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Celiac for 72 years

I was one of the first "banana babies" diagnosed in 1943.  The issue then was failure to thrive and it was thought that making the baby eat tons of bananas would cure her and then by the age of 6 she will have outgrown what was supposed to be a childhood disease.  Thus during school years, I could eat anything but actually never liked pastas and bread. I also missed a lot of school because of stomach aches.  Fortunately, I was a good student. By the time I was 19 or 20, I became very very sick and after many tests and finally a consult with my pediatrician, the doctors at the Univ of Calif in Berkeley diagnosed "adult sprue", basically celiac and since then except for a brief period when the new testing was coming out in 1994, I was on a gluten-free diet. For me living gluten-free is not really a problem. Our children learned to read labels by the time they were four and we've always made almost everything from scratch.  All three of them are gourmet cooks now. I feel quite healthy and my husband attributes my celiac to both of us seeming in much better shape than many of our peers.

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