Death by Gluten: How Undiagnosed Celiac Almost Cost Me My Life

By: Riya Anne Polcastro

Narrated by: Andrea Kincaid

If I had not taken my health into my own hands I would have been a gold mine for Big Pharma. High blood pressure. Chronic back pain. Arthritis. Insomnia. Anxiety. Excessive sweating. Allergies. Insanely huge ulcers in my mouth misdiagnosed as herpes. Ulcers in my nose misdiagnosed and treated as allergies. Not to mention the disaster that was my stomach.

The list goes on and on. Everything that could be wrong with me was. And my medical provider was more than willing to whip out her prescription pad to treat symptoms as if they were the actual disease. But I refused to believe that after being relatively healthy my whole life, my body was simply falling apart from a whole bunch of diseases at the age of 35.

This is the story of how I discovered what was wrong with me and finally received healing after decades of living with an undiagnosed autoimmune disorder. I am sharing this because it is estimated that 80 percent of people with celiac disease are undiagnosed. With over 200 identifiable symptoms - everything from stomach problems to skin issues, anxiety, enamel loss, and on and on - celiac can be hard to nail down. Two people with the same disease can have very different symptoms. And medical professionals are generally not trained to look for it, at least not in the United States.

I was lucky. I got better. Too many people are being treated for their symptoms instead of the autoimmune disease or food intolerance that is causing it. Maybe you’re one of those unfortunate people, or maybe someone you love is. In Death by Gluten: How Undiagnosed Celiac Almost Cost Me My Life, I will explain how I finally solved the mystery of my waning health and how others with undiagnosed celiac can reclaim their lives as well. Don’t let your doctor brush your symptoms under the rug. When it comes to a disease that is largely ignored the way this one is, you must take your health into your own hands.

©2017 Riya Anne Polcastro (P)2019 Riya Anne Polcastro

great story!

Almost a carbon copy of my own struggle to find my celiac diagnosis...so an authentic experience. It's a quick read and the narration is easy & conversational. I'd recommend it.

Poorly written, edited, and performed

Editing makes all the difference! I just got diagnosed with Celiac disease and was looking for a good personal story to help me understand my experience and navigate this new world. This book is certainly a personal account, but very poorly organized and hard to understand- the author elaborated on things that needed no elaboration (she goes to great lengths to describe completely unrelated events that irritated her- one sentence is enough!) and jumped around in her experience making it hard to discern if she was sharing about her post-diagnosis experience or pre-diagnosis trials and errors, and it bounced between sounding casual and awkward with her mixture of cursing and lack of contractions. I ended up fast forwarding through half of it due to unnecessary and long-winded complaining with no real valuable information and didn’t bother finishing it. The person who read the book was equally awkward in her delivery, emphasizing words that didn’t need emphasis, making it sound sing-songy, overly dramatic, and just awkward all around. The information and personal experience that held any applicable value in this book could have been condensed into a magazine article. Waste of a credit.