My Celiac Blog

For years our designs of gluten free food shopping sites have been frustrated by limitations on searching across multiple categories for gluten free food. A recent visit from my far away programmer son led to a very promising breakthrough. We'd like your help in testing and improving the results, if you have a minute. The search form below will open a new window with results from our sister site Gluten Free Search. Results will be displayed according to search terms you provide. The phrase "gluten free" is already embedded in this search, you need only to specify the type, brand or name of the item you wish to locate.

So please think of a brand of gluten free foods, a specific gluten free food item, a gluten free food ingredient, or a type of gluten free food. Type the term in the form below and see if the search results are useful for you, if you can spare a few seconds. Please feel free to leave a comment here if you wish to let us know what you think of this search utility.

Thanks for helping us to make the site as useful as possible, all suggestions are welcome.

Recently I discovered a gluten-free, vegan imitation mayonnaise product that comes in a handy squeeze bottle designed to be stored upside down like those cool Heinz ketchup squeeze bottles. This idea appealed to me because it involves inherent protection against cross contamination that might be caused by people using a knife to spread mayo on a slice of ordinary wheat-bearing danger bread.

I like the flavor and consistency quite a bit. It is very similar to Vegenaise, but perhaps slightly sweeter. We discovered Mayola for sale on Amazon. It is made in the UK and prominently labeled as gluten free. Below are some photos of the product and a tomato sandwich I made using Ener-G rice bread.

	granoVita Gluten and Dairy Free Original Mayola, 10.9 Ounce Bottles (Pack of 6) List Price: $23.94 Sale Price: $17.91

I quite like Mayola and will be buying more once this 6-pack runs out. I even use a little bit of it in a sauces for a stir fry sometimes. I'd give it 4 or 5 stars.

Last weekend we put the finishing touches on two new websites designed for people with celiac disease. Celiac Snacks is all about gluten free snack food items and nothing more. Snacks can be an especially challenging food category for people forced to follow a gluten free diet. Celiac Snacks is designed to help. You'll find pages with information about various types of gluten free treats, and the entire site was designed by a person with celiac disease (that's me!).

Our other new website is Gluten Free Pastas. It is devoted exclusively to information about the various brands of gluten free pasta, with information about the most popular brands and the companies behind them. There is a page about each of the largest manufacturers of gluten free pasta, with information about ingredients used which might be very useful if you have other dietary restrictions in addition to avoiding gluten. Visit Gluten Free Pastas to learn more.

Technorati Tags: gluten free, gluten free shopping, gluten free snacks, gluten free pasta

I have a new favorite breakfast treat these days, gluten free english muffins, toasted, then smeared with lots of creamy peanut butter. I usually have a side of either fresh or canned fruit as well, usually peaches, a navel orange, or canned mandarin orange segments.

Buying canned fruit is a risky business, not that the fruit is going to harm you in any way, but because so often it turns out to have been overcooked making it mushy and disgusting. This seems much more likely to happen with store brand canned fruit.

As far as the english muffins go, since I'm vegan as well as gluten free I am locked out of some types of gluten free muffins, but the ones made by Ener-G are VGF and I have developed a taste for them. I prefer the darker variety that has added sweet potato and fiber.

Because this breakfast has fiber from the muffins and the fruit, as well as protein and fat from the peanut butter, it gets metabolized more slowly and I'm rarely hungry again before lunchtime. It makes me feel like I've had a healthy and well balanced breakfast.

I also often use these english muffins as hamburger rolls when having one of the Wildwood tofu burgers I've blogged about before.

Here are the deals on offer from Amazon for gluten free english muffins.

	Ener-G Foods English Muffins, 14.8-Ounce Units (Pack of 6) List Price: $36.24 Sale Price: $31.06 Average Rating:

I was hankering for a delicious gluten free and vegan snack about a week ago when I looked at the Amazon Daily Deals page and saw Prana Organic BarCashew Almond on a sale that reduced their cost to about a dollar each. Since I'm a cheapskate with virtually no income these days (I paid $40 taxes last year) I thought I might give these a try.

They are absolutely delicious, wonderful, a delight in every way. The bars are made primarily of date paste in much the same way as Larabars (which are also OK) but the percentage of delicious tasty nuts in these bars is much higher than in Larabars. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that they do cost a little bit more.

After eating one of these for my mid-afternoon snack it was not at all unpleasant to wait until 6:30PM for dinner. And when you do eat one of these truly delicious bars you really do get the sensation that you just ate something nice.

They are clearly gluten free and vegan, but if you are allergic to tree nuts run away!

	Prana Organic BarCashew Almond, 1.7-Ounce Bars (Pack of 24) List Price: $54.96 Sale Price: $42.09 Average Rating:

I'll certainly be buying more of thes in the future. I give them 5 stars.

Our latest website designed to help people with celiac disease is now online, and it supports users of cell phones and other mobile devices. Gluten-FreeStore.com features GF food items from the two largest retailers in the gluten free food market, glutenfree.com and Amazon.com.

The site uses Wordpress blogging software, and features listings of a number of gluten free food categories you may select. Prices are shown on the individual item pages, which are in effect each a blog post, and in addition there are pages that list top selling gluten-free items at Amazon.

If you access the site using a mobile device it detects your device type and formats the display layout to better fit your screen.

Please consider visiting http://gluten-freestore.com/ for your GF shopping needs, you can compare the deals from the two top vendors in the business in order to get the best pricing and shipping available.

Technorati Tags: Gluten-free, wap, mobi, shopping, cell phone, mobile web, 3G, celiac, celiac disease, Wordpress

Woo Hoo! Food scientists working together at Washington State University and Oregon State University are planning to develop a new variant of wheat that would not contain the gliadin proteins which cause trouble for people with celiac disease. This, if it comes to pass, would be earth shatteringly good news for those of us with grouchy tummies!

An article on the website Capital Press, which caters to the agriculture industry, reports the good news.

I'd like to thank these food scientists for caring about this issue, and wanting to help overcome this annoying disease.

Imagine sinking your teeth deep into a nice French Baguette like the one shown here, then pulling it ever so slowly away, teeth still clenched firmly, and watching as it stretches and then tears in a way that gluten-free bread just does not do at all.

Imagine eating bread that tastes like bread. Oh yes, I am so there. I might gain 10 pounds in the first week such a wheat-based gluten-free bread becomes available, but I would cherish each and every one of those pounds. Sock it to me, science!

Technorati Tags: celiac disease, celiac diet, gluten-free, food science, research, GF wheat, woo hoo!, gluten free bread

When you go food shopping chances are you do not know the names of the actual company that owns food brand names. As it happens both Morningstar Farms and Gardenburger, arguably the 2 leading providers of veggieburgers, are subsidiaries of the giant food conglomerate Kelloggs.

People with celiac disease have been raving for some time about the Gardenburger brand Grilled Veggie Burgers. But Kelloggs has now reformulated this product to contain wheat, so it is no longer a gluten free product.

No doubt it is purely a coincidence that just a few weeks ago one of the largest competitors of Kelloggs, General Mills, announced that they have reformulated their famous Rice Chex product to be gluten free.

The message I am receiving from Kelloggs is go away. While the message I am receiving from General Mills is, hey, we know you are there.

This seems to be an ideal case for the free market to decide, if Kelloggs does not want my business I will not buy any of their products. None.

If General Mills wants to acknowledge my existence and the special diet I must follow, then they can have my business.

This is sometimes called voting with your wallet. May the giant food conglomerate that wishes to make food I can eat be the winner.

Technorati Tags: Kelloggs, General Mills, Gardenburger, gluten free, Morningstar Farms, free market, veggie burgers

Most Americans will remember Rice Chex breakfast cereal from the days of their youth, but like so very many other well known breakfast cereals it has been off limits to the gluten-free and celiac communities. We have good news [PDF].

General Mills has announced that they will be reformulating Rice Chex as a gluten-free cereal! I might go to my local supermarket and see if it is there yet. This is great news. As a wee lad I could eat Rice Chex until the box was empty, anytime. Today I would be using soy milk instead of moo cow, but I bet I would still enjoy this cereal.

I've also read in the press recently an article suggesting that Gluten Free is the new health craze, following in the footsteps of low carb and no carb fads. If so perhaps it is the health fad aspect that is getting big megafoodcorps to pay attention. If 1% of the population has celiac disease, and only 3% of those with celiac disease know about it, that leaves .03% of the population who are on a GF diet because of having a diagnosed case of celiac disease. This is a very, very small minority. So if diet fadsters with no medical requirement to avoid gluten want to help make it easier to find gluten free food, we say good! Have at it. Did you see this rice flour over here ?

Technorati Tags: Rice Chex, gluten free, gluten free cereal, celiac, celiac disease, gf breakfast cereal, general mills