9: "Is Gluten Making Me Gain Weight?" [ASK DR. ANNA]

Is gluten making you gain weight — or is something else going on? In this episode of ASK DR. ANNA, Dr. Anna breaks down one of the most common questions she hears from people who feel stuck in their weight loss journey and are starting to wonder if gluten is the culprit.

The gluten-free movement has exploded — but for most people, cutting gluten alone is not the answer. And in many cases, gluten-free swaps can actually make things worse. 

Dr. Anna breaks down the real science behind gluten, shares her own personal experience with symptoms changing after living in Europe, and explains what is actually driving results for people who feel better after cutting it out.

Listen in to learn:

• The difference between celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and what most people are actually dealing with
• Why gluten and weight gain are not directly connected for the majority of people
• Why non-celiac gluten sensitivity is real but surprisingly hard to pinpoint
• Dr. Anna's personal story of how her own symptoms changed after living in Europe — and what that revealed
• Why gluten-free processed foods are often higher in calories and lower in fiber than their regular counterparts
• How additives, refined starches, and glycemic index affect hunger and blood sugar in ways gluten never did
• The real reason some people lose weight after cutting gluten — and it's probably not what you think
• How to get all the benefits of going gluten-free without adding a single extra rule to your life
• How a Mediterranean-style whole food approach naturally solves the problem without the label

Drop your questions in the comments below and check out the other episodes here where Dr. Anna is tackling more of your biggest weight loss topics!

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Transcript

Is Gluten Blocking Weight Loss

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I was recently asked, Dr. Anna, is gluten affecting my weight? And with this being a classic point of confusion, I realize we need to talk about this. So this video is for you if you're wondering whether gluten might be the reason you can't lose weight, or if you're worried it's actually making you gain weight. Now, you've seen people lose weight going gluten-free, and you've heard that it causes a lot of inflammation and bloating, and that it can be bad for us, right? So you might be wondering, should I cut out gluten? And is that what's actually been holding back my weight loss progress this whole time? So this is one of the most common questions that I get when it comes to specific foods for weight loss, especially from people who've tried like everything else out there. And the answer is going to probably surprise you. Most people going gluten-free are making their weight loss harder without realizing it. And I'm going to show you exactly why this is. Plus, if you think that cutting out gluten helped your friend lose her 20 pounds, well, what actually happened may not be what you think. And understanding this could literally save you months of unnecessary restriction and frustration. So if you don't understand when gluten actually matters, you might risk cutting it out unnecessarily and just making your life harder overall. Or you could even be blaming gluten when actually something else is your real issue. I'm Dr. Anna. Welcome here to my series where I answer real questions from viewers like you. These are honest conversations about weight loss, real life, and cutting out all the BS. So, yes, I'm a medical doctor, but we're not talking real medical advice in these videos. What we're talking about is just my take on things being a medical doctor. So I'm gonna warn you, I always share my honest, raw opinion. So take it or leave it. But seriously, it's important if you're having any personal issues with your own health, just talk to your own healthcare provider. I cannot encourage that enough. Everybody's situation is unique and your personal concerns are unique to you.

The Medical Truth About Gluten

SPEAKER_00 2:00

Let's start with the medical reality here. So, unless you have true celiacs disease or have been diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity, gluten is likely not the thing making you gain weight. Or said differently, it's likely not the thing blocking you from losing weight. So I'm gonna tell you a quick personal story here. When I was in college, I started to develop a digestive issue. And so I went to my doctor, I did a bunch of tests, we tested for celiacs disease, and I was negative. So then after we did all of the blood work and we weren't really getting answers, we moved on to the next typical approach, which is to do something called an elimination diet. If any of you have heard of this before or if you haven't, quite simply, it's where you eliminate out a lot of foods that cause people problems, and then one at a time, slowly you add them back in to test and see if your symptoms come back when you introduce that food. So it's kind of an old school way, but it's very effective, of figuring out what might be problematic for you. So I did this full thing and I noticed that I had particularly tough times digesting wheat, oats, and corn. So I just said, you know, I I don't have a specific allergy. We did all the tests, but I know my body does not work with these things, so I just avoided them. And that went on for years. I kind of convinced myself I had one of these sensitivities, but for whatever reason it fell through the cracks. And I just knew that when I avoided these foods, I truly felt better and my symptoms went away. So fast forward several years, I had moved to Europe. I was living in Italy and I was in medical school. And I had actually lived in Germany for a short period of time for about six months before I moved to Italy. So I had some significant amount of time already living on the European continent. And I initially was continuing to eat the way I had for the several years prior, avoiding specific foods. And finally, a friend of mine who was German, she had said, you know, you should try our bread. Our bread is really amazing, and it's probably not like your bread in the US. And I was a little bit nervous to engage in eating a food that I knew had caused me so many problems for so long and it had been a long time. But I actually tried both bread, and then when I was in Italy, I decided to have pasta. And I was shocked because I did not have the symptoms. I had no issues at all. And of course, this was like game-changing for me, and I was so pumped because of course, you how can you live in Italy and not have pasta, right? So I realized that, well, I don't know how to exactly explain what happened here, but for the years prior, I for sure was having a real problem. And now I'm not having a problem. But one thing was very clear all along, it was never gluten. Because if it was gluten, the problem would not have gone away. Now, the more and more people I talk to, the more I realize this is actually kind of a phenomenon that's not that rare. People who are American and maybe have some issues with some foods, when they travel abroad, for example, to Europe, I've heard so many times of people having a similar experience. They can eat all the breads and the pastas and the crackers, and it just doesn't affect them in the same way. So what I recognized was there's okay, something going on here. There's a difference in the food, but unlikely it's the gluten itself. And we're gonna talk about why. So, what's the story here? What's the deal? So we need to break down what true gluten issues are, what they technically are. Celiax disease is a true autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks the gluten protein when you ingest it. So it's found in certain grains and not in others, things like wheat are the classic. Statistically, only about 1% of the world's population has true celiac disease. So these people absolutely cannot have gluten or they have huge problems in their health. It damages their intestines, they get massive inflammation, they can wind up in the hospital, really serious health consequences. For them, they have to go gluten-free. It's actually medically necessary. It's not a choice. We don't have a magic pill to just fix this, at least yet. So, how about those people who have non-celiac gluten sensitivities, which is also a diagnosis, but it's a little bit different. This is real, but it can be sort of hard to pinpoint. So I've seen it before in my practice, and this is maybe what I was thinking of was my personal problem for some of those years, but then I realized it couldn't have been. It's a lot rarer than a lot of people think, but it's still more common than true celiac disease. I've seen estimates of between five and six percent of people have this. Some estimates are up to 10% of people might have this. All it is to say is that these people feel better

Why Bread Worked In Europe

SPEAKER_00 6:50

when they do not eat gluten, when they avoid it. And luckily, when they are able to do that, they're not gonna have any big symptoms. But they're not gonna have such a full-blown intestinal damage type of an effect as if they had true autoimmune version or celiac's disease. For everybody else, the let's say 90 to 94% of people in the general population, gluten is just a protein. It's not something that's gonna wreak havoc on your health. It's not toxic, it shouldn't be inflammatory unless you have a specific problem to it, like we've mentioned. It's not something that's actually making you gain weight. Your body should digest it just like any other protein. But here's what you need to understand. If you have not been tested for celiac disease or what are these gluten sensitivities, don't just assume you have these diagnoses. Go get tested. You know, know for yourself. If you're concerned, this is a simple blood test your doctor can order. If you test negative and gluten is not your problem, okay, you may still have real symptoms, but that's a different story. So here's the thing: a lot of people feel better if they go gluten-free. And this is probably not because of the gluten protein itself. So what's going on exactly? Now, if you want to lose weight, but you don't necessarily want to cut out gluten entirely, and you're not in a situation where you technically have to, I would not argue that gluten-free is the thing that's gonna make you lose weight the best. So recognize there's another side of this. Going gluten-free does not equal weight loss. So we're gonna break this down in a lot of detail here. What's even more important is that if you do go gluten-free, thinking that it's the magic bullet that's gonna help you lose weight, I'm telling you right now, all those gluten-free products out there that you're buying might actually be making things worse. So here is the kicker: gluten-free breads, pastas, cookies, crackers, cakes, cereals, you name it, they're often even more processed and potentially higher in calories than versions containing gluten. Here's

How Gluten Free Products Backfire

SPEAKER_00 8:55

a situation I see all the time. Patient or client comes to me convinced that gluten's the problem. I've had this happen for years. They read articles online, they watch influencers, they've seen videos talking about it, they know they feel bloated after they eat bread or pasta or crackers, etc. So they start going gluten-free for a few months, they're really strict, they're not cheating, and they may or may not feel better, but they're not necessarily losing weight. They're still bloated. Now, if you were my patient in this situation, we would start by testing for the actual true problems. I could just order the blood test. That's what's nice about being a doctor. But then what do you do when those tests come back negative? Like remember, they did for me in the beginning. I told you about my personal experience. It's possible you might still have symptoms. So you might be really frustrated and wonder what's actually going on. Now, a lot of people convince themselves that then they still have a gluten issue, that the doctor just didn't detect it, or the tests were wrong, or the tests didn't collect all the information there is to know. And so they start just buying a bunch of gluten-free products and they commit to this lifestyle of being gluten-free. Gluten-free pasta, gluten-free bread, gluten-free cookies, gluten-free pancake mix. And of course, this is going to affect their choices when they go to a restaurant, when they go to an event, like a wedding, etc. And their approach is having all the same foods they would eat if they were eating the gluten versions. They're just getting the gluten-free versions. So if this is you, and I can think of a couple of people I've worked with before where they fell into this camp, you go gluten-free to try to lose weight. But the challenge is if you're just opting for all these gluten-free products, the breads, the pastas, the cookies, you feel like you're being healthier and you're expecting it to give you benefit like weight loss. But the risk is that actually might be the thing blocking your weight loss progress. Because when you flip those packages over, what you're going to see is that they contain so many additives, just like any other processed product. Gluten-free bread may in fact be even more calorie-dense than a regular bread, depending on the brand you buy. What happens is they add a lot of extra oils, sugars, starches, etc., because the texture is different. In a gluten-free green, you're missing the gluten protein. Well, the gluten protein adds a lot of, let's call it, sponginess or stickiness as a texture to a product. So a baked good needs something to make it spongy and kind of bouncy. That's where breads have that quality to them. It's honestly from the gluten most of the time. If you're thinking about some of these gluten-free products that are made with potato flour or rice flour or lentil flour, those don't have the same sponginess to them. So they're going to add other stuff in to try to bring back that texture so that you don't feel like you're having a bad experience eating the product. Now, what I see so often is that all those additives don't add health quality to the food. And so it's possible they're going to be using things to add texture back in, but they're also going to be adding things to put flavor back in, more sugar, more salt, more oil. This happens more frequently than not, unfortunately. So you want to be very careful when you're looking at gluten-free versions of typical food products. There's other aspects of this. It's not just that there's a lot of additives and fillers and things that are adding flavor that may not be healthy, but these kinds of greens tend to have less fiber, they provide us with less protein, and often they fall into a category of what we call higher glycemic index foods, meaning they're the type of carbohydrates that our body can break down faster to become sugar in the bloodstream. That is what can cause like faster blood sugar spikes. And people are typically worried about having too much of a blood sugar spike after they eat. So it's just something to be aware of and something to consider when you're looking at these products. So, like I mentioned, gluten is a protein. It gives dough or it gives flour mixtures a certain texture and structure that makes them elastic. When you remove that protein, the food manufacturers recognize they have to give something back with elasticity. So remember, all these products with the rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, these are very refined carbs, very processed, quickly digested sugars. And then they have to add in the extra sugar for taste and oil and other fats for the texture, the moisture, plus some other thickeners, like I mentioned. So, all in all, this may end up being even more calories, even less fiber, less protein than the original thing. And the risk is, on top of all of it, these gluten-free products tend to be expensive. They cost even more money. So you might even be paying two to three times more for a typical product that might not be helping you. If you don't have a specific gluten problem, you might be wasting money. And what a shame. And that might not even be giving you the weight loss benefit. So, for example, if you switch back to regular gluten-containing products, it may even be the thing that helps you lose weight, depending. It depends on a lot of factors. So just keep this in mind. You're not necessarily setting yourself up for weight loss success just by going gluten-free. That is my honest opinion about that. Unless you have celiac disease or you're diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity and you have determined that it's specifically the gluten causing you your symptoms and problems, it is not necessary to start just eating full Monty gluten-free and buying all the gluten-free processed products. You're actually just better off eating a diet that naturally avoids gluten if you are so committed to eating gluten-free and you want to do it for weight loss. So remember, gluten-free cookies, they're still cookies. Gluten-free pizza, it's still pizza. Gluten-free cakes, it's still cake, right? We want to be smart about thinking about a weight loss approach. If we're committed to losing weight, we have to stick to the fundamentals, which is whole foods, vegetables, fruits, quality proteins, legumes, whole grains that you can digest, nuts and seeds, meats, eggs, things that are giving our body pure nutrition, things that make us feel good, and that are going to set our metabolism up for success. If you know you can't tolerate gluten, that is perfectly fine. You do not have to eat grains that contain gluten. But if gluten isn't the issue for you, I would probably argue that a lot of whole grain breads are better than the gluten-free versions in general. This tends to be the trend. And just consider that the marketers, they're selling more gluten-free products just because they know it's trendy and people will buy them. They're not really committed to your health. And they're certainly not making a product that's meant to help you lose weight. So make sure you're always reading the actual ingredients on packages, being smart about it, thinking through is this even benefiting my health and is this cost effective for me? So then let's turn our attention to this next

Why People Lose Weight Gluten Free

SPEAKER_00 16:10

point. If gluten isn't the problem and the gluten-free products are not the solution, then why do so many people still say that they lose weight when they go gluten-free? I want to explain what's actually happening here because this is a real phenomenon that I see. Typically, when people go gluten-free and they lose weight, I don't believe that it's the absence of the gluten that truly did it. It's what they stopped eating overall. So people lose weight who go gluten-free, typically because, on average, by default, they are forced to cut out tons of products with these processed grains: breads, pastas, cookies, cakes, pretzels, crackers. And it's not because they're missing the gluten, but all the stuff that comes with those processed foods, in addition. So I want to tell you a story here. A woman that I knew once, she went gluten-free, and she noticed she lost 15 pounds in two months, and she was thrilled. And she started convincing herself that gluten was this poison, and she finally figured out the big mystery. And I was really happy for her that she lost weight. But I wanted to understand what actually changed. So I asked her, like, wow, tell me about your eating now. Like, what are you typically having? What are your meals? Because I actually like hearing about this stuff. What did you eat before going gluten-free? So we had this whole conversation, and she told me she used to eat bagels and she loved them. And that was like a typical breakfast for her, or just an English muffin. And so then lunch would often be something at work, salad, a sandwich, and then often for dinner, she would have like Asian bowls with rice and pastas and cookies for a snack. And she would eat like a lot of these hundred-calorie snack packs. And so I thought, okay, what did you eat when you started going gluten-free? And she said, Well, I just decided to kind of change up all my meals. I had a lot of eggs for breakfast. I was eating vegetables with them. And then salad pretty much for lunch, since I wasn't eating sandwiches anymore. And at work, I didn't have gluten-free sandwich bread options. So I just stuck with salads for a while. A lot of the time with chicken on it, sometimes beans, sometimes tofu. And then dinner, she would cook a piece of meat, a piece of fish. She always had some more vegetables. She would eat things like a lot of cauliflower or cauliflower rice. And then her snacks were, she couldn't buy those hundred-calorie snack packs anymore. So she was packing a lot of nuts and fruits and things. Do you see what I saw when she changed her diet to gluten-free? She didn't just remove the gluten. She completely changed her whole diet. And she was cutting out almost everything processed, all those processed carbs, the sandwich bread, the hundred-calorie snack packs, huge portions of pastas and breads and sugary snacks. She was just eating a very whole foods diet with a lot of good proteins, a lot more vegetables, more whole foods in general, fruits as snacks instead of packaged or processed little things. So it didn't surprise me that she lost weight. She was doing so much for her health that was benefiting her, but it didn't have to do with the gluten itself. So let's think about this. What happens when most people go gluten-free is they naturally cut out gluten-containing products. If they're not going to enhance their budget and buy all the gluten-free versions of stuff, they're naturally going to be cutting out bread. Well, there goes easily three, 500 calories a day or even a meal. They're cutting out pasta. There goes several hundred calories. They're cutting out cookies, crackers, pretzels, sometimes baked goods, things that we eat all the time that are just adding a lot of processed sugar and salt and oils into our diet. And typically what happens when people go gluten-free is they sort of forced to start cooking more, or they're thinking about their meals more. And so they're making healthier choices. They might eat more vegetables and proteins to fill in the gap. Things like cauliflower rice. Well, that's adding a lot of really fantastic fiber. It's not rice at all, it's just a vegetable, but it's cut up so small that people can think of it like rice. They end up putting themselves in a natural calorie deficit and they eat more whole foods, they get fuller from their meals. Aha, wonder why they lose weight. Because that is the stuff that works. It's not because the gluten was actually making them fat all along. They just started eating better overall. So, of course, this is predictable. Now, on the other side, I've had a different patient before who went gluten-free, and she had told me this happened to her before we met. She did replace everything with the gluten-free versions, like we had talked about earlier, all those processed products, and she didn't lose any weight. So she was convinced gluten-free is BS, but the version of it that she did was not the best approach for weight loss. So she was still eating basically the same calories, if not more, lots of processed food. And they just happened to be gluten-free versions. So I was not surprised that she did not lose weight with that approach, because that's kind of what I would expect. So here's what I want you to understand the reason we're even talking about this. You can get all the benefits of going gluten-free without thinking of it as gluten-free. So, what do I mean by this? When you go gluten-free, this is what a lot of people end up doing. They automatically cut out a lot of unhealthy, processed, packaged, fast type foods. They end up cutting out a lot of extra eating out, and they end up reading food labels more, cooking a lot more at home, eating more vegetables and protein to fill in the gaps. So, of course, this is going to help people feel better and potentially lose weight naturally because they're eating a more balanced diet with a lot of whole foods that are very nutritious. But it's not necessarily the gluten itself, it's just the overall. Diet change that gave them those results. So, what's the lesson here? Of course,

Whole Foods Approach And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 22:05

it's the same as always. We always want to be targeting eating less processed and packaged things because that's where most of our health problems seem to come from. It's like less bread and smaller portions and fewer baked goods and fewer packaged and processed things like you would find at the gas stations. Just less of that and ending up eating more whole foods, more vegetables, fruits, proteins. That's the stuff that's always worked, and that's the stuff that will always work. It always works for weight loss. And so you don't need to make your life harder by avoiding gluten if you don't have to. You do want to think about overall what's your dietary pattern. How are you eating? And how is that affecting overall all the things you're doing? For weight loss, of course, we always want to go into that calorie deficit, but it's almost easier to do when you're eating healthy foods because you're going to get full naturally on foods that are naturally low in calories, like vegetables and fruits. You don't have to spend a lot of extra money on specialty products just to target weight loss. You do not need to get stressed out at restaurants or social events. It is just about eating real food in a reasonable amount in a balanced way. And I teach this on my free content online on all of the Healthy After 50 Academy. This is what we talk about, how to actually build this for yourself so it's easy and sustainable and delicious and fun. So, of course, tons of resources for you if you want more help on that. And by all means, if you love bread like I do, if you love pasta like I do, there's no reason you need to entirely cut that stuff out for the sake of having a healthy physique and being slim and fit. That is not necessary at all. You have to just think about everything in context. Okay. That's the big secret. So, like I mentioned, in our Healthy After 50 Academy, we do learn how to build these balanced meals with whole food, easy cooking, if not very minimal cooking, because I'm not honestly a great chef at all. But weight loss then can be so automatic for you. It does not require you to go gluten-free if you don't want to. So notice that without having to cut out entire foods because you're afraid of an ingredient like gluten with an approach that makes sense and has stood the test of time, like the Mediterranean approach, you're naturally going to be able to eat amazing meals, whether or not it contains gluten. If you want, you can have tons of whole grains that are not including gluten at all, like quinoa and rices. Many people can lose weight and keep it off by following this approach. It is so easy and fun. I cannot emphasize it enough. To be honest, we know from so much science that it is also one of the healthiest diets in the world for so many diseases. And so it's really quality over quantity, guys. It's not about strictly eliminating anything, and it certainly is not about getting rid of gluten at all costs. So, what I honestly think here is that gluten itself is not usually the thing that's making you gain weight. And it's also probably not the thing that, if you're avoiding it, is making you lose the weight. There's all this other stuff and all these other factors we need to think about that are playing into the picture. If you do, though, have a particular problem to gluten, your celiac disease, you've been diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity, it's probably smart to avoid it. You don't want to risk worsening your health or giving yourself a big consequence. Know that a lot of gluten-free products are more processed and potentially worse for our health overall than if we just naturally ate things that didn't have gluten, if we do need to be avoiding it. Now, what I see so often is that people do lose weight when they go gluten-free because they're automatically cutting out a lot of junk food. As I always recommend for anybody thinking about this, consider that the healthy fundamentals focusing on delicious whole foods eating, eating reasonable portions instead of expensive specialty products, that will probably fast track you to your weight loss success. So I'm sure there are still other questions you might have. If you do, drop them in the comment section. But in general, I want to answer all of your questions about weight loss. That's what I'm making these episodes for. Things that you are actually thinking about, things you're confused about. I want to clear this up for all of us so weight loss becomes something easy and fun and that you can succeed at. Because I really do believe that it's possible for each and every one of you. So drop those in the comment section below and then jump into my other videos up here where we are talking about other topics for weight loss. No BS, the full Monty, giving you the real deal. You're gonna like those conversations. I'll see you over there.