Saturday, March 31, 2012

What is Gluten Free? What are Gluten-Foods?

Today, there are a lot of articles on internet that discuss about gluten-foods (as the name suggests, they are foods that contain gluten). Gluten is a specific protein that can be found in certain foods. It should be avoided by people with celiac disease. What is gluten free? And why do people need to do a celiac disease diet or gluten-free diet?

You might also like to read can you use gluten free diet for weight loss, before continuing!

Gluten free is usually referred to a kind of diet that is free of any foods that contain gluten. Generally, gluten is often common to be found in barley, rye, and wheat. And you should clearly understand that gluten-free diet is not weight loss diet!

The following are pieces of helpful information about why people should do gluten-free diet, so thus you can understand what actually gluten free is!

Celiac disease

Celiac disease is one of increasingly popular diseases at these days. It is a health problem in people that cannot eat gluten-foods. When people with this disease eat gluten-foods, their natural immune system can harm or attack their small intestine, which finally can decrease the performance of their body to absorb nutrient from any foods that they eat. Read also some common symptoms of celiac disease.

The points are:
  1. If the celiac disease is untreated, it can make hard for the body to get adequate nutrient intake. People with this disease should eat a variety of healthy free-gluten foods in order to promote their weight up and also keep strong.
  2. As mentioned before, people with this disease must avoid eating gluten and this is one of the most important keys for the treatment. Even the smallest intake of gluten can be so harmful and can worse the symptoms.
  3. Even if the symptoms are absent, people with this disease should keep & avoid eating gluten!
  4. In several cases, for the first period of treatment - patients should also avoid consuming milk products in their celiac disease diet.
Gluten sensitivity

It is a condition in people who have symptoms of celiac disease after eating gluten, but the test of celiac disease is negative. And some people with gluten sensitivity may be more likely to complain headaches and fatigue.

Helpful for therapy of children with autism!

There are some parents who believe that gluten free diet can be helpful for children with autism. But this is still pretty controversial. There are still not enough studies to confirm clearly evidences that gluten free diet can be helpful to improve certain symptoms in children with autism.

What are foods that contain gluten?

As mentioned before, gluten is more often to be found in barley, rye, and wheat. Some common gluten foods include; pizza, crackers, cereals made with rye-barley-or-wheat, bagels, pasta, and bread.

Furthermore, you may also find certain foods that have ‘wheat-free label’, but this doesn’t mean that they are gluten-free foods. Instance, certain foods with ‘hydrolyzed vegetable protein’ label (this seems harmless, but the protein is usually derived from wheat).

To get more detailed information about what is actually ‘gluten free’, don’t miss to talk with your doctor.

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