What did the boy inherit?

A few months back, I finally did a cheek swab test on my son to see if he did in fact inherit gluten sensitivity from me. I’d ordered the test from Enterolab almost a year earlier on the advice of Melissa Diane Smith, author of the fabulous book, Going Against the Grain. For some reason, I just had a block against finding out. I wanted to keep my boy gluten-free until he was three anyway. With all the added gluten in today’s grain and the increase in gluten sensitivity, I don’t think it’s healthy for anyone to have much of it period, and certainly not when the gut is so immature.

The results showed that my son has one of the main genes that predisposes to gluten sensitivity and celiac sprue and one “non-celiac” gene that also predisposes to gluten sensitivity. Mainstream doctors would not diagnose celiac disease without blood testing and/or an endoscopy, but those would likely not yield positive results unless he had eaten enough gluten to do damage to his gut. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

However, we are trying him now on cow’s milk and will then do a stool test to see if he shows casein sensitivity. The idea is that the more integrity we can build in his gut now, the healthier he will be in the long run. But I don’t want to keep him off of all dairy unless we know. There is so much good to be had in full-fat, farm-fresh dairy — real milk.

So we’re trying to just be up front with him, always pointing out that different people eat different things. Since this is not an issue of allergy, I want to keep out the fear, but I do want him to understand that we sometimes make choices based on information that doesn’t have an immediate impact. That’s next-to-impossible for someone his age to get, but I’m trying to present it just as things are and hope that it will help him eventually make choices that are good for his body rather than get stuck in some kind of right/wrong dichotomy.