May is Celiac Awareness Month. Our family doesn’t spend it posting the same symptom lists everyone has already seen. I spend it thinking about the parents who came before us-the ones who had no diagnosis, no grocery aisle, and no reassurance that what they were doing in the kitchen was even right. When I started digging into the history of this disease, the awareness month stopped feeling like a calendar date and started feeling like the newest chapter in a story that has been unfolding for two thousand years.

The First Written Clue

The oldest medical description that lines up with what we now call celiac disease comes from the second century. A Greek physician named Aretaeus of Cappadocia wrote about patients suffering from a chronic digestive condition he called koiliakos, drawn from the word for abdomen. His notes describe pale, foul-smelling stools, extreme wasting, and a body that could not absorb nourishment. The condition was terrible, and it was a complete mystery.

For the next seventeen hundred years, that description barely changed. Doctors could name what they saw. Nobody could explain it. The notion that an ordinary food like bread might be the trigger was nowhere on the radar. Parents watched their children waste away, and the only tools they had were patience and prayer.

Samuel Gee and a Hint Nobody Followed

In 1888, an English physician named Samuel Gee delivered a lecture that gave modern medicine its first detailed clinical picture of celiac disease in children. He observed that diet seemed to influence the illness. His most practical note was that children often tolerated mussels better than bread. Gee inched toward the truth but died in 1911 without ever isolating the culprit. His observation sat there for decades, waiting for someone to connect the rest of the dots.

A Wartime Shortage and the Proof That Changed Everything

The breakthrough came from a Dutch pediatrician named Willem-Karel Dicke. Before World War II, he had already begun to suspect wheat flour was harming his young celiac patients. During the winter of 1944-45, a famine cut off bread supplies across the Netherlands. Dicke watched his patients’ symptoms improve dramatically while grains were unavailable. When bread returned after the war, the symptoms came back.

By 1950, Dicke had published his thesis identifying gluten-specifically the gliadin fraction of wheat protein-as the trigger. Shortly after, intestinal biopsies confirmed that gluten flattened the villi in the small intestine, starving the body of nutrients even when a person was eating plenty. For the first time in history, celiac disease had a treatment. Not a pill. Not a surgery. A diet.

The Banana Diet Era

Before Dicke’s discovery became standard, American families were following a protocol developed by Dr. Sidney Haas in the 1920s. He noticed that children with celiac improved when their diets consisted mostly of bananas, milk, and a few other simple foods. The diet caught on because it worked, and it worked for a reason nobody fully understood at the time: excluding all cereal grains meant those children were accidentally eating gluten-free. Bananas supplied calories and potassium to bodies that were starving despite food intake. The healing came from the absence of wheat, rye, and barley, but it took decades for that distinction to become clear.

Reading about the banana diet always stops me. Mothers were told to feed their sick kids bananas and hope for the best. No antibody tests. No ingredient labels. Just a kitchen counter, a very sick child, and a fragile thread of hope.

From Rare Disease to Widespread Recognition

For most of the twentieth century, celiac disease was considered a rare childhood condition confined to people of European descent. Better testing rewrote that picture. The development of serologic screening in the 1990s, especially the tissue transglutaminase antibody test, revealed that celiac was far more common than anyone had assumed. A large multi-center study published in 2003 found a prevalence of roughly 1 in 133 people in the United States.

That statistic had a cultural ripple effect. Advocacy groups pushed for clearer labeling laws. The 2004 Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act and the 2013 FDA gluten-free labeling standard gave families a framework for navigating grocery stores. In 2010, the U.S. Senate designated May as National Celiac Disease Awareness Month. What had once looked like a mysterious wasting condition had become something you could test for, name, and manage-in theory at least. In real life, a diagnosis still felt like a wall.

What History Shows a Mom Today

When I pore over those old case histories, I don’t just see medical milestones. I see parents doing exactly what we do now: sifting through incomplete information, experimenting in the kitchen, scanning a child’s face for any sign that something is working, and refusing to accept that there is nothing you can do.

I felt that same stubbornness in 2020. My daughter Kolbie had just been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and, shortly after, celiac disease. She missed ramen. I couldn’t find a gluten-free version that had a clean ingredient list and actually tasted like the comfort food she remembered. So I stood at my own counter and mixed a seasoning blend in a mason jar-real ingredients I could pronounce, nothing artificial. That jar became our Chicken Ramen Seasoning Mix. Later, we added clean ramen noodles made from a single ingredient, organic brown rice flour, sealed in a bag with that same seasoning packet right on top.

It wasn’t a business plan. It was a mom trying to give her kid back a normal bowl of noodles.

Carrying the Story Forward

Celiac Awareness Month always pulls my mind back to that kitchen moment, and to all the kitchens before it. The mothers in ancient Greece had no name for what was wrong. The families following the banana diet had no assurance the food wouldn’t hurt them. Today we have blood tests, biopsy confirmation, certified allergen-free production facilities, and recipe apps designed for families with multiple food allergies. The tools have changed beyond recognition. The posture of showing up in the kitchen, determined to feed the people you love without harming them, hasn’t changed at all.

If you’re newly diagnosed and trying to figure out what to cook, the overwhelm is normal. It does get easier. Our free Clean Monday Meals Recipe App has hundreds of gluten-free and dairy-free recipes built for real weeknights-no exotic ingredients, no complicated techniques. It includes step-by-step instructions, nutritional info, a meal plan creator, and an auto-generated shopping list. You can sign up at no cost anytime.

If you make something that brings a little comfort back to your table, I’d love to see it. Tag us @cleanmondaymeals.

With love,
Janae