I hope the bubble bursts, the sooner the better. And I have a son with medically diagnosed coeliac disease. The substitutes are overpriced and I assure you from experience they are usually fairly disgusting in either taste, texture, odor, or the ingredient list. The best part of his diagnosis was the whole family basically stopped eating junk food. Awesome health benefits from that. So.. no empty calories, no problem!
Stores are already full of gluten free products. I made a tasty homemade beef vegetable stew yesterday in the slow cooker with beef and carrots and potatoes and celery and thats about it (well, some spices, some salt, water, etc). This is what real gluten free substitutes look like. It tasted awesome. This is the kind of GF substitute I've come to expect, not a GF hot pocket or a GF package of oreos.
There's a big business around convincing people they have to buy substitutes so they can keep stuffing their faces with (now gluten free!) twinkies until they die of diabetes at 500 pounds. I'm totally not interested in that kind of substitute. If their processed food business model loses money or wastes executive bonus money on R+D or even better, outright dies out, I'm not going to shed any crocodile tears in my homemade beef stew.
You can see the propaganda way of steering thought by careful word choice:
"Sales of alternatives to meat have flattened"
They've flattened because they're disgusting soy based hyper processed plastic weirdness pumped out of a chemical plant that isn't really fit for human consumption. Not because nobody eats salads anymore.
The whole article is like describing modern online music stores as selling "vinyl free product, even though most buyers don't medically need vinyl free music". Its people complaining the world has passed their business model by. If people aren't buying your toxic cellophane wrapped people-fattener products anymore, instead of trying even weirder chemical plant processing or stealth marketing with complimentary copy, just sell me some cheap lettuce and stop complaining.
Presumably your son would like to eat out occasionally? Or not be relegated to just the healthy options you want him to eat?
Just because there are GF Oreo's doesn't mean you have to eat them. And to counter your observation, in my experience GF food generally tastes alright. My partner is allergic. It's "overpriced" (market priced, really) because it's lower volume and depending on the GF substitute it may be more difficult to produce.
I just want to eat wheat products without nutty people trying to convince me that it is 'poison'. The evidence vastly supports wheat being awesome for your health, not detrimental.
"It will help you to survive" is a far cry from, "The evidence vastly supports wheat being awesome for your health," though. Based on that logic, all food is "awesome for your health." :P
I chowed down all through college on the Seitan chicken in the cafeteria's Vegan line, if I had Celiacs' I'd know.
But I try to limit my carbs now and I do hate the looks I get when I ask for a gluten free menu just to see the entire offerings of a restaurant(and then I feel doubly dumb when sometimes the menu is just a listing of the already gluten-free plates on the normal menu).
Yeah, except for flavor and texture. Seitan might be the single worst food substitute for anything I've ever seen. The only thing worse than the texture is the flavor. It's like eating raw flour flavored packing glue.
You've never had good seitan. I've recently perfected seitan sausage. The meat eater in my house loved it.
When made well (and fresh), it has the texture of the tenderest chicken or pork you've ever eaten. And, it should not taste like flour, at all. It's mostly the protein from wheat (I use Bob's Red Mill vital wheat gluten, which is 80% protein), and none of the other components that taste starchy or bread-like.
I make a double batch and still use less broth and water (I use six cups total simmering liquid for a double batch), as the recipe calls for way too much.
For sausage, I add rubbed sage, thyme, cayenne pepper, fresh minced ginger, and white pepper. A touch of brown sugar is also a reasonable addition. Once boiled, I slice it into 1/4" patties and put it into the toaster oven, on a pan oiled with a bit of peanut oil, to broil for 5-10 minutes to make it sizzly and a little crispy. It really is pretty awesome; I serve it with vegan biscuits and gravy (I make the gravy from the remaining broth from the seitan cook).
In short, seitan is one of my absolute favorite foods. I was ambivalent about it, until I had really good fresh seitan at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant. I tried for years to find some at the store that was as good, and was always disappointed. The key seems to be to make it fresh.
Wow, I might have to try that one myself. Iv'e just been buying the Field Roast brand seitan sausages, and they're awesome. I'd been missing the chorizo sausages of my childhood until those came along... but sadly, there is some scuffle between Field Roast and the Canadian government and so the product was taken off shelves. Good to know I could get good results if I wanted to DIY.
I'm not sure how to say this without sounding extremely disparaging, but I wonder if the reason these stupid, essentially baseless food fads catch on is because the primary food-purchasing demographics are not well-educated.
Anyone with basic reasoning skills, understanding of elementary biology, and the Wikipedia article on gluten could tell you that this gluten-free fad is completely fatuous.
Most diet crazes are completely fatuous. It's not a lack of education (because we can't know everything about everything) - to me it's a chronic lack of self awareness and self responsibility that manifests in most people sincerely believing that everything that happens to them is the result of other actors, and not their own actions. So if you're feeling fat and bloated, it's not because you can't stop stuffing crap into your mouth and are too lazy to exercise, it's because some evil conspiracy is feeding you, the helpless victim, foods which you are not designed to eat.
Maybe it is the decline in religion - without a seemingly senseless deity to blame - the search goes on for other reasons. When the answer is always in the one who asks.
The gluten-free substitute products probably don't contain the FODMAPs that the self-reported "gluten sensitive" individuals are actually allergic to. I'm not sure that makes it a "baseless food fad", this is an area of ongoing research.
Could be, but these fads all roar through the facebook feeds of my college classmates. Though I will grant the possibility that even highly ranked institutions may not be leaving their graduates (i.e., me) "well educated".
I'm actually allergic to buckwheat, and it's becoming increasingly more difficult to avoid as people get carried away with gluten free options (pizza, crackers, etc). It's fine as long as resturant employees know what I'm asking about, but I've been caught off guard a couple of times now.
The best part is when your friends complain about being on a gluten-free diet and you know they aren't sensitive (based on decades of late night pizza and sandwich runs) and they clearly aren't celiac so you say "oh yeah, no problem I've planned out a gluten free meal, health and whatever", and you serve gluten rich foods to them anyways and nobody complains about vague nonspecific symptoms and everybody says they liked the meal and want your recipe - and then a week later complains they can't get it to taste right with their gluten free substitutes.
So you lie to your friends and misrepresent what you're serving them, denying them control over what they put in their own body? It's one thing to not buy the whole gluten-free diet thing and say "I'm making good-tasting stuff that has gluten, take it or leave it," but what you describe here is pretty much just an asshole move.
I know someone who is sure that her kids misbehave because of gluten, so she does everything to control their diet. At parties, she hovers around and takes cookies and cake and other things off them. The kids generally become whiny and behave badly. She usually puts this down to them slipping in some gluten while she want looking.
The other kids stuff their faces, roar around feeding off the energy of the party, and go home happy.
If we are going to talk about anything, it should be unhealthy obsessiveness with diets. Get some exercise, eat fresh foods for the most part. Go crazy and eat some ice cream ,pizza or chocolate cake once in a while. Job done.
The even better part is when you make assumptions about what you know about your friends and it turns out one of them is celiac and just hasn't had a biopsy to confirm. Making medical decisions for your friends without their knowledge is always a great idea.
You'll know if you're celiac -- "vague" and "nonspecific" "maybe feel slightly bloated" are not symptoms of the disease.
They are however specific to the latest hypochondriac food fad that's swept the nation and as numerous controlled studies on random non-celiac populations are starting demonstrate with Science, are treatment for disorders (NCGS) that don't even exist.
It appears that "gluten sensitivity" industry (an $11 billion dollar industry) is now about to run its course, so the next fads are starting to spin up, FODMAPs or Frutates or whatever is probably the next big thing. And guess what my prediction is going to be, all those people who complain of vague non-specific NCGS will start eating Gluten again without any complaint and completely forget about it, while simultaneously froggering over to FODMAP free diets or whatever to deal with their vague non-specific hypochondriac symptomologies.
> You'll know if you're celiac -- "vague" and "nonspecific" "maybe feel slightly bloated" are not symptoms of the disease.
No, that's not true. My daughter has celiac disease; she has a severe version, so we found this out when she was about 4 years old.
However, in later life my mother suffered from serious food sensitivity problems. She wasn't diagnosed with celiac because that was 15+ years ago. Given my daughter's medical history, I'd bet even odds that celiac was exactly what my mother had, even though the serious problems didn't occur until old age. There is a very strong genetic component to the disease. Wikipedia discusses this at length, but I'm certainly not qualified to know how accurate that information is.
So it's quite possible that with less severe celiac, people only have mild symptoms or only develop severe symptoms late in life.
Sorry to quote Wikipedia, they're hardly authoritative, but I think this is a reasonable summary[1]:
People with milder coeliac disease may have
symptoms that are much more subtle and occur
in other organs than the bowel itself. It is
also possible to have coeliac disease without
any symptoms whatsoever. Many adults with
subtle disease only have fatigue or anaemia.
Edit: just wanted to add that information in this field is changing rapidly. When I requested a DNA test for my daughter about 8 years ago, her gastroenterologist was reluctant. He was admittedly quite surprised when my daughter turned out to have the problem alleles. So it's all "relatively new" even for one of the "experts" in the 19th most populous MSA in the United States.
Anecdotally, this really began picking up when Novak Djokovic, the #1 tennis player in the world, began giving it such large press. When asked about his string of successes at the time, he told the press that he changed his diet, and completely cut out gluten. What he failed to mention during those initial interviews was that he was allergic to the stuff, which was the most likely cause for his inconsistent performances. The media, however, took the gluten-free diet and just ran with it... and here we are!
FWIW, some recent research suggests that it's fructans, rather than gluten, which are the actual cause of gastrointestinal problems in non-coeliac gluten sensitivity[0].
However, if you're looking for a purely diet-based solution to GI problems, given that cutting gluten out of your diet will also cut out fructans, then you might as well go ahead with that. Especially as people serving you food will know what you're talking about, as opposed to going "huh?" if you start asking about their fructan-free offerings.
OTOH, if we try to deglutenate[1] foods in some way, or develop some kind of enzyme in pill form (glutase?)[1], than that's not going to help people who are actually fructan-sensitive rather than gluten-sensitive.
Question 1: Why are you convinced? Apart from celiac disease, evidence suggests that there is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", let alone universal gluten intolerance.
Question 2: Why do you call gluten "processed"? It is a naturally occurring compound in wheat, and has been an essential part of bread for thousands of years.
Regarding point 1 there:
"Instead, as RCS reported last week, FODMAPS are a far more likely cause of the gastrointestinal problems attributed to gluten intolerance."
FODMAPS which...includes wheat. So the people who thought they had a gluten intolerance actually had a wider food issue which included wheat as one of the triggers.
The "processing" of wheat is simply grinding it, in a mill[0]. The ears are literally just physically broken down into small pieces. No chemicals are added, and ideally no chemical reactions happen within the wheat/flour. Certainly gluten is not a product of the milling process; it is a protein that exists in the original ears of wheat[1].
Also, the process of milling cannot be described as cooking by any reasonable defintion of the word, so I'm not sure what you mean by wheat being "raw" in a way that flour is not. Unless you count finely chopped ingredients as no longer being "raw".
I would also add that, by this definition, any animal product eaten is processed - even eggs - which are cracked and then usually cooked. Ground beef is extremely processed - having been butchered and then fed through a grinder.
You can theoretically grow your own wheat and grind your own flour. If you can do it yourself without a food factory and secret ingredients, then I don't think it fits any reasonable definition of 'processed'.
Many low tech cultures use carbs obtained from crushing or pulping grains. The reason they don't use wheat is not because of the need for grinding but because of the need for agriculture.
The removal of the wheat germ is the primary reason for re-adding the nutrients, without the germ, and the bran, you just have a large amount of starch in the endosperm.
You have repeatedly called flour a processed ingredient; and linked that processing to gluten.
It's not surprising that people think you're claiming that milling flour is "processing" it, or that you think gluten is a result of whatever people are doing to flour.
Gluten isn't a "processed ingredient." Its naturally found in wheat and grains, and humans have been eating it for thousands of years with bread being a staple food for many cultures.
Celiac disease, which prevents a small portion of the population, seem to be the only people who outright need to avoid gluten to live - AFAIK there are no studies showing gluten free diets is actually healthier on a while for humans.
Indirectly I'm referring to flour as the processed ingredient.
My assumption is that you cannot make bread without milling the wheat to produce flour. Thus processed.
I believe you are correct there are no hard studies. But I did scan a report that said removing gluten from schizophrenic patient diets reduce symptoms.
Wheat is one of the top three plant based foods in the world, and is the largest non-animal source of protein in the world diet. The cultivation of wheat, and the ability to store it in a granary led to the establishment of the first cities in the Fertile Crescent. Humans of all cultures have been eating wheat based products for at least 8000 years and it is the top traded food commodity in the world markets.
Less than 1% of the population is thought to have gluten intolerance by most studies.
From all this, you've determined that gluten is bad....because why exactly? Because it is 'processed'? We're not talking about high fructose corn syrup here, we're talking about crushing a seed and using the various products.
This anti-food information worries me as it seems to be spreading like anti-vaccination hysteria.
I was going to call you out on "rice gluten" which has nothing to do with wheat (which all of the "gluten-free" hubbub is about). Then I decided to hit up [Wikipedia][1]:
Gluten is a protein composite found in wheat and related
grains, including barley and rye.
and:
The stored proteins of maize and rice are sometimes
called glutens, but their proteins differ from true
gluten.
Which is sort of confusing, because you also have [Glutinous Rice][2].
"Gluten" is just latin for "glue" hence agglutinate, glue, etc. Glutinous rice is just that -- it sticks together. The use for the protein is just an obscure gerund.
I know what glutinous rice is. It's just the propensity to describe the parts of grains that are 'sticky' as 'gluten,' and then to have one of them actually officially named 'gluten' that becomes confusing.
He might be exaggerating a bit. There are two ways to understand what he's saying:
1) If wheat wasn't part of white people food for many centuries, and as a thought experiment it was invented in 2014, there's no way possible that the FDA / USDA would approve it for human consumption and stick it on the GRAS list. In other words the only reason we tolerate it in a world that bans red M+M food coloring etc is because it got grandfathered in. Not because its good or good enough.
2) In processed foods its always an empty calorie or bulk-ing substance. You cannot remove wheat from your diet and die of "wheat-deficiency disease" like happens if you try to remove all Vitamin C from your diet. If starvation was a serious medical problem in America I'd say taking twinkies away from the skinnies would be a pretty dumb idea, but in a nation of people dying from being too fat, a dietary substance that has no redeeming value other than empty calories and making farmers and food processors wealthy is a pretty tempting target to imagine banning. Corn can/should pretty much just go away for similar reasoning.
If as a hard sci fi novel you imagine space aliens or terrorists dropped a genetically engineered virus that wiped out corn and wheat, aside from short term shortages the only real effect is Americans would have a healthier weight and longer life. Not exactly a stellar endorsement for a foodstuff that its only real purpose is to make most of us fat and dead and a few of us wealthy.
What about wheat would make it so that the FDA would so likely not approve it? I ask in earnest and I expect there are a few things I don't know on the subject.
Stores are already full of gluten free products. I made a tasty homemade beef vegetable stew yesterday in the slow cooker with beef and carrots and potatoes and celery and thats about it (well, some spices, some salt, water, etc). This is what real gluten free substitutes look like. It tasted awesome. This is the kind of GF substitute I've come to expect, not a GF hot pocket or a GF package of oreos.
There's a big business around convincing people they have to buy substitutes so they can keep stuffing their faces with (now gluten free!) twinkies until they die of diabetes at 500 pounds. I'm totally not interested in that kind of substitute. If their processed food business model loses money or wastes executive bonus money on R+D or even better, outright dies out, I'm not going to shed any crocodile tears in my homemade beef stew.
You can see the propaganda way of steering thought by careful word choice:
"Sales of alternatives to meat have flattened"
They've flattened because they're disgusting soy based hyper processed plastic weirdness pumped out of a chemical plant that isn't really fit for human consumption. Not because nobody eats salads anymore.
The whole article is like describing modern online music stores as selling "vinyl free product, even though most buyers don't medically need vinyl free music". Its people complaining the world has passed their business model by. If people aren't buying your toxic cellophane wrapped people-fattener products anymore, instead of trying even weirder chemical plant processing or stealth marketing with complimentary copy, just sell me some cheap lettuce and stop complaining.