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It does nobody harm if some people choose to avoid gluten, and greatly benefits coeliac sufferers who have increasing good nutrition options.
On the other hand, we've had other family members try avoiding gluten because they perceived it was 'bad', without a causal linkage to any symptoms.
So, is non-celiac gluten intolerance rare? Probably. Do most people avoid it for the wrong reason? Probably. But to make the blanket statement that intolerance doesn't exist is misinformed and denigrates the very real problem that a small subset of the population does have.
There are many thousands of active users on Hacker News. If there are 50 active users over an hours time looking at a given topic, and those 50 active users know an average of 50 people fairly well, that means there's potentially ~2500 anecdotes for any given topic.
Say something happens in .1% of the general population, but it's noteworthy enough to be an anecdote. For any given topic, it's quite possible to drastically over represent that anecdote, as it's quite possible that there will be ~3 such anecdotes for any given topic and the normal case, which isn't especially noteworthy, gets no mention.
Lesson: At a large enough scale, one-in-a-thousand anecdotes can occur several times for a given topic.
Kids loading up on sugar filled, "whole grain" frosted flakes today were eating eggs 30 years ago.
