Samuel Gee starched foods should be avoided. He forbids rice, sago, fruit and vegetables. Raw meat is recommended as are thin slices of toasted bread. Gee highlights particular success with a child "who was fed upon a quart of the best Dutch mussels daily". However, the child cannot bear this diet for more than one season. The cause of coeliac disease was eventually discovered to be an autoimmune reaction to gliadin, a gluten protein found in wheat, plus Secalin in rye and Hordien in barley. The lining of the small bowel is flattened, which interferes with the absorption of nutrients. Gee would
Gluten immunochemistry include: LTP (albumin/globulin), thioredoxin-hB, and wheat flour peroxidase. A particular 5 residue peptide, Gln-Gln-Gln-Pro-Pro motif, has been found to be a major wheat allergen. New immunogenic motifs appear in the literature almost monthly and new gliadin and "Triticeae" protein sequences appear that contain these motifs. The HLA DQ2.5 restricted peptide "I I Q P Q Q P A Q" produced approximately 50 hits of identical sequences in NCBI-Blast search is one of a several dozen known motifs whereas only a small fraction of Triticeae gluten variants have been examined. For this reason the immunochemistry is best discussed at the level