When you walk around
the supermarkets in the US, you will see a lot of shelves reserved for a
variety of “Gluten-Free” foods. “Gluten” is a protein component of grain such
as wheat flour. My image of “Gluten” is that it is the source of the stickiness
of dough. I had no idea why it is good to avoid gluten, but realized that a Gluten-Free
diet is booming in the US.
Gluten is an ingredient contained in the grains such
as wheat, barely or rye. The Westerners who live on these grains have a
higher chance of getting an allergenic disease called “Celiac Disease”. (The
chance of
having this allergy in the US is one out of 133. Surprising!)
Those people with this disease are encouraged not to ingest gluten. Gluten-Free
flour and the other Gluten-Free food products are developed as a component of
a daily diet to cope with this disease. It is unknown how it spreads, but Gluten-Free
diet has gained popularity even among the people without the allergy as a way
to improve their physical condition and to lose weight, and the diet is booming
in the US. If I want to make a rather piercing comment … there should be no valid
reason for the majority of the people without the allergy to go on a
Gluten-Free diet, but it is important for them to believe that they will become
healthier because of this eating habit. You might as well say that raising
health consciousness itself is good for health. Looking back, the Fat-Free diet boomed in the
1990s. There was a Carbohydrate-Free diet boom in the 2000s, and here now is
a Gluten-Free diet boom. It just seems to me that the health food boom is
simply one fad following another. In Japan as well, we talked about cocoa,
then about polyphones being good for our health. Every time I see Gluten-Free
products at a supermarket, I cannot but think that it is a common rule around
the world that we always want to have a new fad of health foods.
By the way, these Gluten-Free foods are pricier than
the normal products. In the US, where there is a wide range of income levels,
the people with higher incomes would probably buy more of these products. A high-end
supermarket known as “Whole Foods” in my neighborhood is an equivalent of “Ikari
Super” in Kobe, and deals in quality foods from around the world. Many
different types of Gluten-Free foods are offered in the store. When it comes
to flour, for example, it is rather difficult to find ordinary non Gluten-Free
flour. You also notice that the customers of this store are mostly slender or
athletic. It looks as if you are observing a grand socio-economic experiment
in which a person’s economic condition reflects one’s health.
Do you know about a Gluten-Free
diet? Japanese people live on rice, and rice does not contain gluten. A Gluten-Free
diet fad may not break out in Japan.
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