Gluten Free Mastery

Digestive Upset Causes Beyond Gluten

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When you have Celiac disease, you have a damaged digestive system. This requires that extra care should be taken to avoid foods and additives that are known to cause digestive side effects.

Many of the people who successfully recover their health after going gluten free will speak about having to make other dietary changes.

These additional changes generally involve removing other foods not thought of to have gluten. Some of these other foods do in fact contain gluten. Some of it will be in the various ingredients in packaged foods, or cross contamination during some point in the production line.

But others will actually not contain gluten, but do contain other substances that further irritate the damaged digestive systems that those with Celiac Disease have.

Some terms that are heard these days are:

• Leaky Gut
• Intestinal Permeability
• Microbiome
• Probiotics and Prebiotics

These all relate to managing the digestive system. It can get a bit overwhelming when you start digging into these subjects, since there appears to be an endless amount of info to learn. Many of them don't directly speak about Celiac and gluten. Others will disregard gluten problems, and be disrespectful of Celiac sufferers.

However, the core theories, and core research backed information coming out of these topics carry an extremely important message:

• Put good stuff into your diet, and take damaging stuff out.

Groundbreaking Advances in Digestive Health Importance

Research in the last few years is really starting to get the core understanding of how this works, and realizing it's much more important than anyone dreamed of. This research is really just the beginning. The research will continue, and much more will be learned over the coming years.

Some core concepts that have come out so far are:

• The main part of the immune system resides in the stomach.
• The microbiome is the core of the immune system.
• The microbiome is the bacteria in our systems, with "ground zero" being the stomach and digestive tract.
• Modern life as lived for the last 100 to 150 years has seriously changed the composition of the microbiome, and not for the better.
• The microbiome can be "changed" via diet. (The details of this are still in their infancy, so much more will be learned in the coming years.)
• Every person has a unique microbiome, thus meaning solutions will be unique to every single person. (This is why some treatments, diets, etc. have such dramatically different results from person to person.)

As people with Celiac disease, who still struggle with not feeling well, we can use this to tailor a truly unique diet plan for our life, and for our wellness.

We all must start with removing gluten, ALL gluten, from our diets.

Unfortunately, that does mean some dramatic lifestyle changes. If we all lived in Utopia, we could just snap our fingers and have a proper gluten free product available for everything we're used to eating. But we don't live in Utopia. We live in a culture that is obsessed with gluten. It's everywhere.

As many of you are aware, first hand, eating gluten free is being treated like a fad. That means that your need for 100% gluten free foods are being disregarded, and not truly taken seriously. By restaurants, food manufacturers, your friends, your family, etc. Far too many people think "just a little is okay."

If you REALLY want to get well, then you need to control your food 100%. That can be inconvenient. It involves a big learning curve. However, it's vital to understand that with practice, this truly will become second nature. But only if you take the initiative to educate yourself fully. If you rely on someone else to make some or all of these decisions, you will not get better. You will continue to be sick, and you will continue to suffer.

As you learn about taking control of eating gluten free, you'll run across a lot of conflicting info. You'll just have to work through the conflicting info, to find what's actually true.

A Core Step in Recovery

A big first step in getting control is to eat only food. That may sound silly, but there's a ton of stuff in the products that we buy that isn't really food, and the vast majority of them can irritate various parts of our bodies. Manufacturers use a lot of additives to mimic the taste, texture and actions of more expensive food ingredients, and to allow them to sell items that if made with real foods would not be able to be packaged and sold long after they were made.

If you're still struggling with feeling well, and feeling frustrated that you can't eat "normal" then it may be time to get back to basics for a while, until you can learn more.

It really is better to feel well and have what you may think of as a restricted diet. When you feel well, you can make better decisions, plan more, get a bit more creative in your meal planning, etc.

Change Our Attitudes, Change Our Destiny

A change in our attitude about food will also go a long way to help us deal with the needed changes. 

For example, we may think we're being deprived by not being able to eat "normal." However, if you think the "Standard American Diet" (the SAD diet) is "normal," then it may be time to rethink the wisdom of that. The SAD diet has come to be known as one of the worst ways to eat that the world has seen. It causes severe chronic illness, and is massively contributing to decades of illness for many Americans.

Earlier I said that our culture is obsessed with gluten. This is clearly seen when you look at the last several Food Guides that the USDA has put out. The current version recommends 5 to 8 servings per day of grain products (for adult women and men). That's a LOT of grain. That's a LOT of bread.

We're being told that we must eat grains to provide the following (per current USDA MyPlate site):

• fiber
• some B vitamins - folate / folic acid; thiamin, roboflavin, niacin
• iron
• magnesium
• selenium

When we cut out gluten containing grains, we pretty much cut out getting these above nutrients from grains. It's almost impossible to get these nutrients in the same quantities from non gluten grains.

However, all is not lost. It's very easy to get these nutrients in other common foods in our diet (if we don't follow the USDA MyPlate recommendations).

You can get a ton of fiber from adding leafy greens, vegetables, some fruits, nuts, and seeds.

All of the B vitamins in the processed grains, those mostly used in the US and other developed countries, are added. The fact is that the processing of foods strips out most of the natural B vitamins. It's super easy to get these vitamins from meat, dairy, nuts, seeds, beans and vegetables. Be sure to eat all of those foods. If you have some other reason to exclude some of those foods, then get some proper advice from someone who properly understands eating gluten free AND your other limitations.

Remember that part of the reason we think we must have these very high levels of grains is that's what the marketers have told us. Even the USDA is really just a group of growers in the US that grow mostly grains (along with a large portion raising livestock). The USDA's food guides have been shown repeatedly to NOT be based on truthful, valid research.

Take a Step Back, Keep it Simple to Start

So, when you're planning your gluten free diet, remember that you don't have to fill your plate with as many grains as you may be used to.

Get back to the basics. Plan out some home cooked meals, made with pure, fresh foods. This may be something you haven't done much of, since our culture is so used to buying mostly prepared foods, but with some practice, and some basic planning, you'll be well on your way to making significant progress in getting well.

Here's a super simple dinner plan, to get you started, when you have no idea how to start:

1. Choose your favorite PROTEIN - meat, beans. Pick your favorite single herbs to prepare them with. Add some diced onions or garlic. Cook.
2. Choose 2 different colored VEGGIES, steam them, or cut up and eat raw - have one be green, the other one be a nice vibrant color.
3. Choose a STARCH - brown rice, potatoes, yams, etc. Boil and serve with butter.
4. Make a SALAD, with a base of leaf lettuce, and at least 4 other veggies, all different colors. Make a salad dressing from scratch: 1 crushed garlic clove, 1/4 c apple cider vinegar, 1/2 c olive oil, 1 tsp raw honey, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/8 tsp pepper. Place in a container and shake.

You can take this basic plan, and adjust one thing at a time by finding a recipe you like that fits the gluten free, processed food free criteria. Over time, you'll start to build a wonderful collection of recipes that suit you and your family.

Be sure to let us all know in the comments below when you try this, how it went, and be sure to tell us what you ate!

Bon Appetit!

Thora Toft

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