Foods made from wheat, rye and barley contain a protein known as gluten. If you suffer from gluten intolerance, the cells of your immune system attack the lining of your small intestine in response to gluten. Over time gluten intolerance, also known as celiac disease, damages the small intestine and inhibits the absorption of nutrients including vitamins, minerals and dietary fat. Dietary fat intake contributes to increasing LDL cholesterol levels, so patients with gluten intolerance may experience lower LDL cholesterol levels.
LDL Cholesterol
Cholesterol is classified as a lipid because like fat it cannot dissolve in water, which means it cannot dissolve in blood. To travel through the body cholesterol must bind to specialized proteins known as lipoproteins. Your liver produces low-density lipoproteins, or LDL, and high-density lipoproteins, known as HDL. LDL binds to the majority of cholesterol in your body and carries it through the blood vessels to the cells that use it to provide structure to cell membranes, produce hormones and create bile acids needed to digest fats.
Cholesterol and Dietary Fat
Your body produces approximately 75 percent of your total amount of cholesterol, according to the American Heart Association. The other 25 percent comes from consuming dietary cholesterol and dietary fat. Decreasing your fat intake can decrease your total and LDL cholesterol levels. Conditions like gluten intolerance that inhibit fat absorption can also reduce LDL cholesterol. Research published in "The American Journal of Medicine" confirms that gluten intolerance, or celiac disease, is associated with low cholesterol levels.
Gluten Intolerance Treatment
Doctors classify gluten intolerance as an auto-immune disease because the disease requires a specific set of genes that cause your immune cells to inappropriately attack normal tissue in response to an environmental trigger, in this case the gluten. The only way to treat gluten intolerance is to remove the environmental trigger by following a gluten-free diet. Because gluten intolerance promotes low LDL cholesterol levels you may fear that treating the disease may cause an increase in LDL cholesterol. "The American Journal of Medicine" reports that following a gluten-free diet causes total cholesterol levels to increase slightly, but that the increase occurs mainly due to a 21 percent increase in HDL, while LDL only increases approximately 4 percent.
LDL vs. HDL
In general, high cholesterol levels increase your risk for heart disease, but not all types of cholesterol are bad. LDL cholesterol stays in your blood vessels and as levels increase the cholesterol can build up along the walls of the blood vessels and restrict the flow of blood. For this reason doctors encourage you to keep LDL cholesterol levels under 100 mg/dL. HDL picks up excess cholesterol from the tissues and carries it back to the liver which uses it to make bile acids that are then removed from the body with the waste. Because HDL helps remove cholesterol from your body, an increase in HDL reduces your risk for heart disease. If you suffer from gluten intolerance, following a gluten-free diet will cure your uncomfortable symptoms like diarrhea and gas and keep your risk for heart disease low.
