Gluten-Free Restaurant Meals Are Sometimes Not Suitable
If you have celiac disease, gluten causes your body to attack itself, damaging your intestines. So it’s important to avoid this, but new research shows that gluten-free restaurant labels are often wrong.
Research has not been able to determine how reliable the labels are, so eating out is still a minefield, which you already know if you have celiac disease.
The data comes from Nima, which sells the gluten detector . It’s expensive: $ 289 for the starter kit, plus $ 6 for each single-use test capsule. If you pair your device with your phone, you can “share” the test results with the company. They used these overall results to try to figure out what was in the foods people were testing.
Results: Many foods were gluten-positive, with an average of about a third of them, including half of the pizza and pasta samples. Positive results were more likely with lunch than with other meals. Does this mean that you should avoid eating pasta in a restaurant? May be.
However, this study has some serious limitations.
To be clear, these are products that people who own a portable gluten sensor have deemed suspicious enough to test. (Even a very accurate test will give a lot of false positives if it is often used on gluten-free foods, so this is important to remember.) The study authors also note that people may have been more likely to do this. share your results if they were positive. In order to share the results, the user has to answer food questions, which I guess even dedicated users don’t do with every meal.
There is one more caveat. The Nida device is very sensitive – perhaps too sensitive. Packaged foods can be considered “gluten-free” if they contain less than 20 ppm gluten, but Nida does not report the amount of gluten found. Instead, he gives a yes or no answer, often marking foods with 5 or 10 ppm gluten. Is it really good or almost useless? It is hard to say.