In the 1920s, Dr. Sidney Haas believed he had found a cure for celiac disease by proposing the “banana diet.” This diet proved successful for those with celiac disease because, incidentally, the diet did not contain gluten. It was 1945 when 2-year-old Lindy Thomson was told she had only weeks to live. She had diarrhea and vomiting. She was so thin and weak that she could no longer walk. Her parents took her to one doctor after another. Finally, Dr. Douglas Arnold in Buffalo, N.Y., offered the most unusual prescription: She had to eat bananas.

“At least seven bananas a day” (see recipe in the photo) according to the diet invented by Dr. Sidney Haas. The diet contained only bananas, milk, cottage cheese, meat and vegetables.

In fact, Dr. Sidney Haas saved the lives of many children, but he made the mistake of focusing more on the extraordinary curative effects of bananas in stopping diarrhea, which was the most typical symptom of this disease at the time, while ignoring the impact of cereals such as wheat, barley and rye.

It would be the Dutch pediatrician, Willem Karel Dicke, who realized that wheat was the factor that could be linked to celiac disease. He noticed that in the last years of World War II, when bread was scarce in the Netherlands, the mortality rate from celiac disease dropped to zero. In 1952, Dicke and his colleagues identified gluten as the cause of celiac disease and thus the gluten-free diet was born.

In fact, Dr. Willem Karel Dicke would also win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery, but his untimely death made it impossible, since the Nobel Prize, as a rule, is not awarded posthumously.

The full article in English at the link: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/24/529527564/doctors-once-thought-bananas-cured-celiac-disease-it-saved-kids-lives-at-a-cost?fbclid=IwAR1WW9–vBn_dEuzkqs2az6KojbN2eUomUIstGYImCdh_4QHJnLkMNGd6cM