People who have an intolerance to, or allergy to, gluten are going to have to avoid many of the foods that most people don’t think twice about eating. If you just learned that you have a gluten allergy, then you will be discovering all the foods that you can no longer eat. Unfortunately, most of those foods are both comforting and tasty.
When I learned that I had a gluten allergy, my first trip to the grocery store made me aware of just how many foods there were that I could never eat again. This experience was rather shocking, and very disappointing. You don’t think about how many foods contain gluten until you have to avoid it in order to stay healthy.
You can pretty much forget about the aisle that contains crackers and cookies. Most, if not all, of those colorful packages are going to contain foods that have wheat as an ingredient. In short, this means that if your favorite cracker was one of the varieties of Ritz, or if you relied on Saltines when you were feeling ill, you are in for some disappointment. There are some gluten free varieties of crackers, but they are not as easy to find as the crackers you were previously eating.
Cookies are another food that tends to contain gluten. It doesn’t matter if the cookies are animal crackers, butter cookies, shortbread cookies, cookies covered in fudge or chocolate, or chocolate chip cookies.
Read over the ingredients on the package, and you will see that most, if not all of them, contain gluten. Usually, this is because in order to make cookies, you need flour. Flour is made from wheat, and wheat contains gluten. There are some companies that make gluten free cookies, but you will have to search for them.
Breakfast is going to be a challenge, for a while. Breads contain gluten. If you enjoyed eating toast in the morning, you are going to have to adapt to eating something else instead. Other breakfast foods that contain gluten include bagels, pancakes, waffles, Pop Tarts, and granola bars. If your cereal contains wheat, then it contains gluten. Hopefully your favorite cereal wasn’t Shredded Wheat.
Pasta is another category of food that contains gluten. No more spaghetti, ravioli, rotini, tortellini, fettuccine, penne, or angel hair pasta for people with gluten allergies. There are some gluten free pastas out there, but, again, you aren’t going to find them sitting next to the pasta that has wheat in it.
Gluten is also found in pizza dough, the dough that is used for pies, and the dough that is made into pretzels. This includes both the hard pretzels and the frozen pretzels that people heat up in the microwave. Foods that are breaded, such as chicken strips, fish sticks, or battered vegetables, are essentially wrapped inside a flour that contains gluten.
The first time you go grocery shopping after discovering that you are allergic to gluten can be somewhat traumatic. Personally, I felt that I was standing inside a desert of food that would make me sick if I ate any of it. This was before I started to learn what foods do not contain gluten, and where to find foods that had been specially made in order to be gluten free.
Image by Lara604 on Flickr