As most of my friends know, I have coeliac disease.
As most of my friends know, I have coeliac disease.
CD is an auto-immune disorder triggered by gluten and a couple of related proteins. The only treatment is a totally gluten-free diet, and even then it can takes years to recover from it. To make things worse, once on a gluten-free diet your sensitivity goes up, and the short-term reactions get worse. To give you an idea of scale of sensitivity, the acceptable safe level is 20ppm - which works out at around 10mg in a day. This is the amount of gluten in about a 1mm crumb of white bread. Total. Over the whole day. Including airborne dust.
And the long-term effects of exposure are not fun - bowel and intestinal cancer, osteoporosis, and more.
As you can imagine, those of us who suffer from this get rather touchy about things like cross-contamination, eating in public, the list goes on.
So when I read the stories in the link below I just about cried. Stories of such wonderful care and support are distressingly rare, and to hear ones like these are incredibly touching.
For myself, I am amazingly fortunate in that Alicia Smith gets it, and has chosen to take the GF path with me. Her support is what gets me through the darker days, and one day I hope to be as articulate as Jennifer in the comments.
http://glutendude.com/celiac/my-friend-has-celiac-disease/
CD is an auto-immune disorder triggered by gluten and a couple of related proteins. The only treatment is a totally gluten-free diet, and even then it can takes years to recover from it. To make things worse, once on a gluten-free diet your sensitivity goes up, and the short-term reactions get worse. To give you an idea of scale of sensitivity, the acceptable safe level is 20ppm - which works out at around 10mg in a day. This is the amount of gluten in about a 1mm crumb of white bread. Total. Over the whole day. Including airborne dust.
And the long-term effects of exposure are not fun - bowel and intestinal cancer, osteoporosis, and more.
As you can imagine, those of us who suffer from this get rather touchy about things like cross-contamination, eating in public, the list goes on.
So when I read the stories in the link below I just about cried. Stories of such wonderful care and support are distressingly rare, and to hear ones like these are incredibly touching.
For myself, I am amazingly fortunate in that Alicia Smith gets it, and has chosen to take the GF path with me. Her support is what gets me through the darker days, and one day I hope to be as articulate as Jennifer in the comments.
http://glutendude.com/celiac/my-friend-has-celiac-disease/
My good friend is a Celiac as well. I can appreciate how much of a pain it can be. We keep plenty of GF options in our pantry now, for whenever he comes over for dinner. I'm just glad that there are a lot more GF foods in shops and restaurants now than there were even 5 years ago.
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