The place of oats in the coeliac diet.

Since the discovery by Dicke (1950) that remarkable benefit followed the withdrawal of wheat and rye from the diet of the coeliac child, much work has been done on the significance of these and other foodstuffs in the coeliac syndrome. Few of these studies, however, involved oats, a food containing a prolamin similar to the gliadin of wheat which was proved to be injurious by van de Kamer, Weijers and Dicke (1953). In 1955, van de Kamer and Weijers suggested that the effects of various foodstuffs on the coeliac patient are related to their amide :non-amide nitrogen ratios and they compiled a list of foods arranged according to this ratio. In many respects their series agrees with the known effects of the foods in coeliac disease. Oats and oatflakes are of interest as they are placed on the margin between the harmful and non-harmful foods. Previous workers on oats, Dicke, Weijers and van de Kamer (1953), and van de Kamer et al. (1953), who fed the same child 140 g. oatmeal per day, and Hansted (1955), who gave one child 150 g. oatmeal per day, claim that such large intakes have some harmful effect. However, in another patient, 75 g. oatmeal per day produced only a slight increase in fat excretion (Hansted, 1955). The effect of still smaller amounts on two groups of three patients each was investigated by Sheldon (1955). The first group received 2 oz. (56 g.) oatmeal per day and the second 1 oz. (28 g.). Despite the short duration of his experiments, he concludes that oatmeal, at these more normal levels, has no ill effect on coeliac children. Frazer (1956) reports that his team found no deleterious effect of *oats, but details are not given. Hansted (1956a) suggests that either a high intake of oats for a short time or a small intake over an extended period is necessary to cause an increase equivalent to that produced by wheat in the fat excretion of coeliac children. Attention has been focused on this suggestion in the present investigation. Four cases only have been studied as the continuous fat balances necessary to demonstrate