Healthy eating = Healthy living

I think the first two years after being diagnosed with Celiac Disease should change a person's life. For life. Because it takes approximately 11 years to be diagnosed with Celiac by which time massive damage has occurred in our bodies I think a newly diagnosed person should be aware of every. single. thing. they eat.

In the last two months, I've talked with nutritionists, read books, googled, talked to other people that have CD. My book budget is almost as bloated as my new grocery budget is because I just can't get enough information. The health information from one book to the next is as different as the colors on a color wheel.

I think a lot of people, who don't have access to a nutritionist who specializes in Celiac Disease, or computer hear gluten free and do just that. They continue to eat potatoes, white rice, iceburg lettuce, corn etc. with abandon because it's gluten free.

They don't look at what they are putting in their bodies.

I read on a forum where someone had come across a sale on potatoes and purchased 200+ pounds of them and spent a week cooking and freezing mashed, twice baked, scalloped, you name it she had it in the freezer so all she had to do was thaw and reheat and she had her veggie already prepared.

OMG!

Now white potatoes do have their nutrition however once you peel, fry, cover with cheese, load with sour cream, butter, cheese, bacon bits or even chili what you have left is nutritionally lacking.

After purchasing (so far) 27 books on Celiac Disease and Gluten-Free cooking I FINALLY found THE book I have no problem recommending!

(photo courtesy of amazon)

This book is packed with nutritional advice. Pages and pages of what foods contain which vitamins, minerals, protein etc. It's hands down the #1 book for those newly diagnosed.

The skinny on oats....

In my pre-Celiac days nothing was better than a bowl of steel cut oats with chopped apples, pecans and a splash of pure maple syrup. As soon as the weather would start getting a little cooler this was a every weekend breakfast.

Once I was diagnosed, I quickly found certified gluten free oats (steel cut even), and was happy that not to much was going to change with my diet. Then I started researching Celiac and holy cow! Oats in the Gluten Free community are equivalent to talking politics in mixed company! Everyone has a different opinion and they are both strong.

I wanted to know WHY oats are so controversial. The sides against them say they have a protein that acts like gluten and are horribly cross contaminated. The sides for them say as long as they are certified gluten free they are fine in small doses. The protein Avenin in oats is responsible for all this debate. In a small amount of people with Celiac, this protein still causes an autoimmune response.

One article that I came across is from 2007 (link here) is a study done on 42 patients with Celiac that they followed for five years. At the end only 12 patients continued eating oats for the full five years and because these 12 patients showed no issues with oats it was deemed that they are safe? If 1 in 133 (give or take depending on the source) people have Celiac how are 12 patients going to prove that oats are safe for all Celiac patients? If a small amount of patients with Celiac have issues with oats how do you know that you aren't one of those small few?

Another article from the same site, from 2008 (link here) again states studies were done and oats are safe. Yet if you read the comments there are a few people that are still having issues with oats. The article states no increase in TtG, IgA levels was noted. A quote from the celiac.com forum

" you can get oats made in dedicated fields, harvested with dedicated machinery, and processed and shipped on dedicated equipment. these brands are more expensive and harder to find, but you can get it. BUT, studies have shown that about 10% of celiacs respond with the same immune response to avenin, the oat protein, as they do to gliadin, the wheat protein - because avenin is structurally very similar to gliadin. there is no blood test or other laboratory test that can be run to determine this. you would have to find it out for yourself by eating oats."

I asked my doctor what he thought and he told me that he doesn't know enough about Celiac disease to give me a definitive answer and that I should ask my nutritionist. So I met with my nutritionist and asked her about oats, her response was if they are certified gluten free then I don't see why you can't include them in a successful gluten free diet.

Many, many things are wrong with the above paragraph. First off, my DOCTOR doesn't know enough about Celiac? My nutritionist, fresh out of college, doesn't even know about about Celiac to know that as a newly diagnosed patient it's recommended by almost all associations that you wait at least six months to one year before introducing oats IF you are going to. As of this month I'm not going to consume oats until there is further testing done.