Coeliac Disease Awareness Week Post #5

Good morning!

Today I’d like to share with you some practical tips on reading labels to enable you to follow a strict gluten free diet for the treatment of Coeliac Disease (CD). Often people who don’t have CD are surprised at what gluten is in and how they don’t really know how to read a label correctly, the following tips can help to guide you on reading labels, whether or not you have CD:

Label reading:

1. First you are looking for the presence of gluten, wheat, barley, rye or oats. As these are allergens, they have to be labelled in one way or another. If the food contains any of these as a main ingredient it will be listed in the ingredients list and often will be in bold. If the source of gluten is in another ingredient it will be in a bracket for example if the food has soy sauce in it it will appear like this: soy sauce (wheat) OR soy sauce (wheat). Then at the end of the ingredients it will say Contains gluten OR Contains wheat. If it doesn’t contain any of the allergens but it could contain traces of the allergen and the manufacturer decides to declare it (it is voluntary to declare that a food may contain traces) then it will look like this: May contain traces of gluten and it may be in bold. This can be used for any of the allergens.
2. The Coeliac Australia guidelines state that if there are no declared allergens (gluten or wheat, rye, barley and oats) and it doesn’t have a may contain statement on it, then it is safe for people with Coeliac disease to consume.
3. If a food has been tested to be gluten free so it contains less than 3ppm (in Australia), it will be labelled as gluten free. The gluten free label overrides what is in the ingredient list. So for example, glucose syrup made from wheat is so processed that it doesn’t contain the gluten protein so it is gluten free and safe for people with CD to eat, they still have to declare that it contains wheat (as the source is wheat and not suitable for people with a wheat allergy), this can be labelled as gluten-free. The only exceptions to this rule is when a food is imported, imported food is supposed to have a new label stuck over the original label if the original label doesn’t comply with Australian labelling standards, however I have seen some products labelled as gluten-free that contain oats – in this case the gluten-free label doesn’t override the ingredients list, I could tell this because the source country was the US and I know they have a different rule about labelling oats there.

I hope this has helped to clear any confusion on reading labels.

Thanks for reading my post,

Erin.