Should your whole family go gluten free with you?

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content:

Hey everyone it’s Kristina Richardson, the Coeliac Disease Dietitian and today I’m going to be answering the question:

If you have just been diagnosed with coeliac disease, should your whole family or household go gluten free with you?

Well the short answer is, no, they probably shouldn’t, and I’m going to give you five reasons why, as well as a practical plan for what to do instead…..

So, you’ve just been diagnosed with coelIac disease, and your lovely amazing family are being really supportive…. so supportive in fact that they’re willing to go completely gluten free along with you. But should they?

Well I did say the short answer is no, but really the answer is a much longer "sort of".

There’s a few good reasons why they shouldn’t cut gluten completely out of their diet, and I’m going to give you those, right now!

1. Gluten-containing grains are part of an overall healthy diet

The first reason is that gluten-containing grains, like wheat, rye, oats and barley do make up an important part of a healthy diet. Wheat and oats especially, which are widely available, and inexpensive, contain nutrients - specifically in their whole-grain form, that most readily-avaiIable gluten-free grains (like rice and corn) just can’t compete with. Protein and fibre are just two of those important nutrients.

Wheat and oats are a lot higher in both protein and fibre than, say rice or corn, which are the two grains that MOST gluten free products are made from. Now, there are of course other gluten free grains which are much better in terms of the nutrients they provIde, but you generally won’t fInd them in gluten free breads, pastas or cereals, because unfortunately these products are usually made with the cheapest available grains. They're also rarely of the whole-graIn variety.

So it's difficult to make sure you’re eating enough whole grains and fibre on a gluten free diet, when you’re relying on these mainstream gluten free products, and you don’t ever want to make this more difficult for yourself unless you have an important medical reason to do so.

You can of course choose gluten free food products that are better in terms of their nutrient profile, but generally you do pay a premIum for these more specialised products …..and that brings me to reason number two.

2. It's too expensive!

And that is… gluten free products are usually very expensive! Unless you have an unlimited budget for grocerIes, switching everyone to 100% gluten free is really going to hurt your back pocket, and fast. With the rising cost of living at the moment, you just don’t want to do that unnecessarily.

3. Screening for coeliac disease in future becomes tricky

The third reason why you shouldn’t switch everyone to a completely gluten free diet is that, if everyone in the family goes gluten free, they lose the ability to be screened for coeliac disease themselves.

As you probably know, if you follow me on social media or have been a client of mine, I do always recommend that close blood relatives should always be screened for coeliac disease as soon as the first person in the family is diagnosed. But once you go gluten free, you can’t have those screening tests anymore, or if you do, the results are going to be very unreliable because you NEED gluten in your diet for the coeliac antibodies to show up.

4. They may become less tolerant to excluded foods

The fourth reason that I’m going to give you might be more of a controversial one, but one that many Dietitians would agree with, and that is, if you cut something out of your diet for a long period of time and then start eating it again later, there’s a chance you may actually have become less tolerant to it in that time.

In other words, your digestive system may get a shock when you all of a sudden eat something that you haven’t eaten in a long time. Its similar to what might happen if you never drink milk, then all of a sudden start having it again, it might give you some malabsorption issues because the enzymes and bacteria in your gut haven’t evolved to be able to deal with milk (or more specifically the lactose in milk).

There are similar component of wheat, called fructans, which also need special enzymes and bacteria to be absorbed and broken down, and if you don’t continually feed those bacteria - guess what - they die. So that is a big reason why you shouldn’t give up gluten unless you need to.

5. The gluten free diet can lead to health issues if not done properly

The fifth and final reason why you shouldn’t go gluten free unless you need to is something I eluded to earlier, and that is that generally the quality of a gluten free diet tends to be poorer than a regular diet containing gluten because of the excess of use of starcher, low fibre grains.

There is some research coming out that’s telling us people who go on a gluten free diet are more likely to gain weight and suffer from metabolic disease later in life, and it’s thought to be due to the fact that most (and I emphasise) gluten free food products are not quite as healthy as regular ones.

This is why its really important to make sure the people in your family who do have coeliac disease are eating the right types of gluten free foods and enough of the right types of gluten free foods so they aren’t at risk of these metabolic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life.

That’s something I really support my clients to do, in my program Gluten Free Mastery, which if you don’t know about it, is a program specifically for people newly diagnosed with coeliac disease who want to make sure they are supporting their health and recovery. You can find more info about my program in the link in the description.

Now that I’ve given you the reasons why you probably DON’T want to change the whole family to a completely gluten free diet…

What do you do instead?

Well I’m going to tell you what I do with my family!

There’s two coeliacs in my family, myself and my daughter, but my husband and my son aren’t coeliac. Lucky boys….

So the way I deal wIth a 50% gluten free household is to make most family dinners 100% gluten free. That means all our sauces, condiments, mixes, and other pantry ingredients are gluten free. That’s makes dinner time nice and easy and simple.

Then for other meals, breakfast and lunch and snacks, the boys wiIl just have their own cereal and their own bread, and sometimes their own muesli bars and things like that.

So us gIrls wIll have our gluten free cereal, or eggs on gluten free toast, and the boys will have their normal cereal or oats or wheat bread.

Then at lunchtime, if we’ve having something like sandwiches or toasted sandwiches, us girls will always have our gluten free sandwiches made first (which is a bonus!) made on fresh, clean chopping boards and clean knives etc. We also have our own gluten free labelled butter - because lotsa crumbs can get into that butter!

And then after our sandwiches are made the boys can go to town making their own sandwiches with their own wheat bread and their own butter, and make as much mess as they like. Then of course everything is washed up and wiped down.

Sometimes with dinner if we’re having soup or burgers or wraps, the boys will have their own bread rolls or burger buns or wraps as well, just for the pure fact that it’s a lot cheaper that way.

With pizzas we usually make our own base and that’ll be gluten free.

If we’re having a pasta dish, I don’t muck around with two different types of pasta that’s just too much work and too much washing up, so that’s always just gluten free. But if you have a bigger family and that gets too expensive, that’s always an option to separate them out.

So really the only thing in our fridge or panty that isn’t gluten free is the boys cereals, their breads, sometimes muesli bars, and of course their own butter.

Any other snacks that we buy (eg if we’re having corn chips or some bickies or chocolate or anything like that) they’ll always be gluten free ones because I don’t want my daughter to feel like she’s missing out on anything. But that’s definitely a personal choice, not a necessity.

Ok, so that’s a very easy way to run a half and half gluten free and not gluten free famIly or household!

If you’d like more in-depth information about how to manage your gluten free dIet, I welcome you to join my Gluten Free Mastery program.

Inside it I teach you everything from how to educate your household, how to minimise cross-contamination (at home and when eating out), and also of course, like I mentioned earlier, how you can make sure you’re not missing out on any of the nutrients that you would otherwise be getting if you were able to eat wheat, rye, barley and oats.

And that’s it for me today, if you have any questions about coeliac disease or the gluten free diet you can send them to me on Facebook or Instagram (and be sure to follow me there as well for any updates!)

Oh, and don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel!

Talk to you soon!

Kristina Richardson, APD