Not due to Coeliac condition though. Interested to know how you find it, the difficulties etc.

Thanks. 🙂

Hi!

Yup, gluten free here. I find it fairly easy to manage, but the products are much more expensive.

xx

gf does

you learn to read labels carefully
use Genius bread – nearly like bread, esp when toasted
issues in many restaurants/pubs – lots of food is ‘packaged’ so they can’t change the ingredients, also had some issues with people lying (*well I think they were really being ‘helpful’/not understanding but not always) by saying it was gluten free, however as gf sicks up it’s easy to know when they’ve lied
– National Front (*trust) cafes do gluten free stuff
– some pub chains and restaurants are now marking menus and there definitely seems to be an increase in number of placs and food ranges
-we now eat Indian a lot (so far all curries ok), can do kebabs – chicken/no pitta, fish and chips – chicken and chips if chicken is ‘bare’, some Thai is ok, don’t really do Chinese anymore

I just read every menu – and I’m finding more and more with either marked items and ‘we can alter to suit statements’ and remember the good ones.

There is coeliac society, worthing joining for info/tips.

Sweeping generalisation The more ‘rural’ you are the less choice, with some blinding exceptions – e.g chip shop in Plockton – no probs I’ll grill a bit of fish for you.

The main windup is when a group of us are out and want to eat – not always straightforward.

My wife switched to a gluten and dairy free diet when she was breastfeeding and our daughter had problems. Health food shops and the bigger supermarkets have a reasonable selection of GF stuff these days. I will say that buying flour and making your own bread will give much better results than Genius branded stuff. In turn that was better than the supermarket stuff I tried, which was horrid. Of our local supermarkets Waitrose and Sainsburys had the best choice.

Aye, coeliac here. TBH there’s no way in hell I would do it if I had any choice- it’s not terribly hard to follow a gf diet but it’s a constant hassle and it does mean giving things up, there’s not always workarounds. GF food is generally more expensive and almost always inferior- the best bread (genius) is pretty much as good as crap supermarket bread.

Eating out becomes a case of first scanning the menu and finding what you can eat, then choosing from that- really restrictive on choice and often you end up eating what you can, not what you want.

Thanks very much for your replies. 🙂

Karin, gus and Rich – has there actually been a Coeliac diagnosis made?

I’ve not been tested for this but have seen mention of gluten possibly affecting my medical problem. It does sound like a lot of hard work when shopping/eating out and quite frustrating I should think too!

Had a quick look at the Coeliac website and it mentioned that some porridge can contain gluten. Porridge is part of my staple diet so that would be painful, as would giving up beer!

RichPenny what recipe(s) do you use?

I’ve been tested, def not coeliac, just intolerant. Porridge is made from oats, oats contain gluten but apparently it is easier to tolerate than wheat gluten. I’m not sure about beer, I thought the problem with wheat gluten was that it is “spiky”, but beer is liquid so I think (and I qualify this by stressing it’s only what I think, not what I know) that beer is ok. You can find out quite easily by going on an elimination diet and reintroducing things one at a time.

Anyway you can get gluten free porridge – I’ve seen it in Sainsburys.

I can tolerate some wheat, maybe one cake or biscuit a week. Anti histamines help with the rash, although I prefer to eliminate the cause rather than pop (more) pills to control the effects.

It’s not so bad! You just have to think around it a bit.

With oats it’s mostly contamination that’s the issue… There’s a link between gluten intolerance and avenin-intolerance too. But not all wheat-allergic people are oat-allergic.

My mum’s got pretty bad IBS so as an experiment she went onto the diet for a couple of months… Made no difference, in her case, but does in others. Definately worth giving it a crack if you think it might be of use.

The trouble is what my brother calls “stealth glutons”, since wheat gets used as a bulking agent in so much food. Like, you wouldn’t expect a 100% beef burger to be full of wheat, or a mars bar. Some recipes change around and go from GF to not GF, which is really frustrating.

Beer is, well, complicated. You can get GF beer but also, a lot of lager is almost GF- frinstance Budweiser isn’t authenticated as GF, and so there’s no guarantee that it’ll be OK, but random sampling shows it to be safe. I just switched to cider, much simpler, and after a while it stops tasting like horse piss.