Is the gluten-free diet just a trend?

 

Eating gluten free is either very trendy right now or more and more people are discovering that they feel better when they avoid gluten. My belief is the latter is most likely the case. According to an Oct. 22, 2012 article in the Huffington Post, gluten-free food sales have become a $4.2 billion industry.

Link to article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/gluten-free-foods-market-42-billion-dollars_n_2003721.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

People often ask me how I eat sandwiches

When I first went on this gluten-free diet (March 2007), I was telling my dad about it and how much better I felt. He thought maybe he should try it too after realizing he had a lot of the same symptoms I had had before going gluten-free.

I called him the next night and asked how the gluten-free diet was going and he said, “It’s too hard. I don't know what I’m supposed to eat for lunch if I can't eat sandwiches.” He made me chuckle, but he’s right. Lunch without sandwiches is quite an adjustment and requires some planning.

People ask me all the time how I eat sandwiches without bread or what I do for sandwich bread. My answer is I don’t really eat sandwiches. Gluten-free bread is high in sugar, fat and calories and also extremely expensive. And on top of that, it usually doesn’t even taste very good -- at least not compared with regular bread.

I have used corn tortillas or lettuce to roll things up in or sometimes just roll up a piece of ham and cheese together as a snack. But generally speaking, sandwiches are not on the menu at my house.

For lunch at work, I usually take a salad or left-overs from dinner the night before. I really don’t miss sandwiches, but that's probably because I wasn't ever really a big sandwich eater -- since bread made me feel so bad. I've never been a big bread eater for that reason. Long before I’d ever even heard the word gluten, I knew bread didn't agree with me, so a sandwich was rarely on my meal plan. I guess that’s why it’s so much easier for me to adjust to life without sandwiches than it is for my dad.

For Starters

If you’re new to the gluten-free diet, there are some things to keep in mind that you may not have thought of yet. You will want to watch out for hidden sources of gluten and the possibility of cross-contamination. Those are the things people don’t think of.

For example: mayonnaise is gluten free, but not if you’ve spread it on bread and put the knife back in the jar. Once you do that then the whole jar is contaminated and anyone who is gluten intolerant should not eat mayonnaise from that jar. This also goes for butter, cheese, peanut butter, jelly, etc. Anything that might be spread on bread or crackers or have bread, crackers, pretzels, etc. dipped into it.

When my daughter lived at home with me, we would use a Sharpie to write “GF” on items that had not been contaminated. If it got contaminated, she would draw a circle with a line through the “GF” to warn me not to eat it. This worked well for us.

Hidden sources of gluten include most processed foods, and gluten is rarely listed in the ingredients. I avoid processed meats, including sandwich meats, boloney (yes, I know it‘s supposed to be bologna but I‘m from the south and I don‘t say bologna, I say boloney), most types of sausage, hotdogs, etc.

Hormel often has gluten-free meats and they are labeled gluten-free. I buy Hormel bacon, ham and pepperoni -- all gluten free. Most Boar’s Head deli meats are gluten-free, but if they slice it on the same slicer as all the other meats then it’s contaminated. It’s stuff like that that you have to think about.

You can’t always trust a package that is labeled “gluten-free.” I usually go to a gluten-free forum on-line and see what other GF folks have to say about a specific product. The FDA allows “gluten-free” labeling if the product has below a certain percentage of gluten, so it may not be totally gluten-free. Canned soups are not usually gluten free, so don’t make anything with cream of whatever soup or broth unless it is a specifically gluten-free brand and you know you can trust it. Campbell’s and Swanson are not safe. Pacific Natural Foods and Trader Joe’s both make gluten free soups. Many Progresso soups are now labeled gluten free, but I haven't tried them yet.

You will also need to learn about ingredients that contain gluten. For example, modified food starch in the United States is usually made from corn, but in Europe is usually made from wheat. So you need to know the brand and know whether you can trust it. If you see Malt or Maltdextrin in the ingredients, it’s not gluten-free. But Maltodextrin is made from corn, so it’s ok. The difference in the two words is the o in the middle.

Below is a link to a site that provides more information about hidden gluten in ingredients.
Good luck! It‘s not hard once you get used to it.
~Michelle

http://www.celiacsolution.com/hidden-gluten.html