The Pediatrician Who Discovered The Gluten-Free Diet

historical-nonfiction:

Dutch pediatrician Willem K. Dicke treated children with celiac symptoms in the 1930s and 1940s. Celiac disease was already a known problem which retarded children’s growth before slowly killing them. What was causing the illness was not clear, though, and the diagnosis was usually a death sentance.

Dicke noticed something strange: his sickest young patients improved during the famine of 1944-1945, when the occupied Netherlands was cut off by a German blockade. Everyone else was dying of starvation. But his sickest children were doing better than ever. When bread became available again, the first precious supplies were given to the (no longer) sickest children, and they immediately relapsed. Eureka! It was the bread! His realization led Dicke to develop the first gluten-free diet, and saving thousands of children’s lives.