It'sade from milk! Go figure! I buy grated frozen parmesan and keep it in the freezer. Go to the source. The less processing, the less chance of mysterious gluten turning up...
Dr Ford,
Insightful comments! I wish more doctors were as well read as you. I live in the Philippines and I've never had any real help from doctors here but my reasoning has been confirmed as reasonable by a GP and a Neurologist (I'm a scientist and able to understand the biology and genetics of the celiac disease world). Here is what I have said about the matter of Gluten Sensitivity and Celiac elsewhere on this site.
Never been formally diagnosed as celiac. But boy do I get sick when glutened. The gut reactions came on as an adult. 50ish but I’ve had neuropathy in my legs since I was 25. Although it has progressed slowly, no doctor has ever worked out the cause. My sister is a diagnosed celiac and many of my family have been undiagnosed celiacs ( bowel cancer, always sick - IBS, Alzheimer’s). I have HLA DQ 2.2 but was never serum tested while eating gluten. I got sick and stopped for 6 months before I realised I needed the gluten challenge. Never been game to make myself sick for 3 months to do it.
Gluten Sensitivity is a genetically modulated inability to digest gluten and similar big proteins. It is an Auto-immune condition. I don’t like to call it a disease or a disorder. We have the original human genes. Everybody else has mutated genes that allow them to digest a poison.
There are a range of gluten sensitivities and celiac is only one expression. Gluten can affect the brain with white holes that affect cognitive skills and may bring on Alzheimer’s and MS in some cases. It can specifically affect the cells in the cerebellum and cause gluten ataxia, it can cause schizophrenia and various mental illnesses, it can affect the skin (dermatitis herpetaformis) with symptoms that look like dengue or measles, it can affect the long nerves in the body causing neuropathy in hands and feet, (I have or have had many of the above) it can affect the thyroid (hashimotos disease) and there are another 300 related and unrelated ways that gluten may damage our bodies as well as diarrhoea, constipation etc. Many of these symptoms may occur at the same time. COELIAC IS NOT THE DEFINING SYMPTOM OF GLUTEN SENSITIVITY. It is only the first one recognised and codified. Coeliacs are gluten sensitive as we are and are part of the gluten sensitivity spectrum.
Gluten specialists such as Dr Marius Hajivasilliou are now saying that more gluten sensitive people have neurological problems than any other and they would class gluten sensitivity as a neurological disorder rather than a GI one.
