I have celiac disease. My daughter has celiac and type 1 diabetes. That combination pushed me into old hospital archives and medical journals, because I wanted to understand why one family can collect autoimmune diagnoses the way other families collect handed-down recipes. What I found in those old texts gave me a framework for understanding my daughter's diagnosis that no modern pamphlet did.
For most of its recorded history, celiac disease was a rare childhood wasting disorder with a grim outlook. A hunger winter in the Netherlands shifted that. In 1888, Samuel Gee, a physician at the Hospital for Sick Children in London, gave a lecture titled "On the Coeliac Affection." He described children with chronic diarrhea, pale stools, and severe wasting. Gee wrote that if the patient could be cured at all, it must be by means of diet. But he had no idea which part of the diet was the problem. He recommended simple, milk-based meals that did not fix the disease.
1944: A bread shortage becomes an accidental clinical trial
During the winter of 1944 to 1945, Nazi occupation forces cut food supplies to the western Netherlands. Bread, wheat flour, and rye flour became scarce. Willem-Karel Dicke, a Dutch pediatrician, noticed that children he treated for celiac disease improved on the famine diet. Their diarrhea eased, their weight stabilized, and some gained strength while wheat was nearly absent. When Allied food drops brought bread back after liberation in May 1945, the children's symptoms returned quickly. Dicke and his colleagues, including biochemist J. H. van de Kamer, ran controlled feeding tests that identified wheat protein as the trigger. They narrowed the problem to gluten, the protein family that gives dough its stretch.
1954: A biopsy shows the damage under a microscope
In 1954, British physician John Paulley documented what celiac does to the small intestine. The finger-like villi that line the small intestine and absorb nutrients flatten and blunt in people with active celiac disease. That damage explained why the children in Dicke's time became malnourished even when they ate. A biopsy still required a hospital procedure, so diagnosis stayed slow and selective. Physicians looked for celiac mainly in children who appeared desperately ill. Same pattern Gee described seventy years earlier.
2003: Blood screening changes the numbers
Blood testing changed things for ordinary families. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, researchers developed screening tests for antibodies against tissue transglutaminase, an enzyme involved in the immune reaction to gluten. A simple blood draw could flag celiac disease before a child became visibly malnourished. In 2003, a U.S. multicenter study led by Alessio Fasano and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found celiac disease in about 1 in 133 Americans, while earlier biopsy-based estimates had put prevalence closer to 1 in 4,000. Better blood testing found cases that had always existed but had gone unrecognized. The disease did not suddenly become more common.
Why autoimmune conditions run in the same families
Autoimmune diseases share a basic feature. The immune system, which is supposed to recognize outside threats, begins to target a normal part of the body. In celiac disease, a gluten-triggered immune response damages the small intestine. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Those two conditions overlap more often than chance would predict. Researchers have repeatedly found celiac disease at higher rates in people with type 1 diabetes than in the general population.
Both conditions are associated with certain forms of the HLA-DQ2 and HLA-DQ8 genes. Most people who carry those gene forms never develop either disease. Genes alone do not explain the outcome. Triggers, timing, and other factors fill in the rest of the picture, and researchers are still mapping those parts.
My daughter received a type 1 diabetes diagnosis first. Celiac followed shortly after. Watching two autoimmune conditions appear in the same child made the research feel less like an academic exercise and more like a family map. That experience sent me back to Samuel Gee, Willem Dicke, and the other researchers who mapped this condition. Understanding how celiac moved from mystery to manageable condition helped me trust that autoimmune conditions are patterns we can study, not moral failures or personal weaknesses.
What this history teaches a mom in the kitchen
Understanding the history changed how I think about the food I cook. It reminded me that a gluten-free diet grew out of decades of clinical observation, wartime hardship, biopsy studies, and blood screening, not a wellness trend. For celiac disease, the standard approach is strict gluten avoidance. Many people see symptoms subside when they follow it.
I make gluten-free, dairy-free food because my daughter missed ramen. When she was diagnosed, the gluten-free ramen options we found either tasted like paper or carried ingredient lists I did not recognize. I blended seasonings in a mason jar and kept the jar in the spice cabinet. That jar became the first Clean Monday Meals product. I think of that jar as a direct descendant of Dicke's observation: same problem, different century.
Where to start if celiac is new for your family
If celiac is new to your family, talk with a clinician before changing your diet. Removing gluten before testing can make blood tests unreliable. Once you have a diagnosis, you do not have to figure out every meal alone. Here are the steps I wish someone had handed me at the start:
- Get a clear diagnosis from a clinician before cutting gluten. Testing while gluten is still in your diet gives more reliable results.
- Find a few safe staple meals you already love and adapt them one at a time.
- Build a small rotation of gluten-free pantry basics you trust, like the Clean Ramen Noodles that saved dinner at our house.
- Use meal planning tools to reduce decision fatigue. The Clean Monday Meals Recipe App has hundreds of gluten-free, dairy-free recipes, meal planning tools, and shopping lists.
You do not have to relearn cooking from scratch. You need a few reliable ingredients and a plan.
With love, Janae