Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Gluten-free vs. Celiac-safe

Here's the thing about being diagnosed with Celiac disease in the height of the "gluten-free" craze: everyone think that everything is Celiac safe. I even thought "Yay! There are so many gluten free options for eating out!" What a great thing, right? 

I learned, very quickly, that wasn't true. Gluten-free food in a restaurant doesn't mean that it is celiac safe. Grilled chicken salads (one of my favorite thing at Wendy's, pre-diagnosis), are suddenly a no-no. Why? Because they cut that grilled chicken on the same surface that they cut the breaded chicken. So why not just tell them not to cut it? Perfect plan, right? Not so much. They also use the same tongs to pick up the grilled chicken that they use to pick up the breaded chicken.

So something that seems gluten free (apple pecan chicken salad), suddenly isn't Celiac safe.
This throws a wrench in a lot of plans for me.

Today, Papa John's Pizza released that they are now going to offer an "ancient grains" pizza that is gluten free. Hmmm.... this is interesting to me. They are only releasing it in certain cities, and Nashville happens to be one of them. So I went to the website and went to the FAQ section. They have a whole section regarding the new gluten-free crust! Good for them!
First I saw this:

Promising.... they don't make the crusts in store, so there is less chance of cross contamination! As a person with no gastro symptoms of celiac disease, I can't tell if I have been "glutened" so I am always trying to pay attention to things like obvious cross contamination.
But further down on the list, I saw this:


Bubble BURST. No chance of being able to eat this ridiculously overpriced, gluten-free, personal pan pizza. It would be nice, but I didn't get my hopes up. Now I'm waiting to hear from all the people around me say "Oh! Papa John's has a gluten-free pizza now!" And I get to go back to explaining the difference between gluten-free and Celiac safe.


*Full disclosure: I never ate a lot of pizza even before Celiac since it usually wreaks havoc on my blood sugars. But sometimes a girl just wants pizza.


1 comment:

Karen said...

Oh man, that really sucks.