Gluten Free Cooking for Diabetics and Allergy Sufferers
If you are diagnosed with gluten intolerance of which there are different levels from mild to severe, this article may help in giving you a few pointers in what to avoid or watch out for.
A gluten allergy in its severest form may be a result of Celiac disease, it is a fairly uncommon condition that causes damage to the tissue lining inside the small intestine of the lower bowel. The effect of this condition is to prevent the lower intestine from absorbing food nutrients that are essential to keeping the body in a healthy condition. The damage occurs as a reaction to the eating of foods that contain gluten.
Gluten occurs naturally in many cereal grains such as barley, rye and wheat, and there is some conjecture in the medical world about oats also, which it may be best to avoid until proven otherwise.
Without going into the details here, if you or a member of your family have been diagnosed with this condition, you will no doubt be aware that the sufferer will need to follow a strict gluten-free diet for the rest of their life, eating nothing unless they are absolutely sure of the absence of gluten.
At first this is going to present a major challenge as apart from all the obvious foods that contain derivatives of cereal grains such as those made with most sorts of flour such as bread and pasta, there are a great many other foodstuffs in which gluten may occur, having been added by the manufacturers to improve the products appearance or consistency.
Unfortunately the addition of gluten is not just confined to food that you eat, and this is where things can get very tricky for the person trying to avoid it. For example it may be added to lipstick, and oral hygiene products such as mouthwashes and toothpaste. To make matters worse it may not even be contained in the product that you buy, but your purchase could have been contaminated by gluten used to make another product on the same machine. This may not be something that is often considered but if the sufferer has a severe allergy to gluten it could be a serious problem for them. It is very important to take great care with anything that you buy. If your child has Celiac disease even their playthings must come under scrutiny such as plastic modeling clay and even crayons as they both may contain gluten.
The problem with removing foods made with gluten from the diet is that many of them contain nutrients and vitamins that are essential for the body, so clearly other alternative sources of these must be found to counteract the any deficiencies if the body is to remain in a state of good nutritional health, for instance anemia can become a problem if the body is lacking in iron and there are a great many other disorders that can stem from a poor diet because the gluten-containing products have been removed from it.
There is no getting away from the fact there will be a lot of things that you can no longer eat, but eventually you will become accustomed to it and find plenty of tasty alternatives, and of course there are many of the normal foods that you can still eat such as fruit and vegetables, in fact you may actually find that your diet improves as a result of this intolerance to gluten.
Fortunately nowadays things are a lot easier, there are many advice groups around for people with a gluten intolerance, and many products may contain a manufacturers contact number for information relating to their products. There are several tests available to find out if you are sensitive to gluten, if your results are positive then a gluten-free diet may improve your health, otherwise there is no proven reason to avoid it as seems to have become fashionable. However, if you need to alter your eating habits and steer clear of gluten for whatever reason, you may like to know there are some really good cookbooks available full of delicious gluten-free recipes. For more details see the link below.
