Comments (0)

By Fred, February 8, 2010 10:00 am

We’ve talked in the past about our love of TED and how many of its big picture talks can help us frame new ways of thinking about the gluten free diet (”GFD”) and Celiac Disease (”CD”). In the video below, Bill Davenhal discusses the impact that geography has over health.

Davenhall walks through his own live, having lived in several “red zones” for health; he grew up in PA, lived in Louisville, KY, which he proclaims as “Rubbertown”, and then moved to smoggy Los Angeles.

His approach to geomedicine, as he terms it, is broad and long term. Having lived years in these places, he claims, that his physicians;

Never asked about the water put in my mouth or the food that I ingest in my stomach.

For CD, the implications might be more profound with a more tactical approach to data.  If every restaurant someone with CD visited in the past month had poor options for those on the GFD, then the probability of gluten ingestion is higher than for those who made different choices.  Davenhall makes a brief case using big time periods; the impact appears as if it might be more profound if smaller periods of time and a more detailed focus on location were made.  Think restaurants, not states and the impact on CD becomes more profound.

Davenhall closes with a quote from respected physician Jack Lord;

Geography is destiny in medicine.

Comments (0)

By Fred, October 20, 2009 8:10 am

Unite for GFD Education!

Just when we thought Zach at Gluten Free Raleigh couldn’t do anymore to help those with recent CD diagnosis or those who pursue the GFD, he has topped himself.  Today he’ll be presenting this petition to the City Council to increase awareness of the big eight food allergens and gluten.

Please take the time to sign up to the petition here.

Comments (0)

By Fred, July 16, 2009 7:17 am

Thank you, Ms. Betty Croker

Great to see these in a regular grocer

If you are gluten free, it’s hard not to love the Betty Crocker chocolate chip cookie mix. It tastes good, which we all expected. More importantly, it is a top tier food manufacturer bringing a GF product to mass market grocery stores around the world. We thought we’d add our review to the mix, although there are plenty of good ones out there, including this one from Gluten Free Chapel Hill.

In the past year, there were 613,000 Google citations of Betty Crocker, when you add “Gluten Free” to that, the total shrinks to 15,700, for 2.5% of the total. In total Google hits for Betty Crocker are just over 2 million, with only 1.5% of those in total including the phrases “Gluten Free” or “GF”. That’s a pretty big search in just the past year. It’s great to see General Mills embracing our dietary concerns, and it is great to see that we’ve reacted with appropriate enthusiasm.

So how did they taste? They were great. They were good hot, but as we all know with GF baked goods, the real test is how they work the next day. They held up great. In fact, they disappeared in less than 3 days. The only item that was noticeable was the sandy sound of the mix in the bag - but you know you’re being hypercritical when your major issue about a baked good is the auditory performance of the mix in the bag!

Comments (1)

By Fred, July 13, 2009 10:01 pm

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our table top yesterday at the Gluten Free vendor exhibits at the Earth Fare in Raleigh.

The quick summary was:
32 National chain locations with a GF menu identified.
6 Well known grocers
11 Local restaurants that are known to be GF friendly or have a GF menu.

We’ll be putting up the full materials later this week, but wanted to be sure to share the snapshot of the map right away. We loved the feedback and camaraderie it generated.

Comments (0)

By Fred, July 12, 2009 1:35 pm

The only time we were free to take a photo was at the beginning before we were swarmed! Thank you, Earth Fare and Gluten Free Raleigh!

We just got back from our first external marketing effort. We’ve done tons of private beta walk-throughs and our user feedback so far has been great, but this was our first walk public demo with the broader gluten free community. Zach at Gluten Free Raleigh had put together yet another cooking class by Jules Gluten Free at the Earth Fare in Raleigh. We’re big fans of all three.

The feedback was great and we were overwhelmed with the response! As promised, will be sharing the information off of our handmade map with everyone who sent us their emails this week with a link to a posting on this site.

Comments (0)

By Fred, June 19, 2009 8:37 pm

Dr. John Floros, head of the Department of Food Science at Penn State University and a member of the FDA’s advisory board, served as a moderator on a Nanotechnology in Food conference that we attended.

He made some interesting comments about Nanotechnology in food, which I will attempt to paraphrase:

Microbiology existed before we knew about it. We found out about these microbes 100 years ago, they caused a great debate in how we look at food but we did not stop eating. Food science is quantifying something that we already do every day, which is very different than information technology or other areas of study. Nanostructures exist in food already, how do we regulate and study new ones? How do we regulate their introduction?

This feels like a grandfathering issue. We are studying about something that we do every day. We learn more, but how do we apply that knowledge to practices that have existed for so long that they are part of our cultural wisdom? Should we challenge that conventional wisdom? These are significant cultural issues that are not easily addressed.

Comments (0)

By Fred, June 18, 2009 1:31 pm

How often in the next year are you going to get sick through accidental gluten ingestion? What is it worth it to you to cut that number in half? What if we cut it to a tenth? What if instead of thinking in terms of accidental ingestions per year, it was per decade? Gluten is out there, it is going to find you. Vigilance is key, and part of our service to our customers is to provide you with the best statistical information possible about what products and locations you should avoid to increase the probability that you stay healthy.

There are lots of people like you. They are diligent about how they talk to restaurants, they call food manufacturers before eating packaged goods and when in doubt they will purchase an over-the-counter food test to make a final arbitration about the gluten status of a product. I personally kept a database that served as a precursor to our current product. The value of what we do at Juno Nutrition is that we allow the gluten free community to aggregate that data. If a location doesn’t give consistent responses about what is gluten free, then that is interesting information to have. If a gluten test gives a different indication about whether or not a product is GF than the food labeling, then that is important information to share.

Juno Nutrition is more than that – we are the advanced troops to helping restaurants understand what GF products are available. When they see that other restaurants are able to be GF with the same menu items, we move from debating whether or not a recipe can be created to knowing it is possible. We want a world where it is easy to avoid gluten and easy to find GF foods; Every day our entire team focuses on making that dream a reality.

Comments (0)

By Fred, June 17, 2009 1:30 pm

The food industry is a wonderful thing. Having had the opportunity to work in and study many different industries, it is always the more mature, more entrenched industries that maintain a staggering diversity of supply chain components and businesses. Food is an old, old business.

It all starts at the farm. Crops are grown, animals are raised. After harvest, those components are created into ingredients. Some are primary ingredients; some are broken down and reformulated into flavorings and scents. These components are augmented by additives and preservatives and then either made into packaged goods to be sold at grocers or into materials sold to the restaurant industry. Every part of this supply chain has numerous players, numerous inputs and varying degrees of knowledge about their inputs and end products.

This is an amazingly complex system that comes together each day to keep all six billion of us fed. There are many points where gluten can be introduced into the supply chain, numerous ways of testing to ensure that the product does not have gluten and in the middle of this difficulty we’ve got to acknowledge that the gluten free population is amazingly tiny when compared to the six billion. That being said, there is hope and help. Food manufacturers understand this issue and as nutrition-addressable healthcare issues continue to arise, the need for accuracy and source-ability in their products continues to increase.

This isn’t an issue that can be resolved overnight, but with the right quantitative approach and long term view, it is an addressable issue.

Comments (0)

By Fred, June 16, 2009 1:28 am

We’ve had a little time to reflect on our trip to the IFT conference in Anaheim, CA which began on June 7, 2009. Since then we’ve recalled a certain electricity that was in the air about the Anaheim convention center. Maybe it was our proximity to Disneyland. Maybe it was the beautiful Southern California weather. A major contributor was that this is a group of individuals who love their job.

And why wouldn’t they love their job? Everybody eats. Even the term ‘Foodie’ sounds cool.

And you know what, they were legitimately bummed out when I told them that I was, “one of the wheat-free gluten-free Celiac people.” I’ve been explaining this to people for several years now, and I’ve never been anywhere that the reaction was more sympathetic. The food scientists at IFT love their job, they love to eat and they know what a change in lifestyle it must be to have your diet so dramatically constrained.

This is an opportunity for the gluten free community. Look around at your local schools and see if they have a food science program. Is there a tradeshow coming up near you? The food manufacturers are receptive to our message – they get it more than we realize. Given that we are the minority, it is our responsibility, if we want their help, to put forward a logical and articulate series of requests for how they can help us. That’s part of what we do everyday at Juno Nutrition.

Comments (0)

By Fred, June 13, 2009 10:59 am

When I talk with a group of non-GF people about our business, I usually open with the question of, “How would you feel if one of your next 100 meals was going to contain a low grade of food poison? It may make you ill for a day, for a week or increase your likelihood of several varieties of cancer. It may effect you right away, or it may take time to activate. What is it worth to you to avoid that meal?” This is what we encounter each and every day. It is a minefield.

Imagine that you’ve got to walk across a field. Are there mines? How do we avoid them?

It depends a little about where we are. If we’re in a former war zone, then yes there may be mines. So, location matters. There are certain grocery store aisles where you are going to find gluten. There are certain restaurants that are going to have gluten in every product. You’ve got to know the ground to know the proper level of prudence. If we start to map out locations, then we can try and understand how much trouble we are in from the outset, and what locations we should flat out avoid.

What kinds of mines are we looking for? Let’s say it is a particularly devious mine that is both anti-personnel and anti-armor. For good measure, let’s say that some of them are simply one or the other.

If we’ve got a test that shows the anti-personnel mines, do we know that we are safe for the anti-armor mines? Vice-versa? It’s important to note that many of the commercial methods used to test for ‘gluten’ are actually testing for one of the protein sub-components, gliadin or glutenin. These tests are okay if we know that these two proteins are always bound together, but we know for a fact that this is not always the case. When we say something is gluten free, or that it does not have gluten, it is important that we present ourselves with an appropriate audit trail so we can know exactly how we know what we know.

Let’s say that we’ve got our minefield identified and that we have gone in and swept the mines. (A favorite Youtube clip is here.) Is it still a minefield? No, but it isn’t a “not-minefield” and pronouncing the area safe may be a bit premature. Rather, what we probably should do is proclaim that it was previously a mine field and state clearly the process we used to clean the minefield up. What if our process only got rid of anti-personnel mines? What if we detonated all of the mines, but there was still shrapnel in the soil? It may be safe to cross with heavy boots, but we wouldn’t want to play a barefoot soccer game, would we?

This last point is an important one. Proclaiming something ‘safe’ if it had dangerous precursors is a tricky endeavor. Imagine that the detonator caps in the mines survived. The mines are now much less dangerous, but the mine subcomponents are now smaller and still potentially harmful. Food processing technologies, such as hydrolysis, may change the gluten such that is difficult to measure, but the protein subcomponents may still be creating a biological reaction that is detrimental to our health.

Getting rid of mines is an extremely difficult proposition. So difficult that the best way to deal with mines is to prevent them from being put down. Identifying products that have a gluten precursor is an important part of understanding product safety for the gluten free population.