Takala

Oh, hello, GIG person above ^ !

re: 3) the "grain dextrins" - Noticed the link to the "Fruitrim" ingredient, STILL does not specify what the grain product it is that they call a dextrin, and mix with the fruit juice to create this ingredient, other than they claim it is NOT corn.  Bad sign. If it is not corn, and it is a grain, that leaves the other categories of either wheat/barley or rice for the most common and cheapest grain sources.  If it were rice, they'd probably be happy to put it on the label...  just sayin'

The day this website starts having the various lobbyist trolls harassing the people for wanting to stick to a gluten free diet instead of being Big Pharma's ongoing lab rats, is the day a lot of other websites are going to start to take its place.   My "job" here on earth, having taken decades to figure out what was making me (and others) sick,  is not to create a situation for the future where various government entities and government contractors, think it's okay to deliberately ruin the food supply, and then tell people to take a vaccine if they cannot cope with the deadly results.

Something funny..... my topical allergies to hay are flaring up a bit...  the other day I carefully wiped out all the dog crates, then pro-actively powdered each dog with diatomaceous earth, because I don't want to hit them with chemicals during the time of year that it's cold enough the fleas die if they go outside.  We then took all the sheets off the bed and the comforters and washed them, and hung them out on the line (freakish sunny days here in early January, usually this is rain every day).  Also washed the cat's blanket that she sleeps on the bed, and wiped down the bed rails.  Then remade the bed and topped it with a fresh, white and pink handmade quilt we'd won a long time ago in a raffle.  Not really my style, but it was clean.   Put out a clean blankie towel for the cat on top.  Who is very territorial about The Bed.  This cat barely allows us to use it.

Then we went somewhere, for only 2 hours, and the 2 larger dogs, who are Not Allowed in the bedroom, and who were not crated, snuck in there, and not only jumped UP ON THE BED, they nested on the white quilt, and they must have been under the Christmas tree first   because now the quilt is covered in fuzzy black dog hair, dirt, hay wisps, diatomaceous earth dust, and pine needles.  There is probably drool on it, too.

These dogs HAVE their OWN giant dog bed already in the living room !    Where is the damned guard cat ? Sleeping in the other bedroom, the slacker!

No, you just need to save up enough nerve to be able to set boundaries with whatever situation you end up in.  Roommates are really dicey, without the extra food safety issues,  while living with relatives is also bad sometimes, because emotionally you would expect them to be willing to make an effort.  It sounds like they are trying, but are not perfect.  You just found out the most treacherous times are the holidays, especially the entire interval between Thanksgiving and New's Year Day, and if you want to have a nice holiday, that means you plan (excessively to most) to avoid being caught in any situation on the eve of such, where anything is going into your mouth that you are not positive about the gluten status of it. Plus, there's a LOT of flu and viruses going around.  I was doing great until I had to touch my face to see to drive, before washing my hands after shopping at one store, (very long story) and of course, I then wake up on Christmas Day with a good gluten status, but otherwise like Death Warmed Over.  At least I was only down for 3 days, recovered quickly, and it could have been a LOT worse if I hadn't been being extra, extra careful.  When I went to a little New Year's type neighborhood gathering, I just brought my own snack bag of chips and my own bottled (non alcoholic) drink, and because my neighbor is very cool and actually understands why I do this, (she also is avoiding certain foods now, and she looks fantastic) nobody thinks anything of it, and I don't have to worry much about cross contamination, as long as I remember not to kiss my spouse who is scarfing down the regular goodies.  He is gluten free at home, but not outside the home.

Cheer up, the holidays are OVER, and the next round of avoiding people trying to give you gluten starts in Mid- February.  There may be things that you can do at home to make a better workspace for yourself, for example, that is not as drastic as moving in with someone whom you discover after the fact, despite assurances, is a typical carb addict and a sort of crumb- spreader,   or worse, they eat your stuff too,   and don't replace it.

If you are not taking a gluten free vitamin B complex, calcium, magnesium, and D supplement, then you ought to start, because quitting smoking is stressful.

Certainly not your fault that they didn't sedate you thoroughly !  A lot of these docs ought to do a week's tour with an equine veterinarian making barn calls running naso-gastric tubes for colics to check for reflux, and then they'd learn what sedation really means -   they can't knock them out because the horses have to remain standing and semi-conscious, but they don't dally around with something that large who's very uncomfortable and might not appreciate a rubber hose going up their nose, thinking "oh well, maybe that was it."

Porous, soft surfaces should not be shared between gluten and non- gluten cooking.  That means don't use the same teflon-coated pots and pans for both, nor the same wooden, plastic, silicone, and rubber.  Well cleaned glass,ceramic, and plain slick metal are okay.  The toaster really needs to be dedicated gluten free, so you'll need a new one for that.  So do cutting boards, storage tupperware type containers, rubber spatulas, wooden rolling pins (you can use a drinking glass as a rolling pin, and they do make ceramic ones), colanders need to be dedicated, plastic measuring cups and spoons if you don't use glass or metal ones, etc.  Get a permanent marker and mark the new stuff prominently. Clean out your drawer(s) you put this in.   If you use cast iron, you can either use new cast iron, dedicated, or burn off the old coating in the oven on the clean cycle and then re- season it.

I have a toaster oven with a removable rack, and removable bottom crumb-catcher, so I can take that out and clean it once in a while, which comes in handy during the learning-curve phase when you may accidentally use a type of flour which you either cannot tolerate or is too cross contaminated, or is accidentally used for something that you really wish it had not been.

I don't know why anyone would want to use the same pans between regular wheat and gluten- free baking, bread pans are relatively cheap compared to getting sick over and over again.  And the wheat flour goes EVERYWHERE in the air during measuring and mixing, (so does tapioca flour )  so it's really better to just do ONE kind of baking in any kitchen.

Although people vary in the amounts of cross contamination that they can tolerate, it is the total amount of whatever threshold you have for gluten contamination that you do not want to cross, which means that you try to avoid it very hard at home, in a controlled situation, so that your "daily quota" from the rest of the world can be withstood.  You may or may not feel sick and have symptoms from cross contamination, what you do not want to have happen is that the auto immune reaction is ongoing, which will cause your body to turn on itself and damage other organs, nerves, inflame joints, demineralize bones, even damage the brain.  The sensitive and super- sensitive people are much more fanatical about this sort of thing, because we really don't like getting incapacitated.

You might like to read the following research on lectins:

http://www.bib.fsagx...t/v14n1/225.pdf

Until now, many lectins from different origins such as Allium sativum agglutinin (ASA), Wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), Urtica dioica agglutinin (UDA) Phytohemagglutinin ( PHA), a lectin from the red kidney bean, Phaseolus vulgaris L., Pisum sativum lectin (PSL), ConA, XCL and GNA have been isolated and partially characterized for their effects on insect pests, but among them some of encoding insecticidal lectins such as GNA, ConA, WGA and PSA have been shown greater potential for expression into a variety of crops including wheat, tobacco, sugarcane, rice and potatoes as resistant factors against some of important insect pests....  

Sure, whattheheck, just put WGA in to rice, who cares.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that they (GMO special interests) aren't out to get you.

Try eating more good fats, such as found in nuts, coconut products such as coconut milk, and avocados, besides switching some or most of the starches into higher protein versions.

Also notice how cleverly the original poster used Shauna Ahern's name in the original post.  Ahern, who is a professional cookbook writer and who's husband is a chef, always has a set of people following her around the 'tubes making a game out of trashing her on the internet.

Like this:

(link) http://washuta.net/blog/?p=633

Shauna is far too invested in food and her personal crusade is annoying to others in her orbit. There’s more to life than what you can put in your mouth from dawn to dusk.

From the comments from a blog called "Someone found my blog by Googling "i hate gluten free people".   Reading the jumble of contradictory, nasty trash coming from the author, who claims to be either celiac or gluten intolerant, depending upon which past blog post you're reading, and who hates to cook (fine. whatever. ) and who likes to eat junk food, (fine. whatever. )  I feel sorry for her, but somebody has to put their foot down and tell other people who are also trying to "represent" the celiac or gluten free community at- large by making much writing dissing other celiacs, and specifically dissing other celiacs and gluten intolerants for attempting to eat in public without getting cross contaminated, that they aren't all that legitimate, either. They are messed up.  And they're mocking other people who are sick.  And there could still be a vaccine "cure," and they'd likely still be really messed up.  Because you can't just blend in with the larger herd of so- called "normal" human beings, by being too embarrassed to tell somebody it's okay to just pick the croutons off a salad.  

I remember the gluten-free newbie fear of being glutened in a restaurant, the wish to make sure that everything is safe, but that wore off. Now, I know how to quickly and quietly navigate the terrain. I do not want special treatment. I want to go to a restaurant, very quietly check in—”I’ll have the salad, no croutons,” or “Burger, no bun please”—and not think about gluten for the rest of my meal; or I want to go to the place where I know I’ve ordered from a gluten-free menu before and just order from it without fanfare. Honestly, I don’t want to think about gluten at all. After all, I’m gluten-free.
I don’t want my life to be ruled by gluten, or by gluten-free, strange in its huge presence because it is a negation. I don’t want to be run by the need to eat, either. If gluten controls my social life, makes me speak its name every time I enter into a food-based give-and-take with another person, I am not in control, and I become defined by gluten. This, perhaps, is what tires people about celiac sufferers:everything is about gluten. It gets old fast.

_________
from the blog "Someone found my blog by Googling "i hate gluten free people."

from the comments, same blog:

....I'm a server in a high volume restaurant set in Zion natl park, so I interact with thousands of diners every season from all over the world....  what is clear to me is that this is simply another fad diet that has infected socio-culinary culture and has made life difficult for us lowly order takers.

...There is no need with most people; this is simply a new and popular twist on the Atkins diet that folks think they need and demand despite the monumental effort. I’m not saying that we won’t, or don’t like to go out of our way for any customer…that’s what we do and we do it with a smile. But once your predilection for that new and shiny diet imposes on others experience ( special attention equates to time away from other tables and longer overall wait times) it’s time to cut back and be a little more considerate. Next year it will be another diet and that tenth of an ounce of gluten in the chipotle dressing won’t matter much.[/b]

How would you like that creep to be your waiter ?  "We" (that's the people with the legitimate medical need to avoid gluten) are mixed in with what he considers to be the rude people on fad diets, and it's difficult to tell the difference, so it's taking up too much of his time when he could be doing more volume at the regular tables.


I was particularly struck by the number of negative comments there, about Ahern complaining about lack of safe gluten free airport food choices, since being stuck (aka "trapped") in an airport on delay for hours and hours, because of flight cancelations, with the increased security and the lack of ability to carry- on a lot of gluten free foods through security checkpoints, is one of my definitions of hell, and certainly is violating the ADA.    So this sort of reeks to high heavens that THESE PEOPLE think that if they can just blend in with the greater herds easier, they won't be noticed and singled out for greater scrutiny.  Perhaps it all comes down to, they then think they can get thru an airport line quicker.  They missed the entire point.  ANYONE can have any physical, medical, social, political, or mental quirk declared "out of the ordinary," or "dangerous to others," and it is the job of bureaucracies to exploit that difference, in order to make up excuses for letting the for- profit segment then sort us into categories, to either be accommodated or browbeaten in to going along with being inconvenienced.

You say you're "67" and supposedly gluten-free for 30 years ?  Yet you just got here, and you're trying to guilt trip / get other aged people to lab- rat themselves for Big Pharma ?  

That would be the same Big Pharma (and some other entities whom are involved in genetic screening and whom depend on USDA agricultural subsidies to grow certain crops) that have done nothing but fight against knowledge of the gluten free diet as a treatment for auto- immune disease caused by gluten intolerance, and who have sent their little trolls all over the internet to claim that the gluten- free diet is bogus ?   They even have had this deliberate misinformation published in Forbes and as a guideline for TED conferences.

Same interests who are fighting tooth and nail against better labeling standards to declare GMO content, or undeclared gluten, such as barley, or who are perpetually "working on" a gluten free labeling standard for the United States that would be even worse than other countries?

Pharma doesn't have your health interests at heart.   We have the relief already..... Don't Eat Gluten.

Humans are changing.  You cannot vaccinate your way out of this one.

I would not even bother to vote.  Go data- mine somewhere else.

This is this scumbag "Hank Campbell" again, previously known for trolling the gluten intolerant as making up their symptoms.

"Celiac: The Trendy Disease for Rich White People"   - that guy, back in August 2012.

http://www.science20.com/science_20/celiac_trendy_disease_rich_white_people-93422  

"Without the autoimmune comorbidities, there is not much way to know who has sensitivity and who is part of a fad.  It is subjective."

There's a whole group of them on the internet social media, spilling this bile whenever they get a chance, interspersed with a few actual research articles, so the unwary wouldn't realize they seem to have another agenda.

I wonder what other members think.

They'll probably manufacture it with an undeclared wheat starch binder and lactose coating.  

I believe my auto immune disease is already too severe to risk furthering more brain and neurological damage by ingesting small amounts of gluten, then expecting a "pill" to handle it.

Try to ease yourself into eating more healthy fats, such as olive oil, coconut milk, avocado, nuts, because they sate hunger better than carbohydrates.  Also, cravings for minerals and vitamins may show up in your body as sugar cravings, because "hunger" is not that specific, more of a generic sensation.  Eating carbs in the form of high glycemic index ones ("white, fast acting") and sugar will spike your blood sugar, then it crashes, then it feeds another craving.  So going back to the vitamin B mixture (gluten free) and adding in some calcium and magnesium and D may help with that, also.

You have to taper off of prednisone if you take it.  I had a nurse friend years ago really, really emphasize this to me, and to warn that this stuff should not be taken frequently, only if there was no alternative, and to never just stop it all at once.  This was in response to how surprised I was, that taking it for something else also seemed to help my joints.    I'm not fond of the side effects, but it's necessary if one gets really bad poison oak, as I have a few times.  But oh, when it wears off, it's not so great.   One time I could see the otherwise okay doc, sort of struggling mentally with writing down the schedule for the tapering dosages, he paused (you have a set quantity of pills, and you want to write this in a way that it is fewer and fewer, until it is just one for a few days, then that's it, so it would be a certain algebra problem)  and I think I said something to the effect of, oh, just like the last time, right ?  And he said "Yes! You're going to start with 4 a day, and we're going to go for 12 days" or something like that.   So when I got home with this, I just looked on my old Rx bottle and wrote it out for myself with a daily checklist, using my fingers to divide them up to make sure I was going something like this:
xxxx
xxxx
xxxx
xxx
xxx
xxx
xx
xx
xx
x
x
x

and that works out to 30 pills in the bottle, divided into 4 levels of decreasing dosages.  This is not being given as medical advice, but as an example of what has been prescribed to me in the past.  I don't know how much medication is in the pills you have been proscribed, and how that would translate.  Do not take a larger dose than you are supposed to take.   I don't know what to tell you other than I am a bit worried this clunker has just given you preddy with no instructions   and I can tell you that I have been lectured about taking a hefty dose and then suddenly stopping is a BIG no - no.  It will depress your own natural ability to make hormones, and then nature hates a vacuum when the artificial substitute stops showing up !  

You know about not using iodized salt or kelp, right ?  That iodine makes the rash worse.

I swear.  Anybody with some Irish/English background, we ought to just be born with a warning sticker stuck on our foreheads "Look Out, Wheat Intolerance Genes More Likely Present "  for those cross- cultural moments.

This is simple.  If you go, take your own safe gluten free food and prepare it, including treats, so your family isn't deprived or left out. It can be eaten at the same time with others.   If this bothers other people, it is their problem, not yours.    I wouldn't even bother to "discuss" it.  This is a feature of your family, that you bring and prepare your own food.  That's the way it is.   End of discussion.  If they tried to make an "issue" of it at the table, they would do it only once and never again, because they are going to get their drama- queen routine crimped pretty badly by the time you are done with them.  After all, you are saving them work and the embarrassment of making their beloved relatives ill.. You're not there for their gluten food.  Bless their hearts.   And be sure to let everyone KNOW in the loop that you will bring your own food and be preparing it, as a short circuit around the drama- queens who have nothing better to do that to whine about somebody else's cooking.  

Start baking now.  You have cookies to make, freeze, and pack.