Gluten Free Engineer - Making Gluten Free Easy

Gluten-Free Fails: The Mistakes I Made So You Don't Have To

• Carrie Saunders • Episode 16

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If you're just starting your gluten-free journey—or even if you’ve been on it for a while—chances are, you’ve made a few mistakes. I know I have.

From trusting the wrong labels, to getting glutened at restaurants, to thinking I could "wing it" without a plan… I've learned a lot the hard way.

In this episode, I’m sharing the top mistakes I made when going gluten-free, what I wish I had known sooner, and how you can avoid the same bumps in the road.


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Carrie Saunders:

Quick reminder before we get started on this episode this podcast is based on my personal experiences and isn't medical advice. If you've just started your gluten-free journey, or even if you've been at it for a while, chances are you've made a few mistakes. I know I have, from trusting the wrong labels to getting gluten at restaurants to thinking I could wing it without a plan. I've learned a lot the hard way. In this episode, I'm sharing the top mistakes I made when going gluten-free, what I wish I had known sooner and how you can avoid the same bumps in the road. Welcome to the Gluten-Free Engineer Podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders.

Carrie Saunders:

In 2011, I was diagnosed with celiac disease a moment that changed everything, but I was determined not to let it hold me back. With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer the gluten-free lifestyle, breaking down recipes, safety tips, travel hacks and everything in between to rebuild a life I love. Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance or simply choose to live gluten-free, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we simplify the gluten-free lifestyle, make it fun and prove that you don't have to miss out on anything. Welcome back to the show.

Carrie Saunders:

Today, we're talking about the top mistakes I made when going gluten-free to help you avoid them. The first area I want to touch on is that thinking gluten-free the words on a label always means that it's safe, and this was one of my first mistakes I made was that, believing if something was labeled gluten-free it was actually safe and automatically safe. What I found, though, is that not all products labeled gluten-free are certified or made in a dedicated facility, and I learned this actually with a really delicious pre-packaged cookie that touted it was gluten-free on the front. What I found was, as I was eating this cookie I think it might have taken the second time I ate it for me to realize what was going on I was realizing I wasn't feeling good, so, like the detective I am being an engineer I looked at the back of the label and was like oh, it says made in a facility that also processes wheat. So this was not certified gluten-free, it just had no gluten ingredients. So if you're celiac or highly gluten sensitive, you're going to want to avoid anything that says made in a facility that also processes wheat, and this is something that I feel like is something that needs to change out there in the world. Honestly, you don't label something peanut free or milk free or any of the other allergens which I know.

Carrie Saunders:

Gluten's not technically an allergen, but it really affects our body in a very severe way when you have celiac or highly sensitive to it, and they shouldn't be allowed to just write gluten-free on there. I always felt that it was not ethical or right for somebody to put gluten-free on a label when it really wasn't technically gluten-free. First off, learn to read the fine print and make sure that it doesn't say main facility with wheat if you're a sensitive or if you're a celiac, because it can cause issues. Sometimes you might not notice it Because sometimes that might not have gotten cross-contaminated. Sometimes it might be a really actually big deal. So always look for certified gluten-free products if you know that you are celiac or you know that you're highly sensitive, if you're gluten intolerant.

Carrie Saunders:

Another mistake I have made is trusting restaurants too easily. It's really easy to assume that a gluten-free menu equals gluten-free safety in a restaurant and that is just absolutely far from the case. What I learned is that not all staff are trained in cross-contamination, so you don't know if they are going to be good with handling your food, even if they have things marked gluten-free and even if they have a separate gluten-free menu. Always make sure that you ask the server. Then, if you're not comfortable with the server's answer on how well the kitchen does, then ask to speak to the chef or a manager. It is not something that's you know out of the blue to them. They are used to people coming in with allergies. They shouldn't have any problem trying to accommodate you if possible. You shouldn't just assume it'll be fine. It's not necessarily fine.

Carrie Saunders:

I have made this mistake many times, thinking, oh, it'll be fine, or you know, I think, well, I don't want to be a bother. I don't want to be, you know, that person. But what I found is, well, my health is a bit more important than being that person. I need to stand up for myself and what's safe for me, just like anybody else would, if something that they eat wouldn't be safe for them. So don't look at yourself as a burden. These people are there to serve you. That's their job, that's what they love to do, and they want to have satisfied customers. They want you to come back, so they're going to want to try to make it right for you and do a good job.

Carrie Saunders:

Now there have been times that I have gone to a restaurant and they have said, no, you probably shouldn't eat anything here, and I was so grateful. So if you are a server or a chef actually listening to this too, please don't feel bad saying that, especially if somebody has celiac disease or high gluten intolerance. We really appreciate your honesty so that we know that we shouldn't eat anything there. I would rather be hungry, honestly, and be inconvenienced for a few hours until I could get something else to eat than to get sick, to get migraines, to feel like I have the flu and to have stomach issues and all the things that go with getting gluten on my end. And so some tips you can do is ask. You know if they have French fries. Ask if you have a dedicated fryer. Also ask and make sure that their fries aren't coated with wheat. Sometimes fries are coated with wheat to make them extra crispy.

Carrie Saunders:

You can also ask how do you prevent cross contact in your kitchen? Do you have a separate area to prepare my gluten-free food? You can ask, like I said, to speak with a manager or chef. You might also want to ask say, you're getting a gluten-free burger with a gluten-free bun you want? You're going to want to ask do you toast the bun? If so, where do you toast it? One of the restaurants that I love around here. I was getting sick occasionally from it and we finally figured out via me asking the waitress hey, do you guys toast your buns in the same place that you toast regular gluten buns? And her eyes like went so wide open because it dawned on her that I was getting sick from the cross contact on the griddle where they were toasting my bun, because they were toasting in the same place. So we just opted not to toast my buns from there on and I was fine.

Carrie Saunders:

So don't feel like you're a burden and don't feel like it's an inconvenience. It's more of an inconvenience to you to get gluten than it is to ask a few questions of them and get some honest answers. So make sure that you're asking those questions in restaurants and even if it's a restaurant you've been to multiple times, don't feel bad double checking. Hey, I want to make sure that this dish is gluten free. We have a great restaurant here in Athens, ohio, that I love to frequent. They serve the best Turkish rub on a flat iron steak. If you know me, you know which restaurant I'm talking about, and they have a rice pilaf side. Many times rice pilaf has little pieces of wheat grain in it. It has little. I can't remember the technical term for the little pieces of pasta, but there's little pasta in it. Well, this one doesn't do that, thankfully, so I can eat it, but it doesn't hurt for me to check occasionally.

Carrie Saunders:

And then another mistake that I have made in the past is keeping gluten in the house, I wouldn't say without boundaries, but without everybody in the house completely understanding the boundaries of what we can and cannot do with gluten in the house. When we have gluten in the house and you're celiac or highly sensitive, it is really easy to get cross-contaminated from crumbs, accidental mix-ups, it can be really easy to get those crumbs from. You know, let's say you're doing a peanut butter toast. You know you dip your knife in the peanut butter, you spread it on your toast, you dip it back in the peanut butter to get more because you didn't get enough the first time. Or right there, you just put some of those crumbs on that toast back in the peanut butter dish. Now if somebody does that with gluten toast, you're putting gluten right back in the peanut butter not dish but in the peanut butter jar. And the same thing goes for butter.

Carrie Saunders:

I have gotten sick in the past from butter dishes, from jelly jars, from peanut butter jars. I have even gotten sick from when my youngest was little. We didn't know he was celiac yet and needed to be gluten free, and we would have regular pizza in our house. Well, he was not very old so he didn't have really good skills at making sure his hands weren't messy, and so whenever we'd have pizza in the house and he would go open the fridge and get a leftover slice of pizza, he wouldn't touch the handles of the fridge. And I would come along later and get some of that piece of grease on my hand and let's say I had some crackers or some chips, something that you would eat with your fingers. I would then get gluten from it and we realized that this was happening. So if you can't have a strictly gluten-free kitchen, then I would highly recommend you have specific areas, designated areas. If you have little ones that don't quite understand the protocols, then it might be a good idea to keep the gluten containing items out of their reach so that they aren't randomly sprinkling it across your kitchen like we had in our house.

Carrie Saunders:

You can also create gluten-free, safe zones for gluten-free foods, so specific areas in your kitchen that only has gluten-free foods in it. You can also use color coded utensils or labels and set some household rules. It is for the safety of everybody. We want to make sure that you're safe in your own kitchen. You shouldn't fear eating in your own house like I did. It's just not. It's not something that's good for your mental health. To be honest with you, it causes a lot of stress, not only on you but also on your loved ones when you don't feel well. So having these rules set aside if you have a mixed kitchen is very important. We now have a dedicated gluten-free house, so that's not an issue for us anymore, but before we found out that the other children had it as well, it was an issue. So you know, set those rules if you need to. If you have to have a mixed house and make sure that you're safe, it's okay to think and to look out for yourself.

Carrie Saunders:

Now, another tip is it was really easy in the beginning to ignore non-food gluten sources. It's not something you think about right away, so not realizing that gluten could be hiding in your lip balm, in your supplements, especially in Play-Doh. Play-doh the brand name uses wheat, or in medications, shampoos, lotions. Even if you eat clean, you could potentially be either putting stuff on your body that has gluten and while that's not directly ingesting it, many times that can still become ingested Because, think about it many times you'll, you know, wash your hands and then maybe you put some lotion on, or maybe even the soap has gluten in it. Well, let's say, you wash your hands and you put lotion on afterwards, because your hands get dry after you wash your hands, like mine do. Well, you just put lotion on your hands. Well, but your hands are clean in your mind. But then you decide to eat some gluten-free pretzels or some gluten-free crackers. Well, that lotion is going to get transferred to that food. So when you eat it, if your celiac are really sensitive, you're going to get a little bit of gluten. Exposure from that Lip balm obviously is a little bit more obvious, because you're going to lick it off your lips. Play-doh gets under your fingernails, you know, in the cracks of your hands it gets everywhere.

Carrie Saunders:

Medications that is one that just drives me absolutely bonkers Whenever I have to be put on a new medicine for some reason which, thankfully, I'm not really on any medicine but you know, occasionally I might have to need an antibiotic or something like that. It is so hard to find medicines that are gluten-free many times, or it's hard for the pharmacist to know for sure because they're not required to label them. The pharmaceuticals are not required to label what starch binder is in it. So making sure you double check with your pharmacist my pharmacist has gotten really good at looking through any medicines I need to take and I'm actually also allergic to polyethylene glycol, which actually doubly affects my ability to take medicines. So making sure that anything you put on your body or in your body is gluten-free is also very important.

Carrie Saunders:

And there's also like a little story here Whenever COVID hit, you know, obviously once they went back to school, all our school system put in. You know all the hand sanitizers everywhere to help kill germs and things like that. So I was very thankful Our assistant band director at the time I mean he knew both band directors knew our kids had celiac. But our assistant band director had found out because had found out that the hand sanitizer they were currently using had wheat in it or had gluten in it. I can't remember which form of gluten, but it had gluten in it. He found that out via an elementary school kid severely reacted to the hand sanitizer and he was so kind to inform my children to not use the school's hand sanitizer because he didn't know which version of the hand sanitizer was in the school system. So it's wonderful to create a system of people like that that are also looking out for you and who would have thought that there would have been gluten in hand sanitizer.

Carrie Saunders:

How unnecessary I feel like that is. You know it should be mostly just alcohol and some sort of gel system. They must've used it as a thickening agent, probably to make it cheaper. But even something as simple as hand sanitizer. Honestly, when I go out to um, out and about, I bring my own hand sanitizer rather than using the soaps in public bathrooms because I don't know what's in them. I'm also sensitive to soy and that's also a very common ingredient in soaps and in hand well, not really in hand sanitizers, but in soap. So I always bring my own hand sanitizer because I don't want to be at a restaurant, wash my hands and then go eat my food and have gluten on my hands and that's how I get sick. So I bring my own hand sanitizer with me. So you know, even consider doing something like that if your celiac are super sensitive.

Carrie Saunders:

Now another mistake that you might make and this is something that's pretty easy to make early on, especially when you're not as versed at gluten-free cooking yet is relying too much on packaged gluten-free foods. Those packaged gluten-free foods can be very expensive. They're highly processed gluten-free alternatives. They're not very healthy for us. They can make you feel tired and bloated and they might still make you feel unwell because they might have extra sugar in them or they might have extra salt or extra preservatives or anything like extra in it, just to help its shelf stability. So build your meals around naturally gluten-free whole foods like fruits, vegetables, meats, legumes, if you tolerate them rice, vegetables, potatoes, eggs, things like that Then you can incorporate those.

Carrie Saunders:

I sometimes go a little too far and incorporate those a little too much, because I missed so much of that when I first went gluten-free because I wasn't very versed in gluten-free baking at first. So sometimes I go a little overboard by making all the fun goodies gluten-free and taking the challenge on. I love the challenge of making something gluten-free and it doesn't taste or have the texture of gluten-free stuff. It has more of the texture of the gluten food. So I love that challenge. So sometimes I go a little too far and make too many yummies and carb-heavy things.

Carrie Saunders:

But when you're starting out, use naturally gluten-free whole foods. It's going to save you a lot of money and you're going to be healthier. It's just really, in general, much better for everybody in this world is to eat whole foods. So do that so you can save yourself some money. So that can be an easy trap to fall in, which is just replacing things with a prepackaged gluten-free food. So do your best to eat your whole foods instead.

Carrie Saunders:

And then another mistake that I have made over the early years was not planning ahead, like not planning ahead, assuming that you can figure it out as you go, when you're on the go, whether it's to a family member's house, whether it's on vacation or an event. So being stuck in an event with no safe food and you're hungry, you're anxious, you know you don't want to be in that situation, and then you make some mistakes that you know probably might get you gluten, but you're so hungry you go ahead and eat them. So always plan ahead. I mean, I know it seems inconvenient, but I feel like it's more inconvenient to feel sick for a few days than to. You know, take 15 minutes and plan ahead what you're going to do at that event. Or you know, if you're going on vacation, maybe it takes you a little bit more, like a half an hour, to plan. But planning ahead is really key to one being healthy and being less stressed and happier and really enjoying yourself at that event, at that vacation, at that family thing that you're going to. You want to bring the joy back into your life and not be stressed about whether you're going to be able to eat there. So take the time to plan ahead there. You know, early on I didn't. I regretted it pretty quickly and that was a pretty quick lesson I learned pretty fast. Um, but that's still something you need to think of and plan ahead.

Carrie Saunders:

The gluten find me gluten-free app is really great for that, and we actually have a special code or are going to re-engineer listeners where you can get $5 off your yearly subscription. So look that up on your website if you would like to do that. But it is a really helpful app. We've been using it for many, many, many years and it helps us when we are traveling to feel a lot safer. I don't think we've ever gotten sick eating off a restaurant from that app whenever it was marked as celiac safe. Not all the restaurants on there are marked as celiac safe. Not all the restaurants on there are marked as celiac safe and they do. You know. Note that. So look for that if you need celiac safe or not, you know. If you're not that sensitive, you can just eat at one of the gluten-free restaurants listed, but if you're, you know, celiac or highly sensitive, then that celiac safe mark is really key there.

Carrie Saunders:

So, in general, everyone makes mistakes when going gluten-free. It's unfortunately part of the journey, but hopefully this episode helps you make less mistakes than I did when I started going gluten-free. But you want to learn from your mistakes and share your mistakes with other people who need to be gluten-free as well. It makes it easier for others and the biggest wins come from knowledge, preparation and self-compassion. So be compassionate with yourself. Give yourself the grace that you need to and can plan ahead and that that is okay and that you're going to work to not make any of these mistakes that we've talked about on the podcast episode so that we can have a healthier, fuller, more fun life being gluten-free, because it is possible.

Carrie Saunders:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Gluten-Free Engineer. If you found value in this story, please share it with someone who might need encouragement on their own gluten-free journey. For more tips, recipes, resources and even links to my YouTube channel, head on over to theglutenfreeengineercom. It's your one-stop hub to make gluten-free living simple, fun and full of flavor. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss out on an episode and we will see you next week. The Gluten-Free Engineer podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. I share my personal experiences and stories about living with celiac disease and navigating a gluten-free lifestyle. This podcast does not provide a medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional for medical questions, concerns or advice specific to your health.

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