For the last three or four years I have had some health problems which the doctors I have visited have been unable to cure. They aren't life-threatening, but they are annoying. My primary symptom is IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) which, as far as I can see, is what the doctor tells you you have when you complain about gastrointestinal problems and all of your tests come up negative. I had sort of resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to put up with these symptoms for the rest of my life but then a few weeks ago I met a woman who told me that she had gone through the same experience but had finally rid herself of the symptoms by eating a gluten-free (GF) diet.
I had done a little research on gluten-free diets when my symptoms first appeared a few years ago because one of the things I was tested for is celiac disease (CD), which is caused by an allergic reaction to gluten. However the test, which was actually a biopsy of my small intestine, had a negative indication. So I told that to the woman who is on the GF diet. She replied that she too had had a negative response to a test for celiac disease but her doctor had told her that some people have an intolerance to gluten even though they don't have CD, so the doctor recommended that the woman try giving up gluten for a month or so just to see if her symptoms changed. She did that and at the end of the month her condition had improved significantly. So she has been on a GF diet ever since.
Now I know that gluten-free diets are almost a fad thing these days. It seems like scads of celebrities and public figures from Gwyneth Paltrow to Bill Clinton are eating GF food and most of them claim that they feel better because of it. I'm usually kind of skeptical of things like that and I know that I don't have celiac disease. Never-the-less, I've got all these symptoms that other folks claim are cured by eating gluten free and I know that a study posted on the NIH website asserted that 1 in 133 people have CD and 1 in 30 have some form of non-CD gluten intolerance. So I decided that it couldn't hurt to eliminate gluten from my diet for a month or so just to see if it has any effect on my symptoms. I figured it would be easy to do and a lot cheaper than having more tests. At this point, however, I'm not sure if either of those assumptions is going to prove to be true.
I thought that cutting out gluten just meant that I would have to quit eating things like bread and desserts that are made with wheat flour. It turns out to be a little more complicated than that as these articles from Wikipedia and the Mayo Clinic illustrate.
The easiest part of eating a GF diet is replacing the items you normally think of as containing wheat (bread, pasta, etc.) with GF items. I haven't had any problems finding gluten-free bread, bagels, cereal, breakfast bars, pasta and things like that. You can also get gluten-free flours for use in baking your own GF goodies. My wife and I found a variety of these types of GF food at places like Sprouts and natural food stores. In fact, we can buy a lot of them at our local supermarket. We even found some Bob's Red Mill gluten-free flour at Big Lots. GF items tend to be more expensive than the comparable non-GF items, so if you can find them at a discount store in your area, you're money ahead.
One thing that I have had a little more trouble locating is gluten-free beer. The problem is that most beer contains barley malt and barley malt contains gluten. Our local supermarket carries Anheiser-Busch's Red Bridge, which is made from sorghum and doesn't contain any gluten. So far that's the only GF beer I've tried. It's not bad, but being a dedicated beer drinker I'd like to have more variety available at an affordable price. There are other gluten free beers of course, but I have had a harder time finding them and the few that I've found locally have been pretty expensive.
While replacing things like bread and beer that are largely made up of gluten-laden ingredients isn't too difficult, it is much more challenging to avoid gluten in foods that you wouldn't think contained any gluten at all. Because so many people have food allergies the US law requires manufacturers to put the words "Contains wheat" or "May contain wheat" on products that contain it. So you might think that you just have to look for those phrases on the label, and in many cases it's that simple. Sometimes, however, it is not. Other grains besides wheat contain gluten. Both rye and barley contain it so when those grains are used to make a food additive, e.g., malt or food starch, it is likely that gluten may be present in the final product. For example, malted grain is used to produce a sugar called maltose which can be used in products such as soup or pudding. Foods of that nature may also contain thickeners made of gluten-bearing ingredients. So you have to check the labels carefully to see if any form of gluten-bearing foods are used as ingredients. Just to make an even bigger challenge, it turns out that maltodextrin, which is sort of a further processing of maltose, is not a problem because the processing removes the gluten bearing proteins. Then there are other foods, such as oats, which may be processed in a factory that also processes gluten-bearing grains and can become cross-contaminated. So to get serious about a GF diet you need to either avoid any food that isn't labeled “gluten free” or do some research and read labels very carefully.
The absolutely biggest challenge I have faced so far in my effort to eliminate gluten from my diet has been eating out. Restaurants are all over the map when it comes to offering GF selections. Some places just don't have a clue and the only thing to do is to avoid them. Probably the next level up from that are restaurants that have realized that more and more people are trying to eat a GF diet and have trained the wait staff to explain what items from the menu are gluten-free or can be prepared that way. This wouldn't work for someone with CD because restaurants like this will use the same utensils and prep services to prepare both GF and non-GF items, so cross-contamination will definitely occur and that can be really bad for someone with CD. For somebody like me, however, it is more of an inconvenience because it might mean that I couldn't really tell if eating GF was helping me or not. My wife and I have also encountered restaurants that have a GF menu but don't avoid cross-contamination, so they're not much better those without a GF menu. By far the most difficult thing to find is a restaurant that not only has a gluten-free menu, but prepares GF items using totally separate utensils and equipment so that there is no risk of cross-contamination. We've found one or two of those in our area and a lot more on the Internet. The best place to look for them is in the Gluten Free Registry.
A sort of hidden cost for Ellie and me has been that we don't have BOGO coupons for GF restaurants, so we have to pay full price for meals at them and they are usually more expensive than non-GF restaurants. My desire to eat GF food has also cut into our ability play the restaurant game and it makes it more difficult to take day trips or long weekends. I'm not sure if this is going to be a problem in the long run. It may turn out that my test indicates that I don't have a gluten intolerance and my symptoms are not relieved by eating a GF diet. Or it may turn out that eating GF does help, but it curtails our favorite activities so much that I have to make a life-balance decision and decide whether it's really worth it to me to eat GF forever. Stay tuned. I'll have more posts on this subject over the next month or so.
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