The Anonymous Widower

The NHS Gets Gluten-Free Food Spectacularly Wrong

According to a report to be broadcast on Newsnight tonight, the NHS pays things like £17 a go for a gluten-free pizza base. If I remember correctly, that buys more than one gluten-free pizza with a topping from somewhere like Sainsburys.  i don’t as I like to buy my pizzas made in a proper oven, by someone who knows what he is doing. The last time I ate a pizza was in Naples.

Apparently, the NHS spent £27 million on gluten-free prescriptions last year and say it helps people stick to their gluten free diet.

I don’t get anything on prescription.  I used to until I went through the boring list available with a pharmacist and I decided that as I liked food with taste, I’d pass. For instance on the NHS approved list there are no chocolate biscuits. A couple occasionally would liven things up.

I’ve just returned from the shops and for my lunch today and tomorrow, I’ve bought some gluten-free rolls, some smoked salmon, an egg and potato salad and some melon. I could have bought the salad and fruit unprepared, but with my gammy hand, I’d prefer to let someone else do it.

It is much easier to buy it in the local supermarket, in this case Waitrose, than get the bread delivered by post.

At the moment, I’m not cooking, as my cooker has gone and the new one is not delivered until Monday, so a couple of days a week, I live on gluten-free ready meals from somewhere like M & S. But when I get cooking again, there are so many simple things to cook that are naturally gluten-free, like fish, meat, vegetables and fruit.

So in some ways the solution to the NHS’s £27million bill for gluten-free food, is to get everybody to eat healthily. We already have a pasty tax, so why not have a super-tax on burgers, unhealthy sandwiches and other foods, that cause obesity. I would be pleased, as every day, someone has dumped the old fast food packaging on my front patio, sometimes with the burger remains in it.

If people need help to cope with the expense of a gluten-free diet, then they should get the help directly, not with food parcels, where the administration is the major cost.

There also might be a virtuous circle here, in that if the NHS stopped prescribing gluten-free food, the supermarkets would feel it was a market worth developing.

One interesting development over the last couple of years, is the Marks & Spencer’s widower’s range of ready meals. They call it Fuller Longer and the range contains very few allergens, with perhaps a third of the dishes being gluten-free. Probably the most common allergen is fish! I can live with that!

With food like that who needs the hassle of collecting a prescription of a load of cardboard-flavoured rubbish.

The only problem is probably bread, but then all supermarkets and many other stores, these days have a selection of gluten-free bread and rolls.

Perhaps the £27 million would be better spent on education. Let’s face it, the most expensive gluten-free products are things like biscuits and cakes.  I wasn’t a coeliac, when I lived with my mother, but some of the biscuits and cakes she used to make in those days, are well within the skills of the average eight-year-old. There is always the old staple of a chocolate rice crisp, made from Rice Krispies or a gluten-free equivalence. Kelloggs also have an interesting alternative here. Just search Google for chocolate rice crisp.

Let’s assume that in the UK, one in a hundred are coeliacs, which means every coeliac costs the country £43.50 a year for gluten-free food.

May 24, 2012 - Posted by AnonW | Food, Health | Coeliac/Gluten-Free, NHS