First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH for voting for me for Best Nutritionist and Best Personal Trainer in Santa Cruz (Shazzam!). I am so very grateful. 🙂

Now back to gluten.

Many of my clients have multiple food intolerances including gluten. In fact, now that testing options have improved by leaps and bounds in the past few years, I see more “positive” test results for gluten sensitivity (previously, very few of the possible toxic peptides were ever even tested). These individuals need to stay completely off of gluten in order to recover from the inflammation caused by gluten exposure.

Some of you may be thinking, “Yeah, I already know about staying off of gluten,” but did you know that there are 24 foods that are potentially cross-reactive (the body can confuse them for gluten)? Someone can be on a 100% gluten-free diet and still experience symptoms and compromised health if they continue to consume any of the cross-reactive foods (fatigue/exhaustion, gas, bloating, abdominal pain, headaches, difficulty maintaining ideal weight, emotional disturbances/irritability, etc.). The great news about this is that I’ve worked with clients who came to me because they were following their gluten-free diets and they were still having symptoms and they were actually relieved to learn that they had a cross-reactive food! Once they took the cross-reactive food out, they felt so much better.

24 gluten-associated cross-reactive foods

Below is an excerpt and image from Cyrex Labs’ website reiterating what I’ve already written and showing the cross-reactive foods.

Don’t Guess…test!

If you’ve been wondering whether or not you have a gluten sensitivity or cross-reactivity, contact me to run the test and find out. Otherwise, staying 100% off all gluten and cross-reactive foods on an assumption is certainly possible, but many people struggle to maintain the motivation to stick to it and end up making occasional exceptions.  However, the way inflammation works, even having gluten once a month or once every couple of months isn’t enough to avoid a flare up if you are reactive! Those with a sensitivity must be 100% compliant to eliminate inflammation and repair the damage done by previous gluten (or cross-reactive) ingestion.

As gluten-related autoimmune expert Dr. Thomas O’Bryan says, “You can’t be a little pregnant: you can’t have a little gluten.”