Coping with the default risk of gluten intake: an analysis of online talk between celiac disease patients

This is an empirical study of the way in which celiac disease patients manage the risk of gluten intake. The paper examines naturally occurring conversational data in order to study how patients cope with constantly being at their day-to-day living. It is found that celiac disease patients resort to a toolbox of discursive techniques that enables them to justify the diet for themselves and others, and to reduce the risk of diet lapses. They for example construct wish to quit as a recognizable but passing phase in learning to deal with the diet, and formulate quitting itself as action that directly affects the efforts of others. By reformulating quitting into ‘cheating’, participants assign the a spoilsport to someone who considers gluten intake. Quitting the diet is thus established as an action that undermines the diet’s necessity and validity, which has direct negative implications for faithful diet followers. Patients display themselves as dependent upon others for being able to manage the risk effectively, as if in a social dilemma situation, but now the emphasis is on preventing the other from quitting the game rather than waiting for the other start it. Celiac disease patients not only construct themselves as densely interwoven with the gluten free diet but present the diet as a necessarily collective effort to manage the default risk of gluten intake. Any solution that affects current dietary practices, such as genomics-related therapies or products, will have to take this into account. gluten intake. The paper examines naturally occurring conversational data in order to study how patients cope with constantly being at their day-to-day living. It is found that celiac disease patients resort to a toolbox of discursive techniques that enables them to justify the diet for themselves and others, and to reduce the risk of diet lapses. They for example construct wish to quit as a recognizable but passing phase in learning to deal with the diet, and formulate quitting itself as action that directly affects the efforts of others. By reformulating quitting into ‘cheating’, participants assign the a spoilsport to someone who considers gluten intake. Quitting the diet is thus established as an action that undermines the diet’s necessity and validity, which has direct negative implications for faithful diet followers. Patients display themselves as dependent upon others for being able to manage the risk effectively, as if in a social dilemma situation, but now the emphasis is on preventing the other from quitting the game rather than waiting for the other start it. Celiac disease patients not only construct themselves as densely interwoven with the gluten free diet but present the diet as a necessarily collective effort to manage the default risk of gluten intake. Any solution that affects current dietary practices, such as genomics-related therapies or products, will have to take this into account.