Hi dear coeliacs!
The International Celiac Disease Symposium is over and a lot of interesting research was shared. Unfortunately I couldn’t go but I have been following their updates through their website.
Today, they shared some POSTERS presented during the events and one of them called my attention with the title:
“A dedicated set of kitchen equipment and utensils may not be required to prevent gluten cross-contact” . Study conducted by Weisbrod et al from Children’s National Health System, Washington.
It is widely recommended that we coeliacs have our own set of kitchen utensils (from pots, pans, cutlery to soft sponge and towels). Gluten is not allowed in my house so it’s easy for me to handle this, but how about people who is not lucky as I am?!
One interesting fact is that these recommendations are based on theory and no one knows for sure how problematic is cross-contamination in an environment with gluten. Therefore, the researchers did an interesting study. Briefly, they quantified gluten contamination in:
- Cooked GF pasta using gluten-contaminated water; GF pasta cooked in a pot washed with soap and water or just rinsed
- GF bread using contaminated toaster
- Knife – previously used to cut a cupcake with gluten – to cut a GF cupcake.
Gluten was detected using the R5-ELISA sandwich assay which is the recommended method for gluten detection (although there are some discussion on how reliable it really is). In the results table we can see that only the GF pasta cooked in the contaminated water and GF cupcake sliced with shared knife got gluten detection above 20 ppm. Methods of rinsing the pot, using same toaster, washed contaminated knife got less then 20 ppm, so they are in the range of what is considered safe for coeliacs.
This study concludes that basic cleaning methods is sufficient to remove gluten from the surface of utensils. Interestingly enough, there was another similar study with comparable results.
Personal opinion:
This type of study is really interesting and I would like to see even more studies like this. It seems so easy to avoid cross-contamination but why there are so many sick coeliacs? Is it only gluten the culprit of all our suffering? Tough question that scientist are still investigating!
Would be interesting to make a study following up children and adults consuming 20ppm of gluten every day for a few months (which is virtually impossible). Coeliac volunteers usually eat gluten for a few days and it’s not hard to know why. Thank you to all volunteers, we know much about coeliac disease because of brave people like you!
As an coeliac, daughter of a coeliac and pharmacist with PhD in immunology I still have the belief that small amounts of gluten everyday will – slowly – activate the immune system and bring terrible consequences to the patient in the long term. Hard to prove my hypothesis in scientific ways. Maybe someday when I have the chance to only study coeliac disease.
- What’s your opinion on this study?
- What is your experience with sharing kitchen or eating out?
I think you nailed it in the in the very last paragraph: small and continuous amounts of gluten WILL trigger your immune system. We have to bare in mind the “stock up” factor that gluten has in our body…
BTW, in places where gf means no gluten at all (like Brazil or Argentina), I seem to believe believe we get less sick because of this careful procedures of taking off small amountsof gluten.