After being diagnosed with Celiac disease in about 1999 I tried to do the gluten free diet. It took me a year to work all the hidden gluten out of my diet. But my health improved daily! Food packages were not labeled well back then. I had to make a thousand phone calls to all the food manufacturers and ask “does your product contain wheat/gluten”? Today you can simply look at the back of the package and find out if it has gluten ingredients or gluten contamination.
There were no gluten free convenience foods back then, no cake mixes, no cookies, no snacks. I found one obscure gluten free yellow cake mix. It was awful! Then I discovered a cookbook by Bette Hagman called the Gluten Free Gourmet (written in 1990). It had wonderful recipes for breads and cakes and desserts all made from flour blends that you made yourself. The flour blends were mostly rice flour as well as starches and bean flours. Wow! I could bake again! A few years after that (1993), Beth Hillson came out with products under the “Gluten Free Pantry” label and I was in heaven! No need to blend flours together to make recipes. It was already done!
Somewhere along the line I read an article in the local newspaper about a support group called the Gluten Intolerance Group and there was a chapter near me! This is a national support group for anyone needing to eat gluten free. I joined that group and spent the next 19 years learning even more about Celiac disease and helping others to do the same. The group was a great platform for discussions and presentations on health. We talked about all aspects of diet, health and going gluten free. We talked about Celiac disease and other autoimmune diseases. We talked about diabetes, and osteoporosis. We shared health concerns and experiences. We had parties and ate great gluten free food! I highly recommend joining such a group as it will allow you to learn so much!
It was through this group that I met very knowledgeable health professionals. One such person was Kathryne Pirtle who was connected to the Weston Price Foundation. Kathryne wrote a book called Performance Without Pain, which chronicled her experiences in healing her gut through not only the gluten free diet but a “traditional diet”. I joined Kathryne at my first Weston Price Conference in Chicago many years ago and that sent me on an even longer journey to learn more about food and health.
Going gluten free was a god-send as it taught me to be critical of what I ate and taught me to correlate what I ate to how I felt. If you can learn that skill, you will improve your health immeasurably!