Gluten is one of the foods, or more accurately, one of the food proteins, I most often see people with lipedema removing from their diet.
What is gluten?
Gluten is a group of storage proteins found in wheat. Related proteins are found in rye and barley. In wheat, gliadins and glutenins form the elastic protein network that gives bread and dough their structure.
I personally do not avoid gluten. I do not have celiac disease, wheat allergy or a known gluten intolerance, and I tolerate foods containing gluten well. If anything, I am sometimes more skeptical of certain gluten-free replacement products than I am of the original food, simply because removing gluten can completely change how a product has to be formulated. But that does not mean gluten-free food is unhealthy either. Many naturally gluten-free foods are among the most nutritious foods we can eat. That distinction is important to me.
LipedemaScience is not about creating fear around foods that everyone should avoid. It is about understanding the biology, understanding the evidence, and having enough knowledge to make your own informed decisions. So in this article, we are going all the way back to the beginning.
What actually is gluten? Why is it so important in food science? What happens when we digest it? What does gluten mean from a nutrition perspective? Why do some people absolutely need to avoid it? Why do others believe they react to it even when gluten may not be responsible? And, most importantly for this community, what evidence do we actually have connecting gluten with lipedema?
First, what actually is gluten?
Gluten is not a carbohydrate, even though we often associate it with carbohydrate-rich foods such as bread and pasta.
Gluten is protein.
More specifically, gluten refers to storage proteins found in wheat and closely related cereals. In wheat, the two major groups involved in gluten formation are called gliadins and glutenins. This distinction becomes particularly interesting from a food science perspective.
When wheat flour is mixed with water and worked into a dough, these proteins interact and form a three-dimensional network. Gliadins contribute more to the viscosity and extensibility of the dough, allowing it to stretch, while glutenins contribute strength and elasticity.
Together, they create the gluten network.
If you have ever made bread, you have seen this network in action. Yeast produces carbon dioxide during fermentation. Instead of the gas simply escaping, the gluten network stretches around the gas bubbles and helps retain them. This is one reason wheat bread can become light and airy.
During baking, several things happen simultaneously. Proteins change structure, starch gelatinizes, water moves and evaporates, and the soft dough is transformed into a stable bread structure.
This is why gluten is so technologically useful.
It is not simply something food manufacturers add unnecessarily. Gluten performs an extraordinary structural function in foods such as bread, pizza dough and pasta.
Gluten is also interesting at the molecular level
Gluten proteins contain unusually high proportions of the amino acids proline and glutamine.
That matters because our digestive enzymes have difficulty completely breaking down some of the proline-rich sequences. Relatively long gluten-derived peptides can therefore remain after digestion. One of the best-known examples is the so-called 33-mer peptide from α-gliadin.
This resistance to digestion is biologically important in celiac disease. In genetically susceptible individuals, particular gluten peptides can participate in an immune response that ultimately damages the small intestine. But there is an important distinction here.
A protein being incompletely digested does not automatically mean that it causes disease.
The biological consequence depends on what happens next, including the immune system, genetics and intestinal environment of the person consuming it.
This is one of the places where a real piece of biochemistry can easily become distorted when translated into nutrition content online. “Humans cannot completely digest gluten” sounds alarming. But it does not follow that gluten therefore damages everyone who eats it.
For people with celiac disease, however, the situation is completely different.
Who really needs to avoid gluten?
Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease in which gluten triggers an inappropriate immune response in genetically susceptible individuals.
Most people with celiac disease carry specific HLA variants, particularly HLA-DQ2 or HLA-DQ8. But these genes are much more common than celiac disease itself. Having the genetic susceptibility is therefore not the same thing as having celiac disease.
When someone with celiac disease eats gluten, gluten-derived peptides contribute to activation of the immune response. This can damage the villi lining the small intestine. The villi normally provide an enormous surface area for nutrient absorption, so damaging them can interfere with the absorption of iron, folate, calcium and other nutrients.
Celiac disease can therefore present with much more than gastrointestinal symptoms. Depending on the person, it may be associated with diarrhea, abdominal symptoms, iron-deficiency anemia, fatigue, weight changes, bone disease and several extraintestinal manifestations. Some people have relatively few obvious gastrointestinal symptoms.
For someone with confirmed celiac disease, a strict gluten-free diet is not a wellness trend or an optional anti-inflammatory diet. It is treatment.
There is another practical point that is extremely important: if you suspect celiac disease, do not simply remove gluten before being tested.
Who needs to avoid it?
People with celiac disease need strict lifelong gluten avoidance. People with wheat allergy or confirmed non-celiac gluten/wheat sensitivity may also require individualized avoidance.
Current European diagnostic guidance recommends initial testing with IgA anti-tissue transglutaminase antibodies together with total IgA, and testing should be performed while the person is eating a gluten-containing diet. Removing gluten beforehand can reduce the immune response and make subsequent testing more difficult to interpret.
Wheat allergy is different
Celiac disease should also not be confused with wheat allergy.
A wheat allergy is an allergic reaction to proteins in wheat and can involve IgE-mediated mechanisms. Reactions can include hives, swelling, respiratory symptoms, gastrointestinal symptoms and, in severe cases, anaphylaxis. This is not the same biological process as celiac disease.
And importantly, wheat allergy is not necessarily the same as gluten allergy. Wheat contains many proteins besides gluten. Someone with a wheat allergy needs individualized medical advice about what they need to avoid.
There are also recognized gluten-related conditions such as dermatitis herpetiformis, the characteristic skin manifestation associated with celiac disease, where strict gluten avoidance is part of treatment.
These are medical reasons for dietary restriction. They should not be mixed together with the much broader claim that gluten is generally inflammatory.
What about non-celiac gluten sensitivity?
This is where the story becomes much more complicated.
Some people do not have celiac disease or wheat allergy but report symptoms after eating gluten-containing foods. This has commonly been called non-celiac gluten sensitivity, or NCGS. The broader term non-celiac wheat sensitivity is also used because it is not always clear that gluten itself is responsible. There is currently no single biomarker that can simply diagnose NCGS.
That has led researchers to perform blinded food challenges. If gluten itself is causing symptoms, people should theoretically experience more symptoms when unknowingly given gluten than when unknowingly given placebo. The results have been fascinating.
A systematic review of double-blind placebo-controlled trials found that only a minority of people who identified themselves as gluten-sensitive showed reproducible gluten-specific symptoms. Nocebo responses were also common. That does not mean the symptoms were imaginary.
It means something scientifically much more interesting: experiencing symptoms after eating a food does not necessarily tell us which component of that food caused them. And wheat contains much more than gluten.
Does gluten cause inflammation in everyone?
No. Gluten triggers a well-established immune response in celiac disease, but current evidence does not show that gluten causes harmful systemic inflammation in everyone who eats it.
Gluten, wheat and FODMAPs are not the same thing
This may be the most important distinction in the entire gluten discussion. When someone removes bread, pasta and other wheat products and then feels better, it is very tempting to conclude: “I removed gluten, therefore gluten was causing my symptoms.”
But wheat contains gluten and many other components.
One particularly important example is fructans.
Fructans are carbohydrates belonging to the FODMAP family. They are not gluten and they are not proteins. They are poorly digested in the small intestine and can be fermented by bacteria in the colon, producing gas and potentially causing bloating, discomfort and other gastrointestinal symptoms in susceptible people.
A very interesting Norwegian study investigated exactly this problem. Skodje and colleagues studied 59 people who already considered themselves gluten-sensitive but did not have celiac disease. In a blinded crossover experiment, participants received foods containing gluten, fructans or placebo.
Participants reported higher overall gastrointestinal symptom scores during the fructan challenge than during the gluten challenge. However, fructans were not significantly different from placebo in the pairwise comparison, and gluten was also not different from placebo. The study therefore provides stronger evidence against a clear gluten-specific effect in this group than it does for fructans as the sole explanation for their symptoms. This distinction matters enormously.
If someone removes wheat and feels better, gluten is one possible explanation. But so are fructans, changes in fiber, changes in the foods replacing wheat, reduced intake of highly processed foods, expectations, total energy intake and several other simultaneous dietary changes. That is an attribution problem, not evidence that the person’s experience is wrong.
Wheat contains other interesting proteins too
There are also components of wheat called amylase-trypsin inhibitors, or ATIs.
ATIs are not gluten. They are proteins that protect the plant against pests and inhibit certain enzymes. Laboratory and animal studies have shown that some wheat ATIs can activate innate immune pathways, including signaling through the TLR4 complex on myeloid immune cells.
This is biologically interesting and deserves continued research.
But biological plausibility is not the same as demonstrating that ordinary wheat consumption causes clinically meaningful systemic inflammation in humans, and it certainly does not demonstrate that gluten causes lipedema.
The same caution applies to wheat germ agglutinin and other wheat components frequently discussed online. Cell experiments can help us identify mechanisms worth investigating, but they should not automatically be translated into dietary rules for millions of people.
What about lipedema?
There is currently no direct evidence that gluten causes or worsens lipedema, and no clinical trial has shown that removing gluten specifically improves lipedema.
Does gluten cause a “leaky gut”?
This claim appears frequently in discussions about inflammatory diets.
There is real science behind parts of the story. Gliadin has been studied in intestinal cells and tissue models, and effects involving zonulin signaling and intestinal permeability have been reported. The response is particularly relevant in celiac disease.
The leap occurs when this becomes: “Gluten makes everyone’s gut leaky.”
That conclusion is not supported by the evidence we currently have.
Even measuring intestinal permeability has created scientific problems. Some widely used commercial “zonulin” assays were later shown not to measure pre-haptoglobin-2, the protein originally described as zonulin, as assumed. This makes some of the literature based on circulating “zonulin” considerably more difficult to interpret.
We also have an interesting randomized crossover study in 60 adults without celiac disease. Participants followed diets containing either 2 g or 18 g of gluten per day for eight weeks. The low-gluten period produced moderate changes in the intestinal microbiome and reduced self-reported bloating, but the researchers concluded that the effects were probably driven primarily by differences in dietary fiber composition rather than by gluten itself.
Again, changing gluten intake often changes much more than gluten.
Now let’s look at gluten from a nutrition perspective
Gluten itself is not an essential nutrient.
We do not need to consume gluten to remain healthy. Someone can eat an excellent diet without it.
But the reverse is equally important: the fact that gluten is unnecessary does not mean that removing it improves the diet.
Gluten-containing foods can provide much more than gluten. Whole-grain wheat, rye and barley can contribute fiber, B vitamins, minerals and numerous other compounds. When we remove these foods, the nutritional effect depends heavily on what replaces them.
Replacing whole-grain wheat bread with potatoes, legumes, quinoa, buckwheat, vegetables, seeds and other nutrient-rich foods can still produce an excellent diet.
Replacing whole-grain wheat bread with a refined gluten-free starch product is a completely different nutritional change.
This is why I think the question “Is gluten healthy?” is often the wrong question.
A better question is:
What food is the gluten in, what does that food provide nutritionally, and what are you replacing it with?
Gluten-free does not automatically mean healthier
This is particularly important to me as both a food scientist and nutritionist.
A “gluten-free” label tells us something very specific about a product. It does not tell us how much fiber, protein, saturated fat, sugar, salt, vitamins or minerals the product contains. It also does not tell us whether the food is minimally processed or highly processed.
And removing gluten creates a genuine technological challenge.
Remember what gluten was doing in our bread. It created an elastic protein network capable of holding water and gas and producing the texture we associate with bread.
If we remove that network, food scientists have to rebuild those properties in another way.
Gluten-free breads may therefore use combinations of rice flour, corn flour, potato or tapioca starch, proteins and hydrocolloids such as psyllium or xanthan gum to create structure and retain water.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these ingredients. Hydrocolloids are food technology tools, not evidence that a food is dangerous.
But the resulting nutritional composition may be very different.
A Norwegian study compared 423 gluten-free products with 337 gluten-containing products on the market. The researchers found substantial differences between the categories, including lower protein and fiber in gluten-free products and differences in saturated fat, carbohydrate and salt. Gluten-free products were also considerably more expensive.
Why might someone feel better gluten-free?
Removing gluten-containing foods often changes many things at once, including wheat fructans (FODMAPs), fiber, carbohydrate intake, calories, food processing and the foods used as replacements. Feeling better is real, but it does not by itself identify gluten as the cause.
This is one reason I personally do not assume that the gluten-free version of a food is healthier for me when I have no medical reason to avoid gluten.
But I want to be equally clear in the opposite direction.
Gluten-free does not automatically mean unhealthy either.
A gluten-free bread made primarily from refined starch is nutritionally very different from a bread based on gluten-free oats, buckwheat, seeds and psyllium. And naturally gluten-free foods such as potatoes, rice, quinoa, buckwheat, legumes, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish and meat do not suddenly become nutritionally questionable because they belong in a gluten-free diet.
We should not replace a gluten health halo with a reverse gluten-free health halo.
Whole grain versus refined grain matters much more than many people realize
Consider two foods: whole-grain wheat bread and a sweet pastry.
Both can contain gluten.
Nutritionally, however, they are completely different foods.
Whole-grain wheat retains the bran, germ and endosperm and therefore provides considerably more fiber and micronutrients than highly refined wheat flour. Refining changes the food matrix even though gluten remains.
This is particularly relevant when someone reports feeling better after “giving up gluten” but has actually stopped eating white bread, pizza, cakes, cookies and pastries and started eating vegetables, legumes, potatoes, fish and other minimally processed foods. The improvement can be completely real. But the experiment changed far more than one protein.
This is why personal dietary experiences can generate valuable hypotheses, but cannot by themselves establish causality.
What about gluten and lipedema specifically?
This is where we need to become particularly strict about the evidence.
At present, there is no direct evidence demonstrating that gluten causes or worsens lipedema.
We do not have a randomized controlled trial in which gluten itself has been isolated while calories, carbohydrates, weight change and the rest of the diet are controlled. We do not have blinded gluten challenges showing that gluten increases lipedema pain or swelling. And we do not have a demonstrated biological pathway showing that gluten causes lipedema tissue pathology.
There is one study that is frequently discussed in this context.
In 2023, Amato and colleagues studied HLA-DQ2 and HLA-DQ8 in 95 women with lipedema. They reported relatively high frequencies of these celiac-associated genetic variants.
But we need to look carefully at what the study actually did.
The participants were a non-probabilistic convenience sample from a private medical institute in Brazil. The researchers did not recruit a simultaneous matched control group. Instead, they compared their findings with a previously published Brazilian reference population.
Most importantly, the researchers did not give participants gluten and measure their response. They did not remove gluten and measure lipedema symptoms. They did not demonstrate celiac disease. They did not demonstrate non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
They measured genes.
This is especially important because HLA-DQ2 and HLA-DQ8 are susceptibility genes, not diagnoses. Many people in the general population carry these variants without ever developing celiac disease.
The title of the paper itself refers to the “potential benefits of a gluten-free diet”, but the study did not test a gluten-free diet.
That distinction is essential when this paper is shared as evidence that people with lipedema should avoid gluten.
What about the diet studies showing improvements in lipedema?
We do have dietary intervention research in lipedema.
Low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets have been studied, as have Mediterranean-style dietary approaches. Some studies have reported changes in pain, body composition, weight or other outcomes.
But these studies cannot answer the gluten question.
When someone changes from a conventional diet to a ketogenic or low-carbohydrate diet, gluten intake will often fall dramatically because bread, pasta and many grain products disappear. At the same time, carbohydrate intake changes, energy intake may change, body weight may change, insulin and glucose responses change, food choices change and many other dietary components change.
Is gluten-free healthier?
Not automatically. Naturally gluten-free foods can form an excellent diet, but some gluten-free replacement products contain less fiber and protein than comparable gluten-containing products. What matters is the whole food and overall dietary pattern, not the gluten-free label.
If symptoms improve, we cannot isolate gluten as the cause.
The same principle applies to any complex dietary intervention.
Interestingly, the 2024 German S2k lipedema guideline discusses Mediterranean and ketogenic dietary approaches. It does not establish gluten avoidance as a treatment for lipedema.
A 2026 scoping review of nutritional approaches in lipedema goes further and concludes that, in the absence of a coexisting gluten-related condition such as celiac disease, wheat allergy or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, a gluten-free diet should not routinely be recommended for people with lipedema.
That does not prove that gluten could never influence symptoms in a subgroup of people with lipedema.
It tells us something more limited and more useful: gluten avoidance is not currently an evidence-based treatment for lipedema itself.
So why do some people with lipedema feel better without gluten?
I think this question deserves respect rather than dismissal.
If you remove gluten-containing foods and your symptoms improve, the improvement is real as an experience. Science should not tell you that you did not experience it.
Science asks the next question: What caused the improvement?
Perhaps that individual genuinely reacts to gluten. Perhaps they have an undiagnosed gluten-related condition. Perhaps wheat fructans were contributing to gastrointestinal symptoms. Perhaps removing bread, pastries and other foods changed overall carbohydrate intake. Perhaps fiber changed. Perhaps total energy intake changed. Perhaps the replacement foods were more nutrient-dense. Perhaps expectations contributed to symptom perception. Perhaps symptoms naturally fluctuated at the same time.
Several explanations can also be true simultaneously.
We simply do not have lipedema studies capable of separating these possibilities yet.
This is the same attribution problem I have to consider when thinking about my own body. Over time, I have noticed that refined sugar, hormonal changes and stress seem to affect me. I cannot tell from my personal experience alone whether every effect reflects lipedema biology or something else.
My experience can generate a hypothesis.
It cannot prove the mechanism.
Foods containing gluten and naturally gluten-free alternatives
The main gluten-containing grains are wheat, rye and barley. Spelt, einkorn and emmer are wheat varieties or closely related wheat species and are not gluten-free. Bulgur, couscous and semolina are also wheat products.
Naturally gluten-free carbohydrate sources include potatoes, rice, corn, quinoa, buckwheat, millet and many legumes.
Oats require a little more explanation. Oats do not contain wheat gluten, but conventional oats can become contaminated with wheat, rye or barley during production and processing. People with celiac disease therefore generally need oats specifically produced and labeled as gluten-free. A minority may also react to avenin, the storage protein in oats.
Buckwheat is another source of confusion because of its English name. Despite containing the word “wheat”, buckwheat is naturally gluten-free. However, products made with buckwheat are not necessarily gluten-free. Soba noodles, for example, may contain both buckwheat and wheat.
Soy sauce commonly contains wheat, while some tamari products are gluten-free. Malt is commonly produced from barley. Ordinary beer usually contains gluten. Seitan is essentially concentrated wheat gluten.
Sourdough deserves its own warning. Fermentation changes food dramatically and microorganisms can break down some proteins during fermentation, but ordinary wheat or rye sourdough is not gluten-free and should not be considered safe for someone with celiac disease simply because it has undergone long fermentation.
For someone with celiac disease, cross-contact and labeling therefore matter in a way they do not for someone who simply chooses to reduce gluten.
We should also talk about food fear
Gluten has become culturally unusual.
A medical treatment for a relatively small group of people has gradually become associated with “clean eating”, weight control and healthy living much more broadly. Experimental consumer research has even demonstrated a health-halo effect, where the words “gluten-free” can make people perceive a product as healthier regardless of its actual nutritional composition.
This does not mean everyone avoiding gluten is following a trend. Some people have serious medical reasons. Others have genuine symptoms they are trying to understand.
But it does show why we should be careful when a single ingredient becomes morally classified as either “good” or “bad”.
Food science rarely works that way.
Nutrition rarely works that way either.
And lipedema science certainly is not advanced enough for us to divide foods into universal “safe” and “inflammatory” lists.
My perspective as a food scientist, nutritionist and someone living with lipedema
The more I study food, the less interested I become in labeling individual foods as universally good or bad.
As a food scientist, I look at gluten and see a fascinating protein system. Gliadins and glutenins interact to create properties that humans have used in food production for thousands of years. I also see proteins containing unusual peptide sequences that become medically important in specific biological contexts.
As a nutritionist, I see a different question. Gluten itself is not essential, but gluten-containing whole grains can be valuable parts of a nutritious diet. Removing them can be completely compatible with good nutrition, provided they are replaced appropriately.
As someone living with lipedema, I understand why people experiment. We want to know what makes our bodies hurt more, swell more or feel better. Personal experiences matter because they can point science toward questions researchers have not yet answered.
But there has to be one additional step:
experience creates the question; controlled research helps us determine the cause.
Right now, that research does not show that gluten is a cause of lipedema or that everyone with lipedema benefits from removing it.
For someone with celiac disease, gluten is an entirely different story and strict avoidance is medically necessary. For someone with wheat allergy, wheat can potentially trigger serious allergic reactions. For someone with reproducible non-celiac wheat or gluten sensitivity, individualized restriction may improve symptoms.
For everyone else, we currently have no good reason to turn gluten into something to fear simply because we have lipedema.
And we should not turn gluten-free food into something to fear either.
The better approach is knowledge.
Understand what gluten is. Understand what wheat contains. Understand the difference between gluten, fructans and other wheat components. Look at the entire food rather than one ingredient. Look at what you replace a food with when you remove it. And, when your own experience tells you something interesting, treat it as valuable information without automatically turning it into a biological conclusion.
That is the approach I want LipedemaScience to take.
Not food fear.
Awareness, science and enough knowledge to make your own informed choices.
Assessing the Prevalence of HLA-DQ2 and HLA-DQ8 in Lipedema Patients and the Potential Benefits of a Gluten-Free Diet (DOI: 10.7759/cureus.41594)
Current Evidence-Based Clinical Nutritional Approaches in Lipedema: A Scoping Review (DOI: 10.1093/nutrit/nuaf203)
S2k guideline lipedema (DOI: 10.1111/ddg.15513)
Fructan, Rather Than Gluten, Induces Symptoms in Patients With Self-Reported Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity (DOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2017.10.040)
No Effects of Gluten in Patients With Self-Reported Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity After Dietary Reduction of Fermentable, Poorly Absorbed, Short-Chain Carbohydrates (DOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2013.04.051)
Suspected Nonceliac Gluten Sensitivity Confirmed in Few Patients After Gluten Challenge in Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trials (DOI: 10.1016/j.cgh.2016.08.007)
Diagnosis of Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity (NCGS): The Salerno Experts’ Criteria (DOI: 10.3390/nu7064966)
Wheat amylase trypsin inhibitors drive intestinal inflammation via activation of toll-like receptor 4 (DOI: 10.1084/jem.20102660)
Nutritional Wheat Amylase-Trypsin Inhibitors Promote Intestinal Inflammation via Activation of Myeloid Cells (DOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2016.12.006)
Gliadin, zonulin and gut permeability: Effects on celiac and non-celiac intestinal mucosa and intestinal cell lines (DOI: 10.1080/00365520500235334)
Widely Used Commercial ELISA Does Not Detect Precursor of Haptoglobin2, but Recognizes Properdin as a Potential Second Member of the Zonulin Family (DOI: 10.3389/fendo.2018.00022)
A low-gluten diet induces changes in the intestinal microbiome of healthy Danish adults (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07019-x)
Nutritional quality and costs of gluten-free products: a case-control study of food products on the Norwegian market (DOI: 10.29219/fnr.v65.6121)
The impact of a gluten-free claim on the perceived healthfulness, calories, level of processing and expected taste of food products (DOI: 10.1016/j.foodqual.2018.10.013)
Long term gluten consumption in adults without celiac disease and risk of coronary heart disease: prospective cohort study (DOI: 10.1136/bmj.j1892)
Gluten intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in three large prospective cohort studies of US men and women (DOI: 10.1007/s00125-018-4697-9)
The Unintended Consequences of a Gluten-free Diet (DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000000640)
Accumulation of Heavy Metals in People on a Gluten-Free Diet (DOI: 10.1016/j.cgh.2017.01.034)
Fantastic article. We have demonized a food that has been enjoyed for thousands of years as a nutritious staple.
There is a woman who also is a food science major who pulls out the research on eating real bread- fresh milled.
Most non-genetic celiacs can eat real bread as long as it is milled and baked, and consumed the same day or within 3 days.
I found that processed gluten was making my joints hurt.
When I swapped to freshly milled, not only did they not hurt when I ate bread, but my digestion was finally healed in about 3 months. I think it is the fiber, the vitamins b and e that made a difference.
Regular bread and white rice make me bloat still- I can happily skip them but the nutritional benefits of real bread (and to be honest- enjoyment) keep it as a staple in our diet. I am eating lower carb for Lipedema, and bread and fruit is my carb of choice.
Talked to a blood pathologist about Lipedema and gluten. He made an important point that most food with gluten in them have glyphosate exposure, at least in the United States. There have been studies linking the MTHFR gene mutation, Lipedema, and glyphosate. So my question is are people really suffering with a gluten allergy or from the pollution of chemicals in our food to such a degree it is causing genetic mutations in our bodies? 🧐