The Value of the Banana in the Treatment of Celiac Disease

Abstract

Some years ago I treated a child, aged 3 years, who suffered from a severe case of anorexia nervosa. She had reached a serious state of depletion and weakness from her self imposed starvation, refusing all food and regurgitating that fed to her by gavage. She finally accepted a banana, with the result that other food was taken in a more or less normal amount within forty-eight hours. There was a complete relapse when the banana was withheld, and food was taken normally only with bananas.This experiment was repeated to test the validity of the observation, always with the same result, until a time came when her appetite was normal whether bananas were included in the diet or not. The action was such as is attributed to a hormone. It was natural, therefore, to test bananas in a case of celiac disease where anorexia was a prominent symptom.Celiac disease is probably the most troublesome disturbance of nutrition of late infancy and early childhood. The consensus of opinion is that it is a functional disease characterized by inability to utilize properly carbohydrates and fats. To what extent the carbo¬ hydrate or the fat is at fault is not quite so clear. Herter,1 who studied these cases from a laboratory standpoint probably more carefully than any one else, found intolerance of carbohydrates to be the most impor¬ tant feature, resulting in the deprivation of the organism of the food¬ stuff on which it mainly depends for its caloric needs, and stated that : "In the severest forms of 'Infantilism' the total quantity of carbo¬ hydrates which can be tolerated may be very small, and it may be possible to supply in this form less than one-fifth of the calories required by the organism instead of nearly one-half as in health. The fats are, on the whole, better tolerated than the carbohydrates." The diffi¬ culty in treating these cases is proverbial, relapses even after marked temporary progress being the regular experience. Ten cases are reported here ; eight of the patients were clinically cured by the form of therapy described below. The two patients not treated died. TREATMENT

Celiac Disease as a Model for the Evolution of Multifactorial Disease in Humans

“…In 1888 (Dowd and Walker-Smith 1974;Simoons 1981;Losowsky 2008) Gee described the 'coeliac affection' as a condition of chronic indigestion associated with diarrhea, wasting, and weakness and common in people of all ages. Gee's report was the first to hypothesize dietary factors as a primary cause of the condition (Dowd and Walker-Smith 1974), and during the early twentieth century some workers noted the value of a starch free diet for prevention of CD (Haas 1924). Dicke andcolleagues (1950, 1953) observed the detrimental effect of wheat flour (but not wheat starch) on CD patients experimentally confirming a role for diet as a driver of CD.…”

Factors Affecting the Consumer Behaviour of Gluten Sensitive Consumers – A Pilot Study

“…Aretaeus of Cappadocia (famous for his dietetic cure) was the first to write about malabsorption, which we can assume he observed in people sensitive to flour. While several other studies (Haas, 1924) assessed coeliac disease in the 20th century and suspected the role of carbohydrates, Willem Dicke was the first to recognize the connection between specific types of grain and the disease in 1950. (Dicke, 1950;van Berge-Henegouwen & Mulder, 1993;Gyurian & Seben, 2012;Stojanovic, 2021;Anderson, 2022).…”

Celiac Disease Revisited

“…Diet was proposed as a causal contributor since Arateus. In the twentieth century, several diets were advocated, such as the banana diet [8] and the Fanconi diet based on fruits and vegetables [7]. The causal link to grain consumption (wheat, rye, barley, and, to a lesser extent, oats) was described in the forties by the Dutch pediatrician Willem-Karel Dicke.…”