The gluten lie and why my sympathy for celiac sufferers has its limits

From what I have read it seems that maybe one percent of people suffer from celiac disease, an autoimmune disease that damages the body's small intestine when gluten is digested. I really do feel sorry for those sufferers who have to avoid the wonderful protein that gives bread, pizza dough and other starchy foods their chewiness. They miss out on one of eating's great pleasures.

But my sympathy does have its limits. The gluten-free-movement is expanding at such a rate that restaurants are beginning to exclude it from their menus and thus deprive we non-sufferers from its pleasures. As Alan Levinovitz, who teaches philosophy and religion at James Madison University who recently published a book "The Gluten Lie," put it in an interview with The Washington Post:

The gluten-free movement really threatens food culture and our relationship with food. People are starting to think about diet as the main way to optimize their health, and as a consequence, their ability to sit down and enjoy a meal is diminishing. I often ask people who are seeking out the perfect diet, if in their ideal world we would all just eat the foods that allowed us to maximize the length of our life and make us as lean as possible. In that world, there is little culinary diversity. In that world, you wouldn't have different cuisines. The gluten free-movement, and a lot of what it stands for, is incredibly threatening to the beautiful diversity of culinary cultures that make life so wonderful.
Another danger is that people who are scared of things in groups often create what's called mass sociogenic illness. This is a well-documented phenomenon where when people believe that something is going to make them ill, they actually start to feel symptoms. So the information that gluten is dangerous, and the prevalence of people going gluten free, actually contributes to a form of mass sociogenic illness where people come to experience symptoms from eating food when in fact those symptoms are entirely psychosomatic.

And a worthwhile comment in an Amazon review by an Australian expert:

“A factually accurate and highly entertaining work. It provides an effective counter to the fearmongering and false promises purveyed by sensationalists masquerading as scientists. This book should be essential reading for anyone who contemplates following a restrictive diet and for all health practitioners who use diets as the central platform of their therapeutic approach.”

(Peter Gibson, MD, Director of Gastroenterology at the Alfred Hospital and Monash University - From a background of research in epithelial cell biology, he now runs a large program of translational research and has active clinical interests in inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease and irritable bowel syndrome. A major focus of his work is the use of diet to control gut symptoms and influence outcomes in chronic intestinal conditions)