Celiac Bites

Great new Celiac Video on CeliacChicks.com

Just ran across this new video posted by CeliacChicks.com. I always love to see a new way to help people understand what Celiac is all about!

School’s Out for Summer!

Aunt Rissy here!

Well, school is out here in South Carolina and it’s time for summer road trips. I am going out of town with the kids this week and knew I had to leave Tom with some quick and yummy gluten-free food. Tom isn’t a picky eater and is very happy eating the same things - He may disagree :-)

For breakfast, I just made some hard-boiled eggs. They are quick and easy and a great source of protein. Thank God that he doesn’t have a reaction to them.

I made pulled pork and potato salad for dinner so he can take the leftovers for lunch. Here’s the recipe for the pork –compliments of The Food Network.

Just make sure all the ingredients are Gluten-free! Most in this recipe are! I find that it is very hard to find gluten free barbeque sauce and this one has you make your own. It was pretty good!

The potato salad is made with Hellman’s mayo and French’s mustard. Also on the menu is glazed carrots. Just boil some baby carrots for 5 minutes. Drain and add some butter, honey and brown sugar. Cook for a few minutes until it makes a nice glaze.

I HAVE to leave Tom with some dessert, so I decided to try out this recipe for homemade donuts. Don’t worry, the photo was taken after Tom ate 5 10 of them, so it makes quite a few more than shown.

I use Jules gluten free flour.

I fried them in peanut oil, but you can use whatever oil you prefer. For the glaze, I just used the cream and powdered sugar. Be sure to check your powdered sugar to make sure it’s gluten free! I’m sure Tom will tell you that they were great! I did have a little bite and YUM! Now he just has to ration them so they last the whole week…yeah right. If he makes it a single day I’ll give him a hundred bucks.

Well, I’ll have to write again when I return and maybe Tom can tell you how he made out while we were gone. Oh, did I mention that we will be eating a lot of wheat while we’re gone? hehe

Congratulations! You’ve got Celiac! Now what?

I have fallen into the time sucking addiction known as Twitter (find me at twitter.com/celiacbites) and every day I run across someone who has just been diagnosed with Celiac. Most are just as confused and lost as I once was, wondering if they will ever be able to survive without Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Pop-Tarts.

If you have followed this blog, you may have noticed I have a thing for Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Pop-Tarts. But I’m not bitter about NEVER BEING ABLE TO EAT THEM AGAIN! Sorry for that, I’m OK now. Not bitter, not bitter, not bitter, not bitter.

As I have referenced in earlier posts, learning to eat absolutely gluten free is a long and complex process. It’s not just eliminating bread and flour. Those pesky Viking descendants - the gliadins - have managed to infiltrate just about every food product known to man, including Pop-Tarts. You simply are not going to become an expert at maintaining a gluten free lifestyle for a good six months. Trust me, you will make mistakes and gluten yourself. Plenty of times.

The problem I hope to help you solve with this post is how to manage the gap between your first post-diagnosis hunger pangs and the end of your gluten free learning curve, however long that may be. You see, about four hours, maybe six, after your diagnosis, you are going to be HUNGRY.  If you’re like me, you may have been HUNGRY for a long time as a result of celiac induced malnutrition. Learning an effective gluten free diet in a few hours is not a realistic option. And you can’t really go on a water and kiwi diet for the next six months either.

The trap that most newly diagnosed Celiacs fall into is immediately trying to start with an exclusive diet as opposed to an inclusive diet. By exclusive, I mean starting with the universe of available foods and then excluding, or ruling out, things that you can no longer eat. There are two main problems with this approach. First, it’s really depressing for your first thoughts about your new lifestyle to be focused on all the things you can’t eat. Second, you simply are not going to know all the intricacies of which foods and ingredients are in fact gluten free. You will get sick. A lot. And that bites. Trust me, I can feel your pain brother (or sister.)

After trying to start with an exclusive approach to eating, and failing miserably, I had my Duh! moment. Why not turn my approach (and frown) upside down and start with a universe of zero “safe” foods and add to the list things that are absolutely gluten free. Over time, as I learned more, I could add to my “safe” list. This approach virtually eliminated my gluten incident frequency while allowing me a series of small “victories” as I learned new things that I could enjoy. It’s all a matter of positive versus a negative perspective. After much deliberation, I have concluded that a positive perspective is, like, way better. Or as my kids would say, the positive outlook is totally beast.

Basic building blocks of an inclusive diet:

Fresh meats, poultry, and seafood. Fresh is the key word here. Not can fresh, but raw fresh. Consider anything pre-packaged in plastic or that contains an ingredient list as suspect. This includes deli meats until you verify them.  Beware of anything that could be pre-marinated or pre-seasoned. Beware of anything frozen as well. Don’t eat Spam. Mainly because it’s just, well, Spam.

Rice. It’s a good thing that I love rice, because I eat a ton of it. And I am talking clear plastic bag, cooked at home rice – not the San Francisco stuff that comes in boxes! No trolleys for you! Depending on your current condition, you may or may not be able to put some real butter on it. Whatever your feelings about Fabio, stay away from fake butter junk that comes in tubs. If you can’t do dairy yet, try a little pure olive oil with some Kosher salt – it’s not too bad of a substitute. For breakfast, I make home made rice cereal, which is basically regular white rice, butter, and pure maple syrup or pure brown sugar. This allows me to put a lot little extra brown sugar on there to compensate for my LOSS OF BROWN SUGAR AND CINNAMON POP-TARTS! Check the labels on the maple syrup and brown sugar to make sure there are no other ingredients!

Fresh fruits and veggies. Again, stay away from anything processed. Get the stuff you have to put in your own plastic bag in the produce section!

Eggs. Fresh eggs are a staple for me.  There are lot’s of ways to prepare them and a little fresh butter or olive oil for cooking is just peachy. Making large batches of hard boiled eggs is a particularly convenient way to deal with snacks, lunches at work, etc.

The suggestions above assume that you personally pulled these things off the store shelves and prepared them. If you eat the same things from a restaurant, you have lost the certainty that the ingredients are pure and absolutely gluten free. You have also opened a big door number three with cross contamination behind it.

As you start to heal, you’ll be able to add other safe items to your list such as cheeses, dairy, some sweets, and more. I will comment on that more in later posts.

So you are off to a rock ‘n roll gluten free diet, but you’re not quite out of the woods yet. Join us next time when we talk about Eating lipstick and other fun ways to poison yourself!

Got Celiac? Allow me to explain...

*** Warning! There is a better than even chance that the following post contains satirical content. The authors of this site cannot assume any liability for potential public backlash against Oompa Loompas, Mel Brooks movies, and/or the good people of Norway. Thank you for your understanding. ***

Just been diagnosed? Don't quite understand what Celiac is and what causes it? Have a broad range of really annoying symptoms and don't know why? Unless you have an obsession with transglutaminase's and antigliadin's, the nuances of Celiac Disease can be a little difficult to digest.  Ahem, pun intended. Boy I crack myself up sometimes.

Let's take a stab at explaining this really complex topic in true Celiac Bites fashion. That could be a little dangerous, but here goes...

I think the easiest way to describe Celiac is to compare it to the big fight scene in Mel Brooks' famous movie Blazing Saddles. Someone punches a horse, things get ugly, and next thing you know, everybody is beating the crap out of everybody else. That's kind of what happens in your small intestine, only there's usually not a horse involved. So, given the likely absence of the either a horse or evil villain Hedley Lamarr, how does this battle royale within your small intestine happen?

It's pretty simple really.When you eat Pop-Tarts, you get sick. Even though Pop-Tarts are mostly made of advanced plastic polymers, they do contain trace amounts of proteins commonly found in wheat, barley, and rye grains. And, as everybody knows, wheat, barley, and rye grains are descendants of Thor, the great viking god of thunder. Thor was a raucous warrior, wreaking havoc and destruction wherever he went. After a while, Thor got bored of being fearsome and plundering things, so he settled down with former Beverly Hills 90210 actress Brittany Ashleigh Spelling. Together they had a whole bunch of kids - so many that they gave up on the idea of naming them individually and instead referred to them collectively as the gliadins. So you might say that the gliadins are little offshoots of wheat, barley, and rye grains. Still with me?  Good, because I'm not.

Over the years, gliadins have taken up residence in Pop-Tarts all over the world.  They also tend to congregate in other forms of yummy food like pizza that have ingredients derived from various grains. While very tiny and seemingly harmless, the gliadins are every bit as irritable and cantankerous as their father Thor - especially when they get eaten. That's where the trouble starts.

When you eat gliadins, they follow a path straight to your guts - home of the villi.The villi are actually a tribe of miniature people begat by the Oompa Loompas. While Oompa Loompas have a reputation of being hard working and industrious, the villi have no such ambition, so they stand around with their hands in the air waiting for any food that may happen to drift by. Most villi are unemployed and prefer to stay that way as long as they can keep collecting free Pop-Tarts.  

So far, so good, as the often cranky gliadins and villi have no real ill will against each other.  As the gliadins float by, they might overhear mundane conversations like this:

"Hey, do you know what's for breakfast today?"

"No, but I sure hope we have Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Pop-Tarts again. Mmmm."

This perfectly civil process turns outright ugly when the auto-antibodies get involved. Antibodies have a chip on their shoulder as they resent having to work so hard fighting things like botulism and the common cold, while their cousins the villi don't do much of anything. As children, the auto-antibodies were generally abused and picked on by the irritable gliadins. Now that they are all grown up, but still a little on the immature side, the auto-antibodies tend to fly off the handle whenever gliadins pass through their neighborhood. However, old fears are hard to overcome, so the auto-antibodies - more specifically the anti-tissue transglutaminase antibodies (tTGA's) - can't muster up the guts to confront the gliadins directly. Instead, they throw showy tantrums and beat up the mellow villi - who are much easier targets to bully. Once the tTGA's start fighting the hapless villi, all hell breaks loose. Next thing you know, you've got antibodies all over the place chasing after villi, gliadins, and stray Pop-Tart crumbs.

So back to Blazing Saddles. By the time we get to the climactic cafeteria food fight scene, everybody is fighting everybody else and throwing food and furniture for no particular reason. The problem for you is that you own the cafeteria - and the cafeteria gets wrecked in this scene.

As you can imagine, the villi tend to tire of these free for all food fights and eventually go on strike. Beaten down, depressed, and disheartened, they won't even bother to get their own food, much less do any work for you. You can eat as much as you want, but no goodness is getting through to you. It's kind of like watching "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." You can spend hours and hours viewing re-runs, but you most likely will not be registering your yacht in Monaco anytime soon. Ok - back to the villi picket line. In a show of union solidarity, everyone else in your body goes on strike. You get sick, tired, lethargic, and weak - kind of like having that 6am Monday morning feeling all the time. And you know how truly awesome that is.

I sincerely hope I didn't lose you with all the complex medical and biological terminology. This has been a public service of Celiac Bites.

Join us next time where we will address the question...

"So you're allergic to bread???"

Thor image: MrDonn.org

Shoutout! Gluten Free World Map!

Just ran across a really cool project put together by the folks at Celiac Chicks. It's a user generated map of the world designed to capture and share all gluten free friendly eateries.

It appears that there are a couple hundred entries already, so be sure to click the link below to add the places you know about - I'll be making my updates for Charleston!

To add your own entries, click here: