Does Gluten Free Diet Prevent Heart Disease in Non-Celiacs?

Celiac disease is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease. The most crucial change for people with celiac disease is the avoidance of gluten, the protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Avoiding gluten doesn’t just help the celiac disease: it may also help reduce the risk of the heart disease that is associated with it.

Because gluten-free diets are becoming more popular even among people who do not have celiac disease, researchers conducted a massive study to determine the relation between gluten and coronary heart disease in healthy non-celiacs. The study followed 110,017 people who had no history of coronary heart disease for 26 years. . . .

When the people who ate the most gluten in their diet were compared with people who ate the least, there were fewer cases of heart disease in the people who ate the most. After adjusting for risk factors, the higher gluten group had a 5% lower risk of coronary heart disease. The difference was not significant, but demonstrated that avoiding gluten does not protect against heart disease in healthy people who do not have celiac disease.

Because gluten free diets avoid wheat, barley and rye, the researchers compared the gluten free diet with a gluten diet that gets its gluten from whole grain and not refined grain. This time the difference was significant: people who had the most gluten in the whole grain group had significantly lower risk of coronary heart disease than people in the gluten free group.

Lead researcher Andrew Chan said “ . . . in those individuals that actually had low intakes of gluten, they also tended to have diets that were also low in whole grains and so subsequently because of that also had a somewhat higher risk of developing heart disease.”

This large study demonstrates that a gluten free diet does not offer cardiovascular benefits for people who do not have celiac disease.

BMJ 2017;357:j1892

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