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By Fred, January 20, 2010 10:57 pm

The North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Safety takes an unprecedented step in the legal defense of those with Celiac Disease.

Pursuant to past posts here, and at the GFCF Cookbook, about Great Specialty Products [dot] com.

This action is being brought to stop the dissemination of false and misleading advertising previously made and now being made by Defendant Paul Evan Seelig, alk/a Andrew Jeffrey “Jeff” Gleason, d/b/a Great Specialty Products (hereinafter collectively referred to as “Defendant Seelig” or individually referred to as “Gleason” or “Great Specialty Products”), using, inter alia, the internet website www.greatspecialtyproducts.com (hereinafter referred to as the “Great Specialty Products’ website”) and via telecommunications. Said advertisements falsely and misleadingly state and misrepresent that certain bread products sold by Defendant Seelig via the Great Specialty Products’ website are and were gluten-free when, in fact, said bread products contain gluten that causes harmful physical reactions and other serious health-related problems when consumed by people who have, inter alia, Celiac Disease.

This is taken from the first page of File No. 10CV001020 issued on Wednesday, January 20 at 3 PM against Paul Seelig, the Plaintiff, by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

We will link to the full document as it becomes available.

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By Fred, January 13, 2010 9:29 am

USA Today ran an article on the social impact of specialty diets

Of the people we’ve dealt with who are newly diagnosed with CD, or who have been told to conform to the GFD for medical reasons in the past month 6% said that they were not going to because, “it was too difficult and disruptive.”  Our sample size is small, but that felt like a high number, and if anything we suspect it may be higher than 6%; few are bold enough to proclaim they are going against medical advice (”AMA”).

While the findings of the USA today article aren’t a surprise for anyone on the GFD or who is close to someone who is, it highlights one of the real challenges.  The diet is difficult for many reasons.  Finding strategies that improve diet conformance for whatever reason, improves patient quality of life.  While the article itself states nothing new to those who are on a specialty diet, educating the population at large about the challenges and stigma that can surround a specialty diet is valuable and we hope there are many more similar articles.

We should note this correction in their article:

Kendra, 31, breaks out in hives and can have swallowing and breathing difficulties if she eats gluten, a protein found in wheat, oat [Gluten is not in oats, although it is one of several challenging food-science issues of the GFD], barley and rye.

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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.

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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.

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By Fred,

Ross Gatlin, one of the owners of Triumph Dining, and I had lunch a month back. He’s a great guy and the Triumph Dining series is one of the best places to start if you are looking for a written food guide. We were talking about over-the-counter gluten tests and he noted that he had done a test on Soy Sauce which showed it was safe. Yikes! Wheat is the first and primary ingredient! What is going on here?

An earlier posting on ‘The Gluten Avoidance Minefield’ lays out a framework for dealing with the seemingly anomalous Soy Sauce testing results. Let’s lay out what could be going on;

1. The test might not have worked. If we were using a kit, it could have been too old, it might have gotten too hot, it could have been made improperly. To prove this, we’d run a duplicate test. [We know this wasn’t the case, more information below.]
2. What are we testing for? R5 tests focus on glutenin. Skerritt tests for gliadin. What kind of tests did we use?
3. Did the food processing affect the protein? Wheat in soy sauce has gone through a good deal of processing, including hydrolysis, the process by which proteins are broken up into smaller protein components.

After talking with several food scientists, including chemists, microbiologists and pharmacologists, it turns out the answer is a combination of #2 and #3. Glutenin is fractured in most methods of Soy Sauce preparation. A Skerritt test would have shown a dramatically different result.

The next question that we are led to is; If the proteins have been broken up into smaller amino acid chains (amino acids are the building blocks that make up a protein), what are the health effects? Is it now okay? And here we run into a wall. It isn’t clear. Full experiments haven’t been run. Isolating the impact will be a difficult challenge. This is why the gluten issue is such a complex area to address.

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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.

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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.

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By Fred, June 11, 2009 11:00 am

The entire Juno Nutrition team attended the recent IFT Expo 2009. The Institute for Food Technology is the trade association for the collection of food scientists, ingredient manufacturers, agriculture companies, packaged-good manufacturers, restaurant meal designers, and academics who collectively define the food industry. We’d had the good fortune to get to know several people there and thought it sounded like an interesting event.

When we did an initial search of the 1,000 exhibitors, we found that 11 showed up in a search for ‘Gluten’ and after walking the aisles of the gigantic Anaheim Convention center, we managed to turn up another 3 groups, for a total of 14. That is 14 / 1,000 exhibitors, so a little more than the 1% of the population that we represent. I think it is great that there are GF-focused expositions and food shows. For those who have been recently diagnosed or who don’t have access to an exhaustive food database like what we are building, it is important to understand the food options that exist.

However, as a community, we have a responsibility to make sure that the broader food community understands that we are a valid and rational constituent. Organized attendance at shows like IFT and others would greatly help the food community understand the unique needs of those who pursue a gluten free diet, and we’d like to see that effort organize and commit to such attendance. If you are interested in attending with us, send a note to us here; contact@junonutrition.com.