Celiac Disease (CD) is not curable, but it is manageable by eating a strict gluten free diet. That may not be enough.
Many suffering from CD still feel ill even after being faithful to a gluten free diet. Celiac Disease is an autoimmune disease which causes your body to attack and destroy the microvilli and villi in your small intestines. These are key to the absorption of nutrients from food and are also where many enzymes used in digestion are made. When these are destroyed, the ability to absorb nutrients decreases and can lead to malnutrition.
This is not all that happens in a damaged intestine. Gluten can cause the tight junctions, spaces between cells lining the intestines, to be damaged or destroyed allowing larger molecules such as proteins and even microorganisms to pass into the blood stream.
Under normal circumstances, the intestinal wall only permits small particles to pass through the intestinal wall and into the blood stream. When these larger molecules make it through into the blood stream our bodies do not recognize these larger molecules and an autoimmune response begins. It is these autoimmune responses that may be the cause of you still feeling ill. What needs to happen to feel well again, is to heal the gut.
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