I used to work with a Celiac sufferer. Before gluten avoidance was a fad for the masses.
He preferred tequila. 100% agave only.
ETA: Yes, small amounts of gluten would produce dire symptoms which he had the good taste not to describe in detail.
Popcorn actually is 100% whole grain for real. It’s very rich in fiber, and it provides a surprising amount of protein to boot. If it isn’t all smothered in fat and salt, it’s the healthiest snack in the world short of raw veggys.
Luksusowa wódka* from Poland is the real deal. Made from 100% potatoes and filtered to within a micrometer of its life. Affordably priced too.
*Pronounced VOOT-ka.
Nobody’s trivializing it, but there’s not any real way that proteins are going to make it through the distillation process, which is literally gently heating the mash and letting chemical compounds vaporize and recondense somewhere else. Gluten and other proteins are going to stay put in the pot- they don’t have a gaseous phase that would make them distillable.
So marketing things like vodka as “gluten free” is marketing stupidity of the worst kind- the sort that takes advantage of earnest people’s ignorance. It’s about as silly as low-fat salt, or water as having 100% hydrating ingredients.
I like the “Gluten-Free” water idea…surely that is true.
Wait wait, WHAT? Are you trying to tell me that gluten, a protein, can survive not just being disgested (generally fatal to most proteins in the first place, since they are broken down to amino acids) but being dispersed through the bloodstream and stored as fat or used as building blocks for other cells? And somehow, it’s still ‘gluten’? That seems absurd to me. We’re not talking about some indigestible trace element here, we’re talking about a complex protein.
I’m not gluten sensitive, but I was curious. There is an article from the Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics journal:
So it seems that less that 10 mg per day is probably not going to cause problems, not a lot of research has been done. It could be that more research occurs and shows that for some celiac sufferers, that trace amounts could affect them, or it could show that it’s psychosomatic. There is another article I found on the American Journal for Clinical Nutrition that specifically states that “some patients are more tolerant than others”.
It’s hard to find solid numbers. I was in a GQ thread on it a few weeks ago, and it looked like all they can really say is that somewhere between 6 and 100 mg is where damage appears to show up in the villi.
The extremely difficult thing is that Celiac disease targets the small intestine, and the only way to tell if the small intestine is being damaged is to do a biopsy. (At least, that’s my understanding. The biopsy is the only way to diagnose Celiac.)
Oh FFS.
No one questions the need for GF products for celiac disease patients or those allergic to wheat. I’ll even throw in people who are sensitive to wheat or gluten.
What everyone is rolling their eyes at are the crunchy yummy mummies who embrace every bullshit health trend out there and claim that it has cured everything from bad skin to neurological problems. A few years back, these people did Atkins, and then organic and oh, they also did the Zone and South Beach and detoxes and cleanses the grapefruit diet and apple cider vinegar as the cure for everything and the godawful cabbage soup diet and Slim Fast. Forty years ago they were obsessing over the fat in eggs and butter.
When people tout their weight loss from a gluten-free diet, I want to yell, “It’s because you’re not eating an entire food group!”
It works on the same principle as asbestos-free cereal.
If this needs to go into its own thread, fine. But this one has been slightly hijacked, so…
20 ppm is trace. Airbeck says his friend is so sensitive, even if he has trace amounts “then we’re talking weeks of suffering and months of eating safely to start healing the damage.”
I don’t know of anyone with Celiac disease, and know nothing about how it impacts the body. But if Airbeck’s description is true, how on earth does anyone survive childhood with the disease? I find it hard to believe that I wasn’t exposed to gluten in massive amounts (well, amounts that would twist a Celiac sufferer into knots) and never knew it. Hell, if I happened to be allergic to peanuts, I would have been dead before I hit 7. (I think I had PB&J for an entire year, on white bread.)
If trace amounts require months of clean living, and watching your complete food intake, just to get over the symptoms, how much would be required to kill a person, or put them in the hospital for months on end?
Sort of. By (current) law, vodka made from a gluten-containing grain cannot be labeled gluten free. It doesn’t matter if it contains no detectable gluten; the TTB says it is not a gluten-free product. So labeling a potato-based vodka as gluten free might still be all about the marketing, but I’d say it’s marketing genius, not stupidity. And it’s rooted more in the ignorance of the TTB and FDA.
Celiac disease is not like a peanut allergy. It’s not an allergy at all. It’s an auto-immune response that causes the body to attack its own cells and damage them.
If a Celiac sufferer eats gluten, his body will attack his small intestine and damage the villi. This causes the intestine not to function properly, which leads to all sorts of nasty, uncomfortable, and serious side-effects. But it doesn’t just kill people. It causes certain deficiencies and it causes seriously painful and unpleasant symptoms much of the time. And it can increase likelihood of cancers, I think. But it doesn’t cause anaphylaxis the way an allergy can.
That’s pretty much the definition of an allergy.
No it’s not. Not at all. If anything, an allergic reaction is the opposite of an autoimmune reaction in that it is reacting to/attacking foreign bodies.
Homeopathic vodka. Whoda thunk!
Celiac’s (and by extension doctor-diagnosed gluten sensitivity) are auto-immune diseases, and like many other sensitivities, certain types of allergies, etc, exactly how much gluten is very much dependent on the person.
Anecdote: my wife is a diagnosed gluten sensitive and probably has full Celiacs, the test for it came back negative, but she (at her doctor’s recommendation) was already on a mostly-gluten-free diet at the point, and the tTg-iGa test looks for antibodies in the blood and you need to be on a gluten-containing diet for them to show up right. The GF diet has helped her significantly, and she’s gotten so sensitive to gluten since that she’s never bothered to spend the few weeks on a non-GF diet to confirm the test since the treatment is … to go on a gluten-free diet.
Anyway, she was diagnosed in her early twenties, but likely had the sensitivity for years - misdiagnosed as lactose intolerance, irritable bowel, and an allergy to other various things.
How can you live with it? The symptoms include things like “chronic diarrhea” and “constipation” and “fatigue” and “ADHD” - all of which could be misdiagnosed very easily, especially prior to the current “fad” of the last few years. It’s a long-term disease and takes years-to-decades to do enough damage to kill you - but can lead to things like diabetes or MS or chronic migraines and cancer. Luckily, a lot of the damage will eventually heal itself, assuming you catch it soon enough.
For the record, here’s the study that seems to have been what established the 20ppm (or 20mg/kg) threshold: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2012/11/27/ajcn.112.047985
(CD = “celiac disease”, explained elsewhere in the abstract then what I quoted).
That study and other research does point out though that individuals are sensitive to differing amounts and that less than 20ppm still may be enough for some individuals to experience a reaction.
cholesterol free vodka would be nice too!
Clever marketing in that it both sets their product up as safe, and the competitors as unsafe. But it’s fundamentally taking advantage of ignorance and fear, as opposed to any inherent superiority or differentiation of the product itself. In other words, there’s nothing special about the vodka that makes it more or less gluten free than any other vodka, other than it skirts the TTB’s stupid regulations about the subject by not being made from certain grains.
Time to get in on the ground floor of the ant-gluten-free diet fad.
Since I am allergic to wheat I am grateful for all the people who are “faddists” and giving up gluten for weird reasons. Because, as a result of this, gluten free products (aka wheat free products) are now available in many places like Target and Walmart. And Glutino brand cookies are delicious. Without the gluten-free “fad” I would not have access to all these products. So, leave those folks alone; they are helping those of us who are truly unable to eat wheat.