Natural Gluten Protection: Charlene Van Buiten, PhD

Hello Gut Check Project fans. Welcome to Gut Check Project and KBMD health family. I'm Eric Rieger here with my awesome co host, Dr. Kenneth Brown. We have another special show. 

We just keep we just keep outdoing ourselves with smart people. I'm like I normally I've well I'm becoming very comfortable being the stupidest person on these zoom calls right now this is like this is the new norm, me being the absolute dumbest person on the screen right now.

If you're the well, that's thank you. That's really weird. And and if you're the dumbest, then this is gonna be a really, really intelligent show. So today, Episode Number 52. We have a special guest. This is Dr. Charlene Van Buiten. She is an Assistant Professor of food science and Human Nutrition at Colorado State University. Hello, Charlene. How are you doing today?

I'm doing well. How are you guys 

Doing great. We're doing great. I'm not going to introduce the paperwork that we're going to get into. But what I am interested...before we get into some incredible information about your research around celiac disease, and how essentially people can stave off long term inflammation. We always like to get to know a little bit about you. But we did print off your resume. And it looks to me like from all of the stuff that you do in the CV, that you started sometime in the womb getting things done.

So you've been like publishing papers in utero somehow.

Yeah, yeah. It's it's a really rare skill. So.

So where are you? Where do you Where are you from originally?

Originally I'm from Connecticut, grew up there. And then did my bachelor's degree at University of Connecticut in nutrition.

Nice. And how long have you been at Colorado State?

I've been at Colorado State about a year and a half now. So I got about six good months before everything shut down. Still happy to be here. It's a nice place to be locked down in at least.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The northern part of Colorado. It's it's definitely beautiful up there. So before you read Colorado State, let's see where else you were a postdoctoral fellow, obviously. And then, is there any other stops along the way that really leapt out to you and ended up pushing you into Colorado State to do you know, good nutrition for human?

Um, yeah, I would say probably the most important step in my whole academic journey was at Penn State where I did my PhD in food science. That's kind of where all of the research that we'll talk about today was really conceived. It was just kind of a one off idea that my PhD advisor and I had just one day, you know, oh, what if we looked at interactions between gluten and tannins, and then, you know, I kind of went back to my office, first year PhD student really excited. And all of a sudden, it was like all of these ideas just in terms of the chemical interactions and what this means for nutrition just designed this whole project. And in a really rare case of circumstances, everything I had designed in my first year of my PhD ended up being what I eventually did over the course of the next five years. I don't think anybody is ever that lucky. Yeah, and the project turned into what you all were able to read before inviting me here. 

We will definitely dive deep into that. But I'm really curious. So I've, we have the CV here that shows your academic pursuit. I want to know why Charlene, Dr. Charlene, Dr. Charlene decided to do the study of food science and nutrition. Let's just start from there. And then I get the passion once you've latched on to something, but I'm always curious how people find their way like, like, how you how you got there.

Yeah, I think I discovered Food Science a little earlier than the average person. Most people will get into it in college, having followed a path of chemistry or biochemistry, and then realizing they can apply all of these concepts to food. But I actually was in the Future Farmers of America when I was in high school. And I thought that I wanted to be a vet, and then realize that I was not really into like blood or sick animals or anything. And one of my teachers was like, we have this competition. It's called food science. you design a food product, you talk about safety and everything. And I was sure sounds cool. And the first day that I met with that team for this competition, we got a textbook chapter on canning. And I was reading about canning, and I was like, I was really interesting. Like, if you can something it'll last a really long time. Or if it's done incorrectly, it can be so dangerous that it can kill you. Kind of dichotomy there. I was like, food science is crazy. And just from there was like obsessed with it. And, yeah, I was for nutrition, grad school for food science.

This kind of reminds me of the whole mycology thing that we were talking about before. Where like you might find a brave food canner and you might find an old food canner but you won't find them in the same person. I'm going to just dabble in some aggressive food canning and see what happens. They don't walk around anymore. We were we have Paul Paul Stamets was talking about that. And then the other mycologists, we've talked to mycologists that actually discuss that they feel the same way where it's like, look, you can have a mushroom that will save you. But if you prepare it wrong, or eat the wrong one, you're gonna die. If you have food canning, you can have food forever. But if you do it wrong, you can die. Well, that is awesome. So reading your article, or reading your paper, which is a review of your thesis, which tells me that you know this essentially better than anybody in the entire world because you did a thesis on something that I have been searching for for a very, very, very long time. I developed Atrantil to help people with bloating and irritable bowel syndrome. And then we started learning I late started learning about these effects of polyphenols came across your article, your review, which is titled gliadin sequestration as a novel therapy for celiac disease, a prospective application for polyphenols. This is the thing that really I've been looking for for a long time, we've known the benefits of polyphenols, but you're the first person that has been able to explain why I'm gluten sensitive. And once I start, once I started taking Atrantil whenever I would eat gluten, I didn't have issues, and I really couldn't explain it. We've had patients that say, when I, you know, when I take these large polyphenolic compounds that are in Atrantil, I can eat wheat. Why is it I didn't know I couldn't actually say from a molecular reason. And then I came across your paper. And this is absolutely fantastic. It's 32 pages of incredible material. And 185 references my goodness, you put some work into this congratulations on putting together what I think is the most comprehension review of polyphenols in the setting of celiac disease. So once again, if anybody listened to this, know somebody that has celiac disease, or has a family member, or has celiac themselves, this is something that really we need to share as a community. We need to get this out there and your work is really pivotal to explain the science, which is so cool. So let's jump into it. Because it's awesome.

Yeah, I don't even know where to start. Because you you described multiple different mechanisms of action on why polyphenols begin to work. So what drove you to to put these two associations together? Why celiac disease and why polyphenols?

So at the time that we came up with this project, I had recently joined my graduate advisor Ryan Elias at Penn State, I joined his lab, and he was doing a lot of work on wine quality. So as a food chemist, you know, we're looking at oxidation of polyphenols, how that can affect wine astringency, etc. And so I was, you know, showed up to grad school thinking I ...