On Tuesday, I started eating gluten free. I want to try it for 30 days to see if it helps my stomach issues or not. Even though my bloodwork results came back negative, I have yet to do an endoscopy to confirm if I have Celiac or not. The bloodwork is only so accurate. If I feel better (which so far I have), I am just going to make the assumption I am. There no need to have an expensive procedure done on my stomach to prove it. The main reason we did it with Natalie was so we could show her if she questions why she needs to eat gluten free when she gets older.
I can tell you this though, finding enough variety in gluten free foods is much easier for a two year old then a 30 year old. My change will force Gina and I to start exploring our recipes more which is probably a good thing. There is plenty out there, we just need to get more adventurous with it.
However, this is not the main reason I am writing.
Has anyone happened to look at food labels closer since everything happened with Natalie? If not, I wanted to show you how things are changing. It's still a difficult process to know what is and isn't OK to eat, but things are slowly getting easier. Here's an
article from the Mayo Clinic last year about how labels are changing in 2008. The top eight allergens are/will soon be spelled out on almost all foods regulated by the FDA.
The food allergens
While food labels don't include every possible allergen, they do list the top eight, which account for 90 percent of all documented food allergies:
- Milk
- Eggs
- Peanuts
- Tree nuts (such as almonds, cashews, walnuts)
- Fish (such as bass, cod, flounder)
- Shellfish (such as crab, lobster, shrimp)
- Soy
- Wheat
Wheat is in the top eight, which helps us out some as it eliminates anything with wheat right away. Gluten, which would easily be in the top eight, is not because it is an intolerance and not an allegen. If wheat is not on the label it does not necessarily mean that the food is gluten free.
If you read the article you will see that the FDA is still trying to do things to help us read labels for gluten as well. You wouldn't believe all the products with natural flavor, artificial flavor and modified food starch alone that we need to question (by calling, e-mailing, visiting websites, etc.).
Here is a sample of the new labeling scheme. See the "contains" section at the bottom of the label. It's very nice.
As I was saying above, if you also look closely at the ingredients in Baked Cheetos you will see that natural flavor and artificial flavor are listed meaning that we would still need to question this product if we did not already know it was OK.
Gina and I (with help from Molly) will be maintaining a list ourselves of all the items we have looking into and the answers we get for those products. Here is the
link. We haven't done much work with it yet. To this point we have mainly referred to lists others have built already since Nattie's diet is not that diverse right now. We will definitely be looking into things more in the near future though.
Nattie's tranformation continues to amaze us. We are grateful to have found out when we did without her having to suffer any longer. The fact that she accepts when she can't eat something without too much questioning has been a blessing as well.
I just wanted to give an update on how things are going.
