Become a label reading expert

 Gluten and wheat are everywhere! It is hard to find products that don't have gluten/wheat in them or that aren't produced in a facility that also produces wheat and/or gluten. Even one of my favorite brands of mustard has wheat in it! As difficult as this no wheat and no gluten thing is (on top of a vegan diet) I am thankful for 2 things pertaining to my new diet: 1) that my intolerance isn't to corn because it's in just about every product on the market. 2) that I am already very adept at reading all labels to check for animal products and bi-products so adding wheat and gluten into the mix is easier for me.

One thing I would like to point out is that wheat can be in various products, including medicine, herbal supplements and vitamins.

Here are some tips and pointers:

• Read labels always. Even if it's a product you use often. Reformulations are not uncommon. i.e., Morning Star vegetable crumbles (which contain wheat) used to be vegan. Years ago I used to buy quite a bit of it. One day I noticed it tasted different and so I read the ingredients and eggs were amongst the ingredients listed. I contacted the company and they had just reformulated it a few months prior, but the new product just made its way to my local grocery store. 

• If you ever need medication (over the counter or prescription) ask a pharmacist to review the ingredients to see if wheat or gluten are present. It is my understanding that if a prescription drug has wheat or gluten in it, and it is absolutely necessary you take that medication (there are no viable substitutes), you can ask the pharmacist to help you locate a compounding pharmacy. This is a pharmacy that mixes drugs to meet the needs of patients with restrictions.

•  Wheat and Gluten can be in a lot of unsuspecting products; like oats, prepared mustard, salad dressing, malt vinegars, modified food starch, vegetable starch, vegetable gum, miso paste (or soup), frozen french fries (including those at fast food restaurants), soy sauce, caramel coloring, sausages and lunch meats (but why would you eat them anyway?), canned baked beans, cheap brands of chocolates, candy, dried mustard powder, curry powder... basically, read the label and look for reputable . If there isn't one, contact the producer!!! They have to tell you what's in it. 

The point I would like to really drive home here is that you really need to become familiar with ingredients and what they truly are. Reading labels is very important and can save you from having pain or discomfort associated with eating wheat/gluten. In the U.S., the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act mandates that labels on foods manufactured after January, 2006, will list the word “wheat” to indicate the presence of wheat. However, the label does not have to list other gluten-containing grains such as barley, rye, spelt, kamut, or triticale. There is currently no U.S. government regulation or enforcement of gluten-free labeling.

What's next???

Ok, so now you know all about my bowels and the problems they have... what's next?


Well, after this last stint of illness I decided I just can't take feeling like crap anymore. So, I went gluten-free and I've stayed the course for almost 4 weeks now (just looked at the calender to confirm). What I have noticed, physically, this time on the gluten-free and vegan diet:

• Less headaches. I've had 2 this month, usually I have about 4 a week
• Once the anti-biotic regimen was over, no diarrhea.
• No constipation. I expected this to return promptly after the medication was complete.
• No more Miralax. I haven't had to use it for a month. I was told I'd need it daily for the rest of my life.
• I've lost 8 lbs. as of today. I lost weight when I was sick and I expected it to come back, but it hasn't.
• No bloating. I used to take Gas-X many times a day to get my swollen belly to go down.
• No abdominal tenderness. I used to have chronic tenderness in my belly. To the touch.

In a nutshell, I feel a lot better and I am attributing this wellness 100% to the elimination of wheat and gluten.

This is the last of the woes.. I promise!

Ok, this is the last part of the epic tale of my bowels.

After the colonoscopy and the discovery of my tortuous colon, I intermittently ate a gluten-free diet. I would do it for a week and then eat bread, etc. The Miralax seemed to be working and I figured I was in the clear. Then a few days before my graduate program began I got really sick. The symptoms looked a little bit like the stomach flu, but I had some additional symptoms such as uncontrollable shaking and really achy joints. I knew what I had and it wasn’t the flu. When I spent the summer in Tanzania I contracted a relapsing strand of malaria and I was having a relapse. I was just hoping it didn’t land me in the hospital like it did the last time. I suffered through it for a day and then it let up. I still felt awful, but a functioning kind of awful. I went to my classes and just tried to make it to the weekend. Come Friday I had a lot of pain in my side and in my back, combined with diarrhea (which is a rarity for me) and I was still vomiting every time I ate. I went to the doctor and she said I may have pulled a muscle and she gave me muscle relaxers and told me if the pain got worse to go to the ER. By Monday the pain was intolerable. I should mention that the pain was not in my left side like it usually was; it was in my right side.

That evening I spent 7.5 hours in the ER before I was even seen (they were packed with standing room only). Finally they took me back and put me on IV fluids, gave me morphine and took an X-ray. The morphine didn’t touch my pain and the X-ray revealed nothing. Then they did a cat scan. A day passed by at this point. Finally they came and told me that I had a case of colitis and that it is caused by 1 of 3 things… a parasite, a bacteria or an auto-immune response. The doctor said colitis is very painful and gave me Percocet (which also didn’t work, I hope to never have colitis again). He also put me on an anti-biotic in case it was bacteria and an anti-protozoa in case it was a parasite.

When I returned home I began thinking about what it could be that caused colitis. I knew it wasn’t something I ate because I had shared all meals consumed that weekend with 4 other people and no one else was sick. Then I thought about it and I consumed a ton of wheat and gluten when I was sick the week before the colitis incident.  I ate toast, crackers, pasta, cereal, etc. Wheat and gluten was I all ate the week leading up to the ER visit! UREKA! It’s wheat and gluten!

I stopped eating wheat and gluten about 3 weeks ago and since then, I haven’t had constipation or diarrhea, I haven’t vomited, I haven’t taken gas-x once because I haven’t been bloated, I have only had one headache and I have lost 8 pounds! I am so happy to finally know what is wrong with me. Now I am left to figure out how to be a gluten-free vegan. It is really difficult.

Continuation of woes...

Ok, I promise to get to the good stuff such as recipes, suggestions, trials and errors, product reviews, etc. I just want to finish painting the picture for you of where I am coming from and where I have been.
I left off at deciding to become vegan. Of course there is more to it, but for the sake of this blog I am sticking to brevity. Anyway, the headaches didn’t really change with the elimination of dairy, but the stomach problems seemed to lessen for a little while. Oh yeah, I also had sinus problems that my doctor felt may be attributed to dairy, they didn’t change either. All that being said, I had read enough about veganism at that point that there was no way I was going to start eating animals again even if the vegan diet didn’t help my stomach or head.

So, the IBS-C continued and sometimes it was worse than others, but it progressively got worse. Eventually (about 2 years into the vegan diet), I began to experience chronic, intense bloating. I don’t mean feeling a little stuffed, I mean feeling and looking 100 months pregnant! It hurt so badly and I often felt like I may literally explode. I took gas-x on a regular basis. *Please note that I also tried various herbal teas, aloe juice and a daily regimen of pro-biotics (which I still take). At this point, I accepted that my stomach would behave this way and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Last year I reached a point where I was over it. I had been dealing with doubled over pain in my belly for 8 years and I just couldn’t take it anymore. My first stop was at an allergist’s office. He tested me for everything under the sun; food, trees, dust, mold, grasses, animals, etc. Surprisingly enough the only thing I am allergic to is dust, dust mites (YES! No more house cleaning for me! LOL), and cats and dogs. The latter is sad because I have a cat and want a dog in the future. *The cat still lives with me; I tolerate my sinus issues because I could/would never get rid of her. Anyway, the allergist suggested that I could still be intolerant to certain food, I’m just not allergic to them. He said I should try a gluten-free diet. So I did, for 30 days and nothing happened.

I spent the next year, once again, accepting my bowels for who they are. In April of this year, I moved back to Columbus (I had moved away for my job) and the first week back I had a big issue. There was a pain in my left side that had never felt this intense. There was also a large lump, like the size of a grapefruit that could be felt if you pushed around the area to the left of my bellybutton. I figured it was because I had been eating pretty poorly due to the move and having everything packed up. I was eating a lot of bread and fries and things I could access at restaurants that were vegan, but that are still awful for you. I had no choice because for 2 weeks I was living between 2 houses in 2 different cities. Anyway, the pain got intense enough and I hadn’t had a bowel movement in 2 weeks and I ended up in the ER. I figured I had a bowel obstruction and the doctors did too. They took X-Rays and came back and told me I major impaction and it need to come out or I was going to perforate my intestines. They gave me all sorts of unpleasant things to drink to get it moving and sent me to a GI doctor. Long story longer, my bowels finally moved and the doctor I saw told me he needed to do a colonoscopy to rule out cancer and other lovely things.

I had the colonoscopy a week later and it revealed that the health of my bowel tissues was great! However, due to chronic constipation over the years I now have what is called a Tortuous Colon. This is when your colon is stretched out so much that it stays stretched out. Sort of like when someone gains weight and their skin stretches, and then they lose weight but they still have the skin. My intestines are forever changed. There is approximately one extra foot of large bowel on my left side, which is why it always feels like a mass is in that area.

The doctor told me I will need to take Miralax for the rest of my life to keep things moving. If things stop moving, the consequence will result in the extremely risky surgery of bowel re-sectioning. NO THANKS! So, I took the Miralax like a good girl and thing seemed fine. For a while at least. In addition, he tested my blood for Celiacs Disease (an auto-immune response to gluten) and it came back negative. He said that didn’t mean I don’t have it and that I should try a gluten-free diet again.

Hello and Welcome!

I will not make this first blog too long as it is just an introduction. So, here it goes...

As I mentioned, I am a graduate student at the ripe age of 38 (it's never too late to go back to school, right?). I was born and raised in West byGod Virginia. I have lived in various cities over the years; Pittsburgh PA, Columbus OH, Takoma Park MD, St. Louis MO, Cincinnati OH and I even spent a summer in Dar Es Salam Tanzania. Currently I am in Columbus OH, this is my home and where I belong. I have spent numerous years working in kitchens (cooking, prepping, managing and being a Sous Chef). I became tired of kitchen work and went back to school in 2001 and earned a BA in Sociology and Criminology. After that, I spent 5 years working for a Fortune 100 organic food retailer and became very interested in food from a policy perspective. So, here I am now, back in school for a MA in Public Policy. There are other things that led me to food policy, but I'll save that for another day.

As for my diet and physical woes, I began seriously looking for a cure for my migraine headaches about 10 years ago. I have had them since I was 5 and I reached a point where I felt medicine was only aborting the headache, but not keeping them from happening in the first place. And yes, I have taken every preventative (meds and herbs) known to human kind. So, I decided that perhaps meat was causing my headaches. I had been eating it since I was little so surely that was the cause!?!? I promptly adopted a vegetarian diet. After a year on the vegetarian diet I noticed a slight reduction in my headaches, but I developed a new stomach problem; bloating, gas, and constipation. I went to the doctor and went through a series of tests and they found nothing. The doctor told me I had IBS-C (Irritable Bowel Syndrome-Constipation) and that it was likely caused by something I was eating. Well, I was eating copious amounts of cheese as a replacement for the meat I was missing. So, I decided to get rid of dairy from my diet (and went ahead and got rid of eggs too). And so my veganism began.

I think I will stop right there and finish this story up tomorrow. That way I don’t bore anyone… I know humans have short attention spans. ;-)