Month: April 2013

Getting started on a gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free, corn-free low allergen diet is not easy, but I found that a lot of the resources that were available to me made it seem a lot worse than it actually was. I am not saying that it is not challenging to avoid all the different allergens, just that its nowhere near as hard as a lot of the books on the topic make it out to be. The first key is to eat only food that you prepare. That said, there is no reason to do a lot of actual preparing. The closer you get to raw and vegan the easier it all is. Here is what we do when I am not testing recipes. It does not require much skill in the kitchen. Snacks We snack primarily on bananas, apples, oranges, blueberries and grapes. I keep pushing baby carrots as well but my son is not all that fond of them. The preparation process is the same as for a bag of chips with the exception that I try to wash the fruit before tossing it into the lunchbox. Berries and grapes need to be washed, put in a container, then put into the lunchbox. No heating or knife skills are required. Lunch My son eats sandwiches for lunch. Pretty much every day he wants a sunflower seed butter sandwich. He...

Having seen the miracles that the diet has done in my life I tend to evangelize about it to anyone with symptoms who will listen or who simply is unable to move fast enough to escape. That said, there is usually a period where they look at me and let me know that they do not think that they can do this. They wonder how I do it. To which I always reply, “Its like having a baby. For three months its bad. It’s really mind-blowingly hard. Then, suddenly you get more sleep and the baby gets cuter and it all starts to flow. But those three months are brutal. Now here I must confess that we are lucky. We are wildly symptomatic. It is easy to stick to the plan when a deviation means a night spent sweating in the bathroom followed by three days of feeling awful. For people with mostly psychiatric symptoms it has to be harder. But it is so worth it. So yes, there is a period where you read every label trying to figure out if the natural flavors are made from gluten and learning the hard way that oats tend to be cross contaminated or that half of celiacs cannot tolerate corn or dairy. I had to learn to read kosher certifications and learn the rules of Passover (which is how a...

Each year the Environmental Working Group puts out a list of the fruits and vegetables that are most and least likely to be seriously contaminated by pesticides. The idea behind this list is so that if you cannot afford to buy all of your produce organic then at least you know which produce is very contaminated and should be avoided if not organic and which produce is generally not treated too heavily with pesticides making the choice to eat organic less critical. They call these lists The Dirty Dozen and The Clean Fifteen. Now, in general produce is at the bottom of the list of things always to eat organic. Here is a more complete list of what you need to get organic, wild or otherwise and why. Meat It is as simple as this, I do not eat chicken at restaurants unless I know the owner and know its organic. Here is why. In addition to being fed antibiotics, chickens are frequently fed arsenic. It is put in their feed as it makes their meat that pinkish color that people like and it kills insects. Interestingly, chickens are supposed to eat insects. Insects are an important part of a chicken’s diet. Also interesting is that while arsenic kills people and there is no safe dose for humans, it somehow appears not to hurt the chickens (this may be...

Although this site has many dessert recipes on it, that is merely because when a typical dessert is a concoction of wheat, dairy and eggs as so many are, making one hypoallergenic is a real culinary challenge. Making hypoallergenic lentil soup is simply a lot easier. That does not mean that I think that everyone should eat dessert on a regular basis. To the contrary I am convinced that excess sugar intake is slowly killing a lot of people, and celiacs can consume far too much of it. The problem is that most people have no idea how much sugar is in foods. For example at the Gluten and Allergy Free Expo this weekend I purchased a new product from Enjoy Life, which is a Chocolate Sunbutter Bar. It tastes like a candy bar. It contains 9 grams of sugar which is about two teaspoons. Which is a fraction of the sugar in a glass of orange juice. I know this because of this incredibly cool website where they show you different fruits and veggies and how much sugar is in them. Sometimes the amount is shockingly low (like strawberries and pineapple), sometimes it is grotesquely high (the photos for a certain type of soda are especially alarming), but it is always informative. What they do is photograph a certain amount of food, say a one cup measure of...

I spent the day today at the Gluten and Allergy Free Expo. There were good things and disappointing things. I will start with the good things. This year the expo is much bigger than it was last year so there were far more booths to visit and vendors to meet. Some of my favorite brands are coming out with some terrific line extensions, (the Kinnikinnick bagels are actually chewy), and it was great to know what to demand from my local Whole Foods. One huge improvement was that this year it was easier to attend lectures and the speakers were easy to hear as they were all speaking in rooms dedicated for that purpose with full AV. Last year it was literally difficult to hear the speakers. The Kid Zone was also greatly improved. Last year it was a table in the hallway. This year it was a confined, dedicated space. That said there are a few more things I thought could be improved. First of all, there were too many vendors that were about green living or holistic health, not specific to digestive issues. I felt bad for them as they did not get the business that they should have. Second, out of a total of eight or ten lectures total, two were given by moms whose autistic sons drastically improved after making changes including the GFCF diet....

Although there are more and more websites out there to help people with food allergies find something to eat, they vary in quality. I remember reading one blog post that covered five Chicago area restaurants none of which had a gluten-free menu. Or parking. While totally leaving out such bastions of gluten-free dairy-free and vegan dining as The Chicago Diner or Rose’s Wheatfree Bakery. So when I went looking for an ice cream parlor for my son, I found additional frustration as yelp! sent me to places that were wildly inappropriate (hey kids while everyone else is getting a double fudge sundae we have some sugar-free rasberry sorbet for you) for children who, interestingly, are the major clients of ice cream parlors. I also found places that no longer carried the dairy-free products. which was really frustrating. But I digress. So after spending hours making myself crazy reading weblog after weblog and review after review, I found this list of places that serve dairy free ice cream. It is a national list with parlors from New York to Los Angeles and is slightly out of date (one of the best parlors in New York, Stogo has closed and KindCreme has eliminated one location) and is incomplete (how you can miss the vegan milkshake menu at the Chicago Diner is beyond me) but its a good start and would be...

This week there was an OpEd piece in the New York Times about the fact that the chemicals in personal care products are not tested for safety and that babies are born with a lot of chemicals already in their blood. My parents were chemists so this is not news to me, but if you thought that the stuff in shampoo or lotion or other personal care products had been somehow tested for safety in a thorough way, allow me to cut to the punchline. It hasn’t. Heck they put formaldehyde precursors in certain baby shampoo as a preservative (it doesn’t say formaldehyde because it only becomes formaldehyde when water is added). Even more concerning, the Unites States allows personal care products to contain ingredients banned in the EU and Japan. So not only do we not check to see if they are safe, but even after we have evidence that they may not be safe, these products stay on shelves and continue to be manufactured and sold. So what is a concerned shopper to do? There are two websites you can visit to find out if your personal care products contain ingredients suspected of causing cancer or banned in other countries. They are called The Good Guide and The Environmental Working Group. Both explain why they rate products the way that they do. You can find The Good...

Imagine Natural Creations has come out with an Organic Creamy Garden Tomato Soup that is Low Sodium and Low Calorie. I prefer to make my own since its pretty easy, but for people with multiple food allergies this is a great product. The box shows no dairy, no nuts, no eggs no gluten, no corn, nothing in the big eight and no sesame or citrus listed in the ingredients. It also has none of those warnings on the side about it being made in a facility that contains scary ingredients. A one cup serving has 80 calories, 1g of fat, 2g of sugar (less than half a teaspoon), 2g of fiber,300 mg of sodium (which is good for canned soup but is still 13% of your daily limit), and 30% of your vitamin C. It is not quite paleo due to the inclusion of small amounts of brown rice syrup and canola oil. You can microwave it with little rice pasta shapes and make a sort of tomato soup with stars. It is not concentrated but is rather thick. If I was planning to use it with a pasta I would definitely thin it out with water or unsweetened unflavored hemp milk. They sell the soup at Whole Foods, but if you cannot find it locally the company has a website and does mail order. I also use their...