Celiac Disease. I’m starting to come to terms with it. I’m starting to not think about it so much, just like the participants in the study I conducted last year said I would. When I go shopping I know what to buy. When I invite my friends to dinner I know where to go and who to trust. For the most part, I’ve even had the chance to slow down a bit with explaining it to people - most of my friends know all about CD after the last three years of listening to the recounts of my new discoveries.

So you can imagine my surprise when my friend Richard sent me this article. It’s about the three specific toxic peptides associated with CD. They are important because they are what people with CD react to the most - they are the toxins that create the autoimmune reaction.

Immunotherapy exposes people with CD to small amounts of the toxins to encourage the development of natural tolerance, just like for other allergies. The article doesn’t name the peptides, or any scientific information really, but it does say that they expect important headway in immunotherapy for CD after this discovery. 

So the question remains… would you do it?

Bonjour!

Day 1 diagnostics: it’s really really hard to find French people who know what Celiac’s Disease is. However, I did meet a British Woman on the ferry who has had it for 12 years. She visits her summer home in France with it. That got my hopes up about travelling to the South until she said that she brought all her food with her from England. Merde!

On the upside, Justin and Hombeline and I are understanding each other about 80, maybe even 90% of the time. Not bad for someone who hasn’t been to France in 7 years!

Jessalyn O’Donnell, the Thrifty Foods registered dietitian, has compiled a gluten free list of the store’s products. I’m apparently a month late on this, but that doesn’t mean it’s not relevant to future GFC meetings!

Now, if only Sobey’s (the people who own Thrifty Foods) could decentralize their distribution centre so that food grown on Vancouver Island doesn’t have to travel to Vancouver and back again to our island shelves every week. Then they could win twice: by being gluten free AND carbon emission reduced!

I really like Thrifty’s. I’m so glad that they have started this list. They still have some things to work on, like their webite search bar and their online customer service, but they’re getting there!

This GF girl has wonderful recipes. She makes me want to buy a breadmaker -then I snap back to reality and realize that I barely cook these days, let alone bake. I’ll have to wait until May at least.

These recipes would make wonderful dishes for the next GFC meeting!