This is advice to all visitors to the United Kingdom and throughout Europe who suffer from an intolerance to gluten. New labeling and composition rules, aimed at helping those people who have an intolerance to gluten, were published in the UK earlier this year (how do these compare to rules in the USA?).
Under the new European Union regulations, only foods that contain less than 20 parts of gluten in a million will be allowed to use the term “gluten-free” on their packaging. Recent evidence shows that this extremely low level of gluten will offer much better protection for people with an intolerance to gluten. Previously foods labeled “gluten-free”, could have contained up to 10 times more than this!
In addition, some foods made using cereals that have been specifically processed to remove most of the gluten, but which contain less than 100 parts of gluten in a million, will be able to state “very low gluten” on their packaging. This includes staple foods like breads.
The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA), says that with the introduction of just two types of labeling, this will reduce consumer confusion in this area and will help those people with the Celiac Disease to make safer and more informed choices about the types of food they eat.
Around 1% of the United Kingdom’s population (64+ million people) are intolerant to gluten and each year the number of gluten-free products being marketed is increasing rapidly, so without these rules the actual amounts of gluten in these products could vary greatly, which in turn could cause serious health problems. So these new limits of 20 parts per million will mean a greater peace of mind that foods sold as “gluten-free” do not contain levels of gluten that could be harmful to them.
Manufacturers can use this new labeling system effective immediately, but in order to give suppliers time to reformulate their products and adapt to these new rules, the rules will not strictly apply until January 1st, 2012.
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Dr. Osborne,
Thank you for sharing that. That makes a lot of sense and explains why I can tolerate it ...
Thanks Shirley! If I go to the event, I hope to enter something with pumpkin it it...just haven't worked out ...
