Allergies & Cures

Gluten allergy symptoms may become extremely serious and, due to your body’s inability to process gluten, you will have to eliminate gluten from your daily diet. A gluten allergy may evolve into a very serious type of malnutrition that can affect your body on the long term. Usually, the symptoms of your gluten allergy may start in a very subtle way – for instance, you may experience a little indigestion or bloating and you will not feel too worried about this. But if you leave your symptoms untreated, you may end up with more severe and numerous symptoms.

First, you may experience fatigue and headaches while your gluten allergy starts to weaken your immune system. Then, you may become malnourished and get sick more often than you used to. Once you get diagnosed with a gluten allergy, you will have to stick to a gluten-free diet in order to prevent future allergy attacks. You will have to determine how you can replace all the wheat-based foods you are accustomed to eat.

Going for a gluten-free diet means that you will have to find flour and gluten substitutions in order to completely remove gluten from your life. For instance, flour substitutes include bean flour, tapioca flour, brown rice flour and potato starch flour. Keep in mind that you must replace gluten separately. For instance, the gluten that can be found in all the wheat-based products is the one that provides stickiness and elasticity in all these products. The main 2 ingredients that are used in order to replace gluten and provide the foods with the same qualities are xanthum gum and guar gum. These ingredients are totally safe and natural and a person suffering from gluten allergy can use both of them. For instance, guar gum can be used in order to provide the home baked cookies with a familiar texture while xanthum gum can be used in order to rise your breads because it is a perfect substitute for yeast.

People suffering from gluten allergy may think that it’s really hard to find foods that do not contain gluten. For instance, bread products and bread itself are to be regarded as being off limits for a person suffering from gluten allergy. So, all the sufferer must read the ingredient labels in order to determine which foods are safe to eat and which may cause allergic reactions. If you are suffering from gluten allergy, you will have to learn how to read labels and which ingredients are to be considered as gluten in disguise. It is paramount for a person suffering from gluten allergy to recognize all the potentially harmful ingredients, ingredients that can indicate whether there is gluten in a particular food or not.

Here are some of the ingredients that indicate that gluten is among the ingredients used in the case of a particular food: cereal extract, semolina wheat, seitan, crumbs, couscous, wheat germ and wheat bran. People who are sensitive to gluten should watch out for all the ingredients listed above in order to avoid the foods containing them. However, there are also some products that do contain gluten but this aspect is not so obvious in their case. For instance, foods containing natural flavoring may be among these harmful products. Natural flavoring is to be regarded as a vague term that might indicate that gluten is among the ingredients that have been used.

Also, soy sauce does contain gluten because it contains vegetable gum, food starch and hydrolyzed vegetable protein. If you are truly afraid that you may accidentally eat a food that contains some of the harmful ingredients, you should keep a list of all the gluten containing products in your purse or pocket in order to compare this list with the ingredients listed on the foods you are planning to purchase. Compare your list to the ingredients listed on the label in order to make sure that you will not eat something that can turn out to be a real allergy trigger.