A friend stopped by for dinner a week or two after having returned from an extended stay in Italy. I decided to serve pasta. “Oh, sweetie, this looks great, but I just found out that I’m gluten intolerant,” she informed me. Huh? How did this woman manage to live in Italy for six months and avoid pasta? She didn’t. In fact, she had been enjoying it almost daily: the breads and pastas in Italy didn’t seem to affect her, which was not the case when she attempted to replicate that lifestyle upon returning to the States, for some strange reason. Actually, the reasons aren’t that strange at all. Ask most people what gluten is, which Jimmy Kimmel once famously did, and they’ll often answer, “a chemical that’s added to flour.” Which it isn’t, as you no doubt know. According to the Celiac Disease Foundation, ‘Gluten is a general name for the proteins found in wheat (wheatberries, durum, emmer, semolina, spelt, farina, farro, graham, KAMUT® khorasan wheat and einkorn), rye, barley and triticale – a cross between wheat and rye.” While people with Celiac Disease, a genetically-inherited autoimmune disorder that can be confirmed through genetic testing, must avoid gluten in all of its many form – bread, pizza, cakes, and even certain sauces, such as soy sauce, where wheat is sometimes, but not always, added – gluten-free products have hit the market and have become big sellers in the last few years, and the number of people who feel that they’ve developed a ‘gluten intolerance’ has skyrocketed, whether they’re self-diagnosed or it has been suggested to them by a doctor, nutritionist, dietician or a friend. Or they simply avoid it because it sounds like something that's bad for them and should be avoided at all costs.
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With all due respect to the medical community, doctors study nutrition for three weeks in medical school, and we don’t know how many of them do the grocery shopping and read the ingredients list on the products they buy – or recommend to their patients - or the nutrition labels.
Celiac disease aside, why this matters is that in the majority of commercially available gluten-free baked goods, wheat flour is often replaced with a combination of rice flour and potato starch, or some other carbohydrate-laden gluten-free alternative. The question is: would you sit down to
Mar 2017