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Infant Recipe: Advanced Baby Food

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff Leave a Comment

Once your baby has mastered eating the Basic Baby Food Recipe, you can begin to add meats and new fruits and vegetables. As with the basic recipe, you will want to make sure you try any new ingredients one at a time leaving a few days in between to watch for any adverse reaction to the new food. Now that your baby is older, the food should be thicker, and as he develops teeth, chunkier so he can work on learning to chew. Again, mix and match, especially when introducing meats as many youngsters have a hard time adjusting to the taste of meat. For an added treat, you can also add cooked rice once you feel your baby can handle it.

Ingredients:

Meat:

  • Chicken
  • Beef
  • Ham
  • Turkey

Fruits:

  • Peach
  • Cranberry
  • Blueberry
  • Cantaloupe

Vegetables:

  • Broccoli
  • Peas

Optional:

  • Cooked Rice

Directions:

  1. Choose your ingredient(s). Remember to start off using one at a time, but as your child successfully tries each ingredient you can mix and match (i.e. apple & banana or carrots & pumpkin) for new flavors.
  2. Cut your ingredient(s) into small, bite-size pieces. They will cook faster and be easier to puree.
  3. Cook your ingredient(s) by either steaming, baking, or for meat, broiling, or poaching until they are soft.
  4. Once your ingredient(s) are soft, use a blender or food processor to puree them while adding water, breast milk or formula.
  5. The consistency of the puree should be somewhat thick.
  6. Once your food is pureed to the consistency you want, you can stir in some cooked rice if you choose to do so.

If you’d like to check out other recipe ideas, check out our gluten-free recipes page!

Is Being Partially Gluten-Free Beneficial?

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff Leave a Comment

Definitely, the hardest part of being on a strict gluten-free diet is the adjustment period you go through as you get used to your new diet. Now, obviously, the gluten-free diet is 100% zero tolerance and even the smallest hint of gluten can cause extreme problems for many Celiacs but could be partially gluten-free be beneficial at all?

At least one person with Celiac disease doesn’t think so:

The answer is a little complicated. You won’t be able to tell if gluten is a problem for you unless you give up gluten 100% for 3 months. This is because it takes a while for gluten to get out of your system. By incorporating some gluten-free food into your diet– cereals, pasta, breads, snacks–you might realize being gluten-free is not only do-able it is is fun. Being partially gluten-free would allow you to change your eating habits gradually and to learn about living gluten-free. But you wouldn’t get the huge benefit of feeling better and having chronic problems potentially disappear.

Dr. Nancy O’Hara, who is an integrated doctor says if you can’t be 100% off gluten (or dairy) then she would rather see you on a different type of healing diet (The Body Ecology Diet, Gut and Psychology Syndrome Diet, Specific Carbohydrate Diet or a low oxalate diet.) People often go on a 85% gluten-free diet and don’t get better and so they decide the GF diet doesn’t work for them, when they might get completely better by removing gluten completely. A gluten-free diet is tricky because so much food contains hidden gluten. Oats, for instant, are not gluten-free unless specially labelled because they rotate crops and often grow oats in the old wheat fields. And soy sauce, rice crispies and Twizzlers all contain gluten. So unless you are reading every label and researching how to do a gluten-free diet, you might think you are doing a gluten-free diet but you really aren’t.

I’d love to hear what our readers think.   If you are 100% gluten-free and accidentally get a hint of gluten in your diet, how does your body respond?

Are Churches Now Offering Gluten-Free Communion?

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff

Are churches starting to become more aware of the needs of Celiacs? In a typical communion, you eat the body of Christ (which interestingly enough contains gluten!), but for people living on a gluten-free diet, this is not an option.

Fortunately, I know of several churches here locally that have started to offer a gluten-free version of Christ’s body so that celiac church members are not left out of the ritual.

According to Health-Family.org, it looks like the Catholic Church has also started to offer gluten-free alternatives:

The Holy See has declared that some gluten is necessary for the substance to be considered as true bread. And thus a gluten-free wafer, in spite of its external resemblance, is no longer bread and thus is incapable of becoming the Body of Christ.

The sacraments are far too important to risk performing them invalidly.

Recently, however, another solution has been found thanks to the patience and perseverance of two nuns, Sisters Jane Heschmeyer and Lynn Marie D’Souza, of the Benedictine convent in Clyde, Missouri. Over two years of experiments they have developed a Communion wafer that has been approved as valid material for the Eucharist by the Holy See.

With a level of gluten content of 0.01% it is safe enough for consumption by almost all celiac suffers, according to Dr. Alessio Fasano of the University of Maryland and other medical experts.

Link Between Autism and Celiac Disease?

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Worried that your autistic child may have Celiac Disease? According to a recent study, there is no link between autism and Celiac Disease, meaning Autistic children are no more likely than anyone else to have Celiac.

Here is an excerpt from their study:

Researchers compared blood samples of 34 children with autism to samples of 34 children without autism who had been referred to an outpatient clinic of the same hospital. They looked for two antibodies used to help detect celiac disease “anti-gliadin antibodies and anti-endomysial antibodies. Biopsies of the small intestine were offered to children who tested positive for either antibody to confirm the diagnosis. Each group contained 18 boys and 16 girls between the ages of four and 16.

The study found autistic children were no more likely than children without autism to develop celiac disease. Anti-gliadin antibodies were found in four children with autism and two without autism. Biopsies on all six children came back negative for celiac disease.

“This study shows food allergies often associated with autism may have no connection to the gluten intolerance experienced by people with celiac disease,” said study author Samra Vazirian, MD, with Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, Iran.

Click over to check out the rest of the information regarding this study.

Urinary Stone Disease in Adults with Celiac Disease

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff Leave a Comment

For adults with Celiac Disease or other intestinal diseases, one of the things that you are at high risk for is Urinary Stone Disease (USD). I just noticed that recently a study was done on adults with USD and Celiac Disease, which was documented over at Jurology.

For their study, they took patients who were 18 years or older, untreated, and also newly diagnosed with celiac disease by serum markers and jejunal biopsy.  Clinical presentation of celiac disease was assessed focusing on 5 disorders of diarrhea, and deficiency of calories (low body mass index or weight loss), lipid (low prothrombin time or low serum lipids), iron (low hemoglobin or low serum ferritin), and calcium (low serum calcium or low bone densitometry). Urinary stone disease history was also assessed via questionnaire (imaging, stone excretion, stone disruption/removal), and urinary variables were measured in a 24-hour collection in a subgroup of patients.

Here is an excerpt of their findings:

Study Results

Under untreated conditions (baseline) urinary stone disease was independent of celiac disease presentation and more prevalent in patients with celiac disease than in a population sample used as a control (608 and 3,540, 7.9% and 5.0%, sex and age adjusted odds ratio 4.0, 95% CI 2.7–5.9). Excluding from analysis individuals with baseline urinary stone disease, the incidence of urinary stone disease history was not significantly different between the treated celiac disease (gluten-free diet) and control population (458 and 3,003, 2.4% vs 3.9%). The urine of untreated patients with celiac disease differed from that of healthy volunteers with 120% higher oxalate and 43% lower calcium (in 45 and 45, p <0.001). A gluten-free diet corrected urinary abnormalities (p <0.01).

If you’d like to learn more, click over to read the rest of their post!