Living beyond food allergies:
A Q&A with Gluten-free Girl

I understand that you suffer from celiac disease. Could you tell us
a little about your backstory?

There are so many people suffering from celiac (certainly not me alone!).
And everyone suffers in a slightly different way. Celiac actually has 300
separate symptoms. And people can have any subset of those 300. But
in terms of what happened to me—as a kid I was prone to infections and
prone to the flu and had pneumonia at times and things like that. Then
in my thirties I had a car accident, from which I'm lucky to be alive, but
I never recovered completely from my injuries. Later I had surgery for
something else and was tired all the time, and then in the early spring
of 2005, I caught the flu and just nosedived. I just never recovered.
Sleeping 18-hour days, stomach pains every time I ate, bad migraines,
brain fog, and I knew that something was clearly very wrong.

I had two months of doctors' appointments and emergency room
visits, scans, ultrasounds and no one could figure it out. And it wasn't
until someone pointed out an NPR piece on celiac disease (the most un-
diagnosed disease in the U.S at that time) that I said, well, that sounds
about right, (and since we had already gotten everything else off the
table) I got my doctors to do the test, and there it was!


Is there a difference between celiac disease and gluten intolerance?
If so what is it?

Yes, there is a difference, although for some people the difference in symp-
toms is negligible. Some people who suffer from gluten intolerance can
suffer just as much as those with celiac. Celiac is actually an autoimmune
disorder, and so the body attacks itself. So for example (in my case) If I
ingest any gluten, my body reads it as a toxin and sends out antibodies to
destroy the gluten, and in doing so ends up harming and destroying my body
too. For some folks who are gluten intolerant, it's just that their bodies just
don't like it (gluten) and they may feel sick, and their bodies may have all
sorts of intestinal stuff going on but they don't have the same severity of
problems. Yet in other instances there are people who have told me that
they are gluten intolerant and they say that they feel just as lousy as I do
when I get celiac. So although the tests themselves are still in the refining
stages and it's just in the last decade that we have begun to understand
celiac, I imagine a lot of people who are labeled gluten intolerant actually
do have celiac disease.

Now how did you bridge the two? Going from what was happening in
your life at that time to becoming an award-winning food blogger?

I don't know, actually. It's all been such a crazy surprise! When I started
writing my website I didn't know that anyone would be reading it. For me,
it was just a place to put all of these urgent discoveries I was having about
food and my health and feeling better for the first time in my life. I really
started it as a place for my friends to come and read long emails (laughing).
I don't know! But it keeps me humble 'cause I feel like it's still there. I feel
like I'm still writing letters to friends. So it sort of happened organically. A
couple of months after I started I began getting emails from people I had
never heard of. And I'm like, who are these people? (laughing) so I began
to followed them, found this whole world of food blogs, started leaving
comments on their sites and started meeting people, and it sort of
blossomed from there.

Are most of your readers people who are struggling
with gluten intolerance?

Actually I would say it's about half and half. The fervent readers are gluten
intolerant. But I would say about half of our readers have no problem with
gluten and eat what they want, but just like the writing and the recipes and
the stories, and so they just come back for that.

For the millions of people struggling with some of these issues, what
is the best way to jump-start a gluten-free diet? Are there some
basic dos and don'ts?

Sure. I think that if you have a doctor you really trust, you should work with
your doctor. Because you can go off gluten and if you start to feel better you
may say, I'll stop eating gluten—but you may have to go back to your doctor
and get the test to confirm it. Problem is, that you can't get a positive test
result unless you are actually eating gluten—because those blood tests
measure the antibodies in your blood system and that's not going to happen
if you are not on any gluten. I hear that from a lot of people who write me
and say, “ I know gluten isn't any good but I want the diagnosis.” The Uni-
versity of Chicago, for example, won't test you for celiac unless you have
been eating gluten for 12 weeks straight (which to me sounds like death!).
So make the decision really carefully.

Now, if you have solid reasons why you should go gluten free, then the most
important thing you can do is to embrace it and say yes to it. If your body is
built this way, then spending a lot of time moaning and cheating and saying
I can't and trying it [again] anyway won't hurt anyone but yourself. There
are so many great foods that are naturally good and gluten free. There are
lots of breads you can bake and lots of pizza you can have. There's really
no suffering here.

So if I'm gluten intolerant or suffer with other allergy issues, I'm not
relegated to a life without bread or baked goods?

Oh no (laughing), I bake every day. When we are at home I bake every
single day! In so many ways I enjoy eating so much more now than I did
before, because when you eat so much enriched white flour it doesn't have
very much taste or nutrition, and recipes are written for you and you follow
other people's recipes and then you make a cookie and go on…. But with
gluten-free, if you have this kind of adventurous spirit, you can play with
different flours, different flavors. you can play with different things like co-
conut oil instead of butter! There's just so much play involved. So although
as of now, people just don't know that gluten-free baking can be this fan-
tastic, the bonus is that you'll find that when they do, they will all be just
so impressed with you! (laughing)

Yeah, I guess the expectations are still not quite that high (laughing).

But even more than that, it's important for people to know that baking is
baking. The main thing we talk about on our website and in our book is that
if you want to bake gluten free you just have to buy kits and a scale. The
different gluten-free flours all have different weights, so while one cup of
enriched white flour is 140 grams, If you just simply weigh 140 grams of
your favorite gluten-free mix to use in place of one cup of all-purpose mix,
you can pretty much convert anything!

With the holidays quickly approaching could you make some sug-
gestions for a traditional Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner? What
types of strategies can you offer for those faced with this dilemma?

Well, part of it is to get your family on board. If your family has seen the
transformation and the huge shift in your energy level and in the pain you
once suffered, then together you can sit down and really think about what
the holidays are really about—which is about getting together, and cele-
brating each other, and not about wanting the same stuffing I have had
for the last 45 years thank you very much! And that should be the first
step, which is mostly a change in attitude.

Besides that, most of the things for Thanksgiving are pretty easy. All you
need to make stuffing is a good gluten-free bread, and after that it is like
any other stuffing. We have got a great pie recipe on our website. As a
matter of fact there are several. So people can make pumpkin pie, or even
make a gluten-free vegan pie that works. It's all about wrapping your mind
around it and deciding to play and to include everyone, because the worst
thing that can happen is that a family makes the giant Thanksgiving or the
Christmas or the Hannukah meal, and they are like, Hey you are gluten
free, so here's your salad, and that just makes you feel like crap! So I think
if you approach it as how to feed people as opposed to how to do it the way
you have always done it and how to impress people, then it really changes
the whole game.

We understand that there's a new cookbook on the way.
Could you tell us about it?

Sure! Unfortunately it's not going to be out for quite some time. At least
not until early 2013! But we are very excited about it and we have called it
Gluten-Free Girl Everyday. Our first cookbook (which I loved so much) was
the story of my husband and me falling in love and the first couple of years
of us being together. He is a chef, so it was all about these meals at mid-
night and us just luxuriating! Which some people found intimidating. But
now that we have a 3-year-old daughter we don't cook that way anymore
(both laughing!) This is really a book about how to build a great pantry and
how if you have good food in your house you can cook anything you want.
I hate to say in less than 30 minutes because it has become such a catch
phrase now, but these recipes really don't take very long. Each chapter is
a strategy for getting dinner on the table, so one night it might be breakfast
for dinner, another night is stir-fry, while another night might be a one-pot
wonder because you just need to move fast. So each chapter is about a
different way of cooking that allows us to get great food with lots of flavor
from all around the world on the table fast.

In need of more holiday inspiration? Here are a few holiday recipes
from the Gluten-free Girl.

http://glutenfreegirl.com/coming-home-2/

http://glutenfreegirl.com/this-is-the-gluten-free-stuffing-we-will-be-eating/

http://glutenfreegirl.com/who-needs-gluten-when-there-is-pumpkin-pie-like-this/

http://glutenfreegirl.com/gluten-free-vegan-pie-crust/

http://glutenfreegirl.com/cranberry-cocktail-for-thanksgiving/