Hi Charlotte,
While I do agree with the comment about the association between gluten and disease, that comment has absolutely nothing to do with coffee.
The misinformation about coffee apparently comes from this website:
http://drclark.typepad.com/dr_david_cla ... -news.html
I wouldn't stoop to calling him a "quack", but I can't help but wonder if he sleeps in a bed at night, or goes to roost, instead.
On his website, he says:
Ten percent of coffee is a protein that cross-reacts with gluten antibodies.
That's news to me, news to USDA scientists, and news to anyone else who knows anything about the protein content of coffee. The fact of the matter is, the protein content of a cup of coffee is slightly over one-tenth of one percent, (about 0.12%, to be more specific). He claims that it's 100 times that much. Really? I'm guessing that he flunked math in high school, so he probably figured that "functional neurologists" didn't need to know math, so that's why he picked that particular career.
What is a "functional neurologist", anyway?
You'll notice that the letters following his name that are supposed to represent a title, are "DC", not "MD", or "PhD". So what does "DC" stand for - most likely, "doctor of chiropractic".
Here is how he describes the "cross-reactivity" process:
Coffee cross-reacts with gluten antibodies.
Let me tell you what that means...
When you have a gluten problem you make antibodies to it. Antibodies are like little strobe lights that your immune system makes for a specific invader.
So you put out these strobe lights for gluten, right? And they attach to a gluten molecule and they sit there and they flash so that your T cells --your SWAT team-- can come in and kill the gluten.
Gluten antibodies - those little strobe lights - can attach to other foods that are not gluten.
Your immune system thinks those non-gluten things ARE gluten ---and you can still have a gluten response.
Outside of sounding rather unscientific for such a sophisticated "functional neurologist", the description sounds worrisome - except for the fact that those "little strobe lights"
do not attach to other foods that are not gluten. The fact of the matter is that antibodies are extremely specific, and anti-gliadin antibodies only attach to gliadin peptides in gluten. Period.
Is an honest-to-goodness peer-reviewed scientific research article, published in a prestigious medical journal, cited anywhere? If it is, I couldn't find it. So all of this makes me very, very suspicious about his claims about coffee, his qualifications in general, and his motives in particular.
Unfortunately, if what he says is true about cyrex labs, that makes me highly suspicious of their claims about their testing, also.
Look at it this way. Most of us here drink coffee, (including me). If coffee is so loaded with "cross-reactivity" to gluten, why aren't all of us sick, all the time?
Tex
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