Gluten free diet

kyoto49

Well-Known Forumite
Is anyone on a gluten free diet? I'm trying to stay gluten free, 2 days so far, as I have an illness that I've read is improved by being gluten free. It's almost impossible!! Seems that prior to going gluten free I lived solely on gluten judging by how many of the foods i ate daily that I can no longer eat! Had never given it a thought really as I eat pretty healthily bar my jaffa cake addiction!

Breakfast was porridge - at's no longer allowed

Dinner was sandwiches - they are no longer allowed

Tea was Pasta or tortilla's, or noodles - none of them are allowed

Supper was jaffa cakes and Ovaltine - none fo them are allowed!!

It's a nightmare!

Obviously those carbs mentioned are allowed eaten with copious amounts of nuts/pulses/fruits and vegetables, but bar rice and potattoes I'm at a complete loss as to how I will manage without bread/cakes/biscuits/ovaltine/pasta and everything thing else in my diet that contains gluten!!!

Any suggestions please?


Admin Edit: Gluten free posts moved to their own thread.
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Sainsbury's have these.

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Glam

Mad Cat Woman
Sainsburys stock a lot of gluten free stuff. It don't come cheap tho. £2.50 for a loaf of bread!
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Coeliac disease is very popular in Ireland and the indigenous supermarkets there all have large sections of non-gluten and other 'specialist' items.

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Noah

Well-Known Forumite
Most ofthe major supermarket chains have "free from" ranges, including gluten free, on the shelves and in the freezer sections. As Glam said, they ain't cheap.
 

Trumpet

Well-Known Forumite
Never heard of gluten or gluten free foods 20 years ago. Is this a latter day thing like nut allergies also unheard of 20 years ago.
Not being insensitive to sufferers dietary requirements, just asking.
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
It's been around for a long time - people just suffered unpleasantness. The Coeliacs that I know weren't in a life-threatening situation before they were diagnosed, but things were difficult enough. It's not like the anaphylactic shock thing with some nut allergies, that will kill you now.

There is a spectrum to a lot of these things. I remember a kid with a nut allergy in the 1960s.
 

kyoto49

Well-Known Forumite
Never heard of gluten or gluten free foods 20 years ago. Is this a latter day thing like nut allergies also unheard of 20 years ago.
Not being insensitive to sufferers dietary requirements, just asking.

Back then our diets weren't full of additives, preservatives, chemicals and all the other general shite that big pharma and food manufacturers put in to the food chain to ellicit profit rather than the health of the population.

I eat organic, I grow my own fruit & veg where possible, I cook everything from scratch, no processed sauces, in fact we eat very little processed food, bar jaffa cakes and ovaltine :) but I still know that food today isn't what it was when I was growing up and the veg still had mud and slugs on it!! If poeple don't think there is a link between processed food, huge profits to food manufacturers and the decline in people's health and rise in obesity they are deluded. Awareness of the impact of food on health, such as gluten intolerance is just increased knowledge!

You are what you eat is never more true!
 

Noah

Well-Known Forumite
There is significant evidence that exposure to birch pollen is implicated in nut allergy. The main allergenic protien in birch pollen is very similar to one in peanuts and some nuts, some people's immune system is not able to distinguish between the two so if they have become sensitised to birch pollen they may react strongly to nuts. This pollen-food cross-reaction may also be responsible for soya allergy as again soya contains very large amounts of a protein which cross-reacts to birch pollen.

"Oral allergy syndrome, also known as pollen-food syndrome,is caused by cross-reacting allergens found in both pollen and raw fruits, vegetables, or some tree nuts. The immune system recognizes the pollen and similar proteins in the food and directs an allergic response to it. People affected by oral allergy syndrome can usually eat the same fruits or vegetables in cooked form because the proteins are distorted during the heating process, so that the immune system no longer recognizes the food.

Oral allergy syndrome typically does not appear in young children; the onset is more common in older children, teens, and young adults who have been eating the fruits or vegetables in question for years without any problems. Those with oral allergy syndrome typically have allergy to birch, ragweed, or grass pollens." (http://acaai.org/allergies/types/food-allergies/types-food-allergy/oral-allergy-syndrome)

Birch has been widely planted in residential areas since the 1970s to replace non-native ornemental trees, it is cheap and easy to grow, shallow rooted and promoted by council tree officers!
 

db

#chaplife
Never heard of gluten or gluten free foods 20 years ago. Is this a latter day thing like nut allergies also unheard of 20 years ago.
Not being insensitive to sufferers dietary requirements, just asking.

fewer than 1% of the population are intolerant of gluten, but the diet industry has sufficiently demonised it to make it a very lucrative trendy diet option.. the irony being, of course, is that gluten free options are usually much unhealthier for 99% of people, since they contain far more sugar than the standard alternative:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...ld-damage-health-of-people-without-coeliac-d/

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/25/gluten-free-diet-life-saving-fad

Back then our diets weren't full of additives, preservatives, chemicals and all the other general shite that big pharma and food manufacturers put in to the food chain to ellicit profit rather than the health of the population.

even if that is true, gluten has nothing to do with "additives, preservatives, [and] chemicals" - gluten is a protein in wheat and other grains, so humankind has been eating it for tens of thousands of years.. fair enough, modern intensive baking methods have changed some of the properties of the gluten that is in the food that we eat, but it's still a naturally occurring protein (or group of proteins) that do no harm to almost the entire population..

I eat organic, I grow my own fruit & veg where possible, I cook everything from scratch, no processed sauces, in fact we eat very little processed food, bar jaffa cakes and ovaltine :) but I still know that food today isn't what it was when I was growing up and the veg still had mud and slugs on it!! If poeple don't think there is a link between processed food, huge profits to food manufacturers and the decline in people's health and rise in obesity they are deluded. Awareness of the impact of food on health, such as gluten intolerance is just increased knowledge!

You are what you eat is never more true!

not disagreeing with you, incidentally - i agree with everything above, and i too try to make as much stuff from scratch as i can - but the gluten free thing is an exercise in expensive futility that will end up costing you more and could result in a higher sugar intake, if that's something that you try to keep an eye on..
 

littleme

250,000th poster!
Ooooo I forgot to reply to this ... try cauliflower rice or spiralised vegetables as an alternative to pasta/rice. :)
 

citricsquid

Well-Known Forumite
Haven't felt any better not having gluten so that experiment is over but found this article terrifying and incredibly depressing. A big issue for all those who eat wheat (and roundup):

http://www.globalresearch.ca/monsan...nce-and-other-wheat-related-illnesses/5419461

Off to buy Organic bread straight away!!

That's an interesting idea but the cited research is flawed apparently, the research cited ("Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance") draws conclusions based on a (flawed) study into the impact of Glyphosate on fish. Here's a response from Steve Savage (Independent Expert):

In a recent literature survey published by Samsel and Seneff, an argument is made for a possible link between the incidence of celiac disease in the United States and the use of the herbicide glyphosate. A key element of the authors’ argument is based on a single example of a study with fish (Senapati et al., 2009). In that study, adverse effects were observed in fish that were exposed to water containing a glyphosate-based herbicide. Samsel and Seneff concluded that the effects observed in the fish were "highly reminiscent of celiac disease." The Senapati fish paper is itself deeply flawed, but it is also irrelevant.

Senapati et al. exposed fish in tanks to a glyphosate rate of 4mg/L, added as a commercial formulation manufactured in India, called Excel Mera-71. That is a formulation made for terrestrial, not aquatic, use, and it is described as containing glyphosate and "a blend of non-ionic and cationic surfactants." At least in the United States, products registered for use on emerged weeds growing in water do not contain surfactants, because they are known to injure fish. The 4mg/L concentration used in the Senapati study was also more than twice as high as the highest rate allowed for a legitimate aquatic formulation, AquaMaster, in the United States. In addition, the water in which the fish were kept was replaced every other day for 45 days with a fresh supply of the surfactant-containing herbicide—not something relevant to any real-world situation. There was no surfactant control in this study, even though surfactants are well known for being able to cause injury to the gills and digestive tracks of fish. The Senapati study simply redocumented the fact that long-term, high-rate exposure of fish to surfactants is damaging, while glyphosate and its primary metabolite, AMPA, are classified as "practically non-toxic" to fish by the EPA.

There is no pattern of potential glyphosate exposure for humans in the United States that is even remotely like that in this poorly designed fish study. The formulation surfactants would not be present in human foods, the rates of glyphosate would be orders of magnitude lower and they would be in the form of the metabolite AMPA.

Certainly worth removing treated wheat from your diet as your own experiment though because it's possible that while the research is flawed there could still be other problems as yet undiscovered by researchers, but that specific article is flawed.
 

kyoto49

Well-Known Forumite
That's an interesting idea but the cited research is flawed apparently, the research cited ("Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance") draws conclusions based on a (flawed) study into the impact of Glyphosate on fish. Here's a response from Steve Savage (Independent Expert):



Certainly worth removing treated wheat from your diet as your own experiment though because it's possible that while the research is flawed there could still be other problems as yet undiscovered by researchers, but that specific article is flawed.

Whether the research is flawed or not, the idea that dousing food liberally in any sort of chemicals is bad enough. To drench a crop with harmful chemicals two days before harvest for no other reason than profit is abhorrent.
 

Noah

Well-Known Forumite
Some interesting recent work throws some doubt as to whether glutens are the real problem for most people. About 1% of the population have coeliac disease and do have a serious reaction to glutens. However another 12%+ of the population feel ill after eating foods such as bread and pasta while not having coeliac disease. Now there is a suggestion that the real problem for these people is not gluten but sugar chains called fructans which are often found in the same foods as glutens - such as wheat, barley, rye & onions. Soy sauce is high in gluten but low in fructan and the fermentation process used in making sourdough bread strips out any fructans. So if you have gastrointestinal problems but can eat soy and sourdough bread your problem may not be gluten but fructans or other hard to digest short chain sugars.
 

darben

Well-Known Forumite
Get a spiralizer you can turn veg into noodles / spaghetti - courgettes are the simplest to convert and look the most pasta like - if you like you say you have a lot of pasta / noodle meals you should be able to have a lot of the same food without making vast reinventions to your evening meals.
Update
Sorry didn’t see the date on the thread and apologies to the person who had already suggested the same I hadn’t read the whole thread through
 
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