly five years, and through experiments with wheat-free diets, Dicke determined that avoiding foods with wheat and related grains reduced diarrhea and allowed for weight gain in people with celiac disease. They usually felt better, too.