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here's a link to a useful site that will give you tons of information about celiac sprue: celiac.com.

from this site and through reading other things about celiac sprue, i have learned that you should not give up wheat and other gluten products before you get any kind of testing! here's the quick and dirty rundown:

in your small intestines, there are things called villi (well, actually, they're all over your GI tract). they look kinda like fingers (or so people say, but i like to think of them as stalagmites--- you know, like in a cave?). part of what the villi do is help break down things like gluten (which is part of wheat products, barley, etc... and maybe even oatmeal). anyway, an endoscopy is done to actually look at the villi. if you have celiac sprue (in effect, an allergy to gluten; an inability to digest it), these villi are going to be lying flat instead of standing up straight. think of those long skinny balloons you see clowns tie up into dogs and stuff. if they're working right, they're standing up, but if they're not making the right enzymes to break down gluten and they encounter gluten, they kinda just fall over.

hope you followed that- i don't know if i'm explaining it very well!

anyway.... if you stop eating gluten, slowly but surely these villi start to stand up again, 'cause they're not being bombarded with gluten. gluten is like kryptonite to those little buggers. take it away, and they do fine.

it makes sense, then, that you don't want to quit the gluten before you get your test! right? 'cause if you give up gluten and your villi jump to attention, your doctor is going to go in there scoping and see what? perfectly normal looking villi! and then he tells you "ah, no gluten problem. eat all the bread ya want!" and so you do, but if you are truely a celiac patient, what's going to happen when you bite into that loaf of bread? yup! you're going to reintroduce that kryptonite and the villi are going to pass out again.

some people, even on celiac.com suggest eating more gluten than usual in the days leading up to a test. this goes for bloodwork as well as the endoscopy. i don't know about that, 'cause i actually don't eat gluten and if i had to gluten-load before a test i know i'd feel like dirt. i think i'd skip the overindulgence, but it's up to you. regardless, eating gluten before the test is really the only way to get close to sure that you have celiac sprue (though it's not 100% even then. love that fuzzy logic applied to medicine, don't you!?).

another thing, just because the villi may (or may not!) respond fairly quickly to giving up gluten, that doesn't mean you will notice an immediate change in how you feel. you haven't been getting the right nutrients for a while, so you're not going to be A-OK right away. you'll have to build up to it (and by the way, since the villi do other things besides break down gluten, if they're asleep on the job, that could explain why celiacs lose weight!) i think i read that celiacs should give themselves 4 - 6 months at least on a GF diet before they should expect to notice a real huge difference! keep that in mind as you experiment.

anyway, hope that helped????

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