She was 11.
Years of stomach pain, vomiting, rashes, stunted growth.
And then a doctor handed her a rasgulla and said:
"Congratulations. We finally know what's wrong with you."
Muskan had coeliac disease.
For her, that sweet wasn't dessert — it was relief.
The end of a 6-year medical mystery.
But also… the start of a lifelong negotiation with food.
Coeliac disease isn't a "gluten allergy" or a lifestyle trend.
It's an autoimmune condition where wheat, barley and rye literally trigger your body to attack its own small intestine.
👉 Affects roughly 1 in 100 people globally.
👉 In northern India, seroprevalence is as high as 1.23%.
👉 And up to 85-90% of Indian coeliac patients also battle anaemia.
Yet most people get diagnosed years after symptoms begin.
The medical fix sounds simple: skip gluten. Forever.
The emotional fix? Doesn't exist.
Dharit, 27, from Mumbai, sat through an 8-hour concert unable to eat a single thing on offer.
Muskan once stood at an office ice cream celebration with exactly one safe flavour — mango. A flavour she hates.
"Nobody intended to exclude me," she says. "But the world isn't designed with your condition in mind."
That's what psychiatrists are now calling it.
Food stops being pleasure.
It becomes a daily threat assessment.
Every meal involves:
Doctors in Chennai say this constant vigilance breeds anxiety, depression and social withdrawal — far more than people realise.
And kids have it worst. They just want to eat the birthday cake.
Dr. Shubha Vivekan from Apollo Chennai is blunt about it.
Even when the gut fully heals…
the psychological scars don't.
Her fix? Stop treating coeliac as just a GI problem.
The new playbook looks like:
Not sympathy.
Not pity.
Not another "oh, you can't eat anything?"
Dharit puts it perfectly:
"We want awareness, safe food, better labelling, and the chance to participate in everyday life without constantly worrying about getting sick."
Because the hardest part of coeliac disease was never the gluten.
It was everything else nobody bothered to see.
That's all for now!
