Cadbury
I’m sad that that iconic British company, Cadbury, is being sold to the Americans.
There are two main reasons and both are selfish.
I buy a lot of Green and Black‘s chocolate because I know it’s provenance and can trust that what they say on the packet. I really don’t trust Kraft to keep the standards of this brand and hope that someone buys it from them.
But the main reason is that Cadbury are very correct about which products are gluten-free and it is just a quick check on the web site. In fact over the last few years, more products have gone that way. Can I trust Kraft, from the country of gluten-in-everything to not put the evil maltodextrin in everything to save money?
I doubt it.
So yet again, coeliacs may well have less and less chance to buy something sensible to eat on the move.
Dr. Chris Steele
Dr. Chris Steele is a TV doctor. I’ll admit I’d never heard of him before, as he’s on ITV and I try not to watch any program with adverts.
But he has now been diagnosed with coeliac disease as the Daily Mail reports.
I’ve tried to put a comment on the web site, but I can’t seem to get registered. So I’ll post it here for now.
Dr. Steele’s case is typical. For some reason, doctors miss diagnosing coeliac disease all of the time. I know of a GP with coeliac children, whose husband family have coeliac history, who missed her own coeliac disease. So it is not easy to get right.
In my case, I was not diagnosed until 55, seven years ago. My symptoms were joint pains, chronic dandruff, extreme tiredness, gall stones, migraines, depression, wind, diarrhoea, mood swings etc. etc. But if you trace my family tree and those who probably had coeliac disease, you will notice that no women in the family have had any children. Could it be that the low B12 levels associated with coeliac disease, mean that it is difficult to conceive or carry a baby to full term?
As to eating out, Dr. Steele should try Italy. Just say you are a coeliachai and you get gluten-free pasta in many restaurants. We should follow the Italians and treat the disease very seriously, as how much does the misdiagnosis cost the NHS.
I very pleased of this for two reasons.
- Every celebrity who is diagnosed with coeliac disease helps publicise the disease.
- His experience shows that when you have been diagnosed the cure is simple and you get better pretty quickly.
So my advice would be if you think you have any of the symptoms of coeliac disease, try a gluten-free diet. It might not work, but it wouldn’t do you any harm.
Musings on Gluten-Free Pasta
As a coeliac, I can’t have normal pasta, but there are some fairly good gluten-free ones around.
I do get Dr. Schar‘s pasta on free on prescription (I’m 62, so age does have some advantages!), but I’m not that good at cooking it, so it tends to be a bit hard. As I’ve now got the hang of cooking rice, in either the quick Uncle Ben form or the more traditional one, I tend to avoid cooking pasta.
However, I have got a liking for Carluccio’s the gluten-free pasta on their menu that is suitable for coeliacs. Just click the link on the page indicated. I had some of the Giardiniera today in their caffe in St. Pancras Station and it was excellent. I just wish that they would change the gluten-free menu more often and also do some liver too!
But hey, the pasta is always worth waiting for, even if it takes a few minutes more. Does that explain my hard pasta?
The interesting thing though is that Carluccio’s seem to do only one type of gluten-free pasta with different sauces. And that is penne!
Could it be that gluten-free pasta comes better in the thicker varieties?
Recently, I’ve tried cooking some of the Doves Farm gluten-free penne and that was a lot better. Also a friend has cooked me one her special lasagna using Dr. Schar‘s pasta and that was better than excellent.
I’m no cook and I wonder if anybody has any ideas.
Keeping Your Brain Healthy
Look at any list of symptoms for coeliac disease and you’ll find a lot of them are concerned with brain or mental problems.
- Mild Depression
- Feelings of Inadequacy
- Gait Ataxia/Apraxia
- Lightheadness and Fainting
- Migraine or Persistent Headaches
- Mood Swings
- Sleep Disturbance
I used to suffer from most of these except for sleep disturbance.
Once I went on a gluten-free diet all of these symptoms cleared up. Now I know that I am a special case in that I’m a coeliac, but once the B12 levels were back up to normal, all of the symptoms disappeared. Research at Oxford University has indicated that higher B12 levels may help brain health.
It would be interesting to repeat their experiments with coeliacs. When a hospital diagnoses a coeliac, they should immediately undergo the tests before starting a gluten-free diet. And then they should be tested at intervals after starting the diet. My body actually reacted quite quickly in that my dandruff cleared up after about two weeks.
Now I know several people who have MS. One has sent me a link to an article about a new treatment for the disease called The Liberation Treatment. Here are the first couple of paragraphs.
Amid the centuries-old castles of the ancient city of Ferrara is a doctor who has come upon an entirely new idea about how to treat multiple sclerosis, one that may profoundly change the lives of patients.
Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a former vascular surgeon and professor at the University of Ferrara in northern Italy, began asking questions about the debilitating condition a decade ago, when his wife Elena, now 51, was diagnosed with MS.
He found that in some patients, the blood flow to the head was restricted and by improving this using standard surgical procedures, their health improved. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the article.
One of those patients was Buffalo resident Kevin Lipp. Lipp had MS for over a decade, and as part of the study, discovered he had five blocked veins in his neck. After undergoing the Liberation Treatment 10 months ago, he says he hasn’t had a single new MS attack.
Zamboni emphasizes that the Liberation Treatment does not make people in wheelchairs walk again. Rather, it seems to stop the development of further MS attacks, and in some cases, improves movement and decreases the debilitating fatigue that are the hallmarks of MS.
It may not cure MS, but it is all very interesting.
I tend to look on the body, as an engineer would look on a machine or a car. Machines don’t work well if they don’t have all of the things they need like fuel, electric power, oil, water and all the other necessities.
Is the body any different to my car in that respect?
And now today, it has been reported that those who develop Alzheimer’s are less likely to get cancer.
This would appear to push things in another direction, as research at Nottingham University has shown that coeliacs are less likely to get breast cancer. Diagnosed coeliacs have on the whole healthy brains because they eat well, so this research might show the opposite.
We need to do a lot more research to find all of these links.
I Cooked my first Christmas Dinner last Night
I’m sixty-two and last night I cooked my first Christmas Dinner.
Because of the snow and travel problems, I had bought a Marks and Spencer Turkey Breast Joint, in case I have to spend Christmas alone. But with last night’s snow, I had two extra mouths to feed, so I decided to cook the turkey.
I was aided by some broccoli and parsnips donated by a farmer and luckily I had potatoes and some ready-prepared Schwatz gravy. Note that that gravy is gluten-free, so it’s fine for coeliacs like me. My guests don’t like sprouts, so they stayed in the fridge.
It was very passable. All my guests enjoyed it.
I even enjoyed the parsnips, which my mother used to cook so badly with the potatoes. I just followed the rules on the BBC web site. This must be the font of all knowledge for novice cooks like me.
Hopefully, the weather will relent by Christmas Day.
Sometimes I Go Over the Top
Friends sometimes accuse me of being a bit boring as I keep banging on about gluten.
But then I read this at Gluten Connection, which advertises a new book. This is an extract.
Millions of Americans are enduring painful and chronic conditions. Most doctors are mystified. Drugs usually offer little help. Most of these conditions have one thing in common… It’s called gluten sensitivity. It’s caused by a widely used food ingredient. It can lead to a wide range of serious health conditions and…it can affect up to 81% OF ALL AMERICANS!
If you are gluten sensitive, your body does not have the ability to break down and digest gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. Your body reacts to gluten as if it were a virus. It launches an immune reaction that can cause or worsen a wide range of chronic health problems.
So perhaps I’m a bit understated.
Being a Coeliac in Holland
I travel to Holland quite a bit and to Den Haag in particular. In fact, I’ve just come back from a few days in the Dutch capital.
So how do I manage as a coeliac in Holland?
On last Friday, I went for lunch in a cafe in Amsterdam called Puccini. It’s in the Staalstraat fairly close to the Amstel River and the Town Hall and the new Music Theatre. Most of the food was the usual bread offering, but they gave me a delicious salmon salad with no problems. Just remember that gluten-free is gluten-frij or gluten-fry! At least if they know about gluten, you will get food without a problem.
I would say that the level of knowledge in restaurants and cafes in major cities is about the same as in London or Cambridge.
But the biggest help is Albert Heijn. This is the Dutch equivalent of Waitrose or an upmarket Tesco Metro. You don’t have to know your Dutch, as every one of their own label products is labeled with the gluten-free symbol, if that what it is. If you’re still not sure, you can usually check the ingredients, even if they are in Dutch, as food names seem to be similar, even if the spelling is unpronounceable.
Woolpack, Ipswich
The Woolpack is a pub which is within walking distance of the town centre of Ipswich.
I was having a drink in the pub before the football on Tuesday and the landlady informed me that her husband, the chef, cooked everything from scratch and knew all about gluten-free food.
I think I’ll try the pub next time I’m in the town for a meal.
Marks and Spencer’s Financial Services Leaflets
They have just started a series of leaflets advertising their financial services, where they compare them to food.
The one for foreign currency says ‘Gluten-free. GM-free. Now try commission-free.’
I would never get my foreign currency from M & S, as I usually use a cash point abroad for convenience, but I find that now gluten-free is rather heartening.
The sooner gluten-free food becomes mainstream the better!
Michael Obiora
It helps me and many other coeliacs, when a celebrity, an actor or anybody in the public eye, says that they are coeliac.
So three cheers for Michael Obiora, who has said he’s a coeliac.
He actually seems to have suffered from a multitude of problems, that I didn’t have. So I’ve been lucky! I wish him all the best.
The Anonymous Widower 