I got my celiac diagnosis after a small-intestine biopsy in 2014. The doctor said autoimmune. I nodded and went home and started reading. What I found surprised me: celiac disease has a written history that starts in the first or second century AD and took a sharp turn during a famine in the Netherlands.

The Earliest Written Descriptions

Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a Greek physician writing around the first or second century AD, described a condition of chronic diarrhea and poor absorption. He called it koiliakos, meaning abdominal. Modern researchers recognize the description as celiac disease.

For centuries after that, doctors wrote about wasting in children without understanding the cause. In 1888, an English physician named Samuel Gee gave a modern clinical description of celiac disease and made one important observation: diet mattered. He noted that patients improved on a simple diet, but he could not identify which part of the diet was the problem. Gee suspected certain grains. He died before the answer was found.

A Dutch Pediatrician Connects It to Wheat

Willem-Karel Dicke, a Dutch pediatrician, noticed something in the winter of 1944. Bread had disappeared from the Netherlands because of the war. Children with celiac disease, who had been sick for years, started improving. Dicke kept records. After the war, when wheat returned to the food supply, the children got sick again. Those observations led Dicke to conclude that wheat was the trigger.

He followed up with controlled feeding studies and published his findings in 1950. He identified gluten, the protein fraction in wheat, as the culprit. Celiac disease had a specific dietary trigger.

The 1997 Discovery That Changed Testing

In 1997, researchers published a paper showing that tissue transglutaminase, an enzyme that normally helps repair the intestinal lining, is the very thing the immune system attacks when someone with celiac eats gluten. That finding gave doctors a blood test and confirmed, at a molecular level, that celiac belongs to the autoimmune category rather than the food allergy category.

The Genetic Background: HLA-DQ2 and HLA-DQ8

National celiac organizations report that 95 percent of people with celiac carry a genetic variant called HLA-DQ2. Most of the rest carry HLA-DQ8. About 30 to 40 percent of the general population carries one of these variants, while celiac disease affects about 1 percent of people. A person needs the genetic background, but it is not enough by itself. Gluten is the environmental trigger that starts the immune response in people with the right genetic background.

Celiac as a Model for Autoimmune Research

Celiac is unusual among autoimmune conditions because researchers identified the environmental trigger, the genetic background, and the specific target of the immune attack. When someone with celiac removes gluten from their diet, the immune response quiets. Researchers report in follow-up studies that on a strict gluten-free diet, the antibodies decline, the intestinal lining heals, and symptoms improve in most people. That is not the case for most other autoimmune conditions, where the trigger remains unknown and management often relies on suppressing the immune system.

The gluten-free diet manages celiac disease. It does not cure it. Researchers are testing enzymes that break down gluten and therapies that retrain the immune system. None have replaced the diet.

Our Kitchen After the Diagnosis

My daughter Kolbie was diagnosed with celiac and Type 1 Diabetes in 2020. Researchers have documented that people with Type 1 Diabetes develop celiac disease at a higher rate than the general population. The two conditions share genetic risk factors. Living with both in our home means I think about the autoimmune connection every day.

Kolbie loved ramen. I could not find a gluten-free ramen that tasted good with clean ingredients, so I made my own seasoning blend and kept it in a mason jar. That blend became the Chicken Ramen Seasoning Mix, our first product. The Clean Ramen Noodles are made from one ingredient, organic brown rice flour, produced in an allergen-free facility. The seasonings are gluten-free, dairy-free, and soy-free.

Everything we make at Clean Monday Meals exists because celiac is an autoimmune condition with a clear dietary trigger. Families living with that reality deserve real food that fits it. For recipes that make a gluten-free kitchen feel doable, download the free Clean Monday Meals Recipe App. I keep hundreds of gluten-free and dairy-free recipes there.

None of this is medical advice. I share what I learn as a mom. For celiac-specific questions, talk to your gastroenterologist or a registered dietitian.

With love, Janae