How to easily read food labels when you're gluten free: Walkthrough of my FREE label-reading guide

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One of the most common questions you’ll see posted in Facebook groups for people on a gluten free diet is “Is this gluten free?” ....and then they’ll post a picture of the ingredients of a product.

Crowdsourcing can be helpful when you come across something tricky. But you really can’t rely on it long term. Especially if you’ve just been diagnosed with coeliac disease. You don’t want to be trusting someone else with this, you need to get proficient at reading food labels, and quick!

Today I’m going to do quick a walkthrough of my label-reading guide, which I’ll link below and that you can download for free,

It teaches you how to read labels so you don’t have to rely on random people on the internet to tell you whether something is gluten free any more.

NOTE: the guide and the steps I talk about here are just for Aussies and Kiwis as our labelling laws are the same, but different to the rest of the world.

Ok so Step 1 is really obvious, if it’s marked “gluten free” anywhere on the product, you’re good to go.

You don’t need to then turn it around and check the ingredients.

Under our labelling laws in Australia and New Zealand a product can’t carry a gluten free claim unless it’s been independently tested for gluten, and shown to have nil detectable.

You can see this has been done because under the protein line in the Nutrition Information Panel - you’ll see “Gluten - nil”.

So that’s step one.

Step 2 is where you’re going to have to start becoming familiar with some ingredient names.

Wheat, rye, barley and oats all fall into the category of “declarable allergens”, meaning, if they are in a food, in any way, shape or form, they must be declared on the label somewhere either as that grain, or as gluten.

So that means, if you can’t see the wheat, rye, barley, oats or gluten mentioned anywhere in:

- the ingredients,

- any allergen summary statement, or

- any warning statement,

You're also good to go.

Now one important thing to note here is that when you’re looking for wheat, you also need to keep in mind that wheat can go by a few different names.

The most common of these is spelt, and triticale, so you will also need to remember these at the very least.

But the instances of wheat not being clearly identified at wheat, is quickly phasing out, because of the new Plain English Allergen Labelling laws that are coming in. But you still need to be mindful of it for a few more years yet until that comes into full effect.

Now here’s where it gets a little more nuanced.

If you get to Step 2 and you find that the only thing mentioned is wheat (or sometimes even gluten), the product might still be gluten free and that’s where Step 3 comes in….

....because there are three very common ingredients you need to be aware of that are gluten free, even though they are derived from wheat. Those are:

- Wheat Glucose Syrup;

- Caramel Colour 150 (from wheat); and

- Dextrose (from wheat).

These three ingredients show up A LOT and sometimes the product will even say “contains gluten”, even though the only supposed “gluten” source is one of these three - usually wheat glucose syrup.

Confusing I know!

But this is due to a general lack of understanding in the industry about gluten.

Now there are a few other gluten free wheat-derived ingredients, but they are very uncommon, in fact I’ve never come across them personally so there’s really only the three you need to learn off by heart.

So really its not that hard to memorise all these ingredients right!

You know you have to avoid gluten, so that shouldn’t be hard to remember,

Then you have the four gluten-containing grains - wheat, rye, barley and oats…. (and its good to remember spelt and triticale just in case those pop up as well).

Then the only other three ingredients you need to remember are… glucose, dextrose and caramel colour!

And after you follow my simple flowchart a few times - you will easily learn these ingredients off by heart.

That’s when your shopping is going to become A LOT quicker, because you’ll just be able to scan labels really quickly without having to lookup every ingredient!

The sooner you get started practising the better - so go to the link above and download my guide right now!

Also, if you’d like to go into even further detail on this, including what those pesky “may contain” statements really mean, what to do about foods that don’t have a label (or a list of ingredients), and how this all works for medications, supplements.... and alcohol (which doesn’t need to list the ingredients), you’ll have the opportunity to enrol in my full label-reading class, which you can do at any time night or day, when you sign up for my free guide. So keep an eye out for that!

As always if you have anything you’d like me to cover in these videos, then please send me a message on social media. I’d love to hear from you!

Also don’t forget to hit the 'like' button if you found this video helpful and also subscribe - that would really help me to reach as many people as possible.

Talk to you soon!

Kristina Richardson APD