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| Celiacs are cautioned to not eat over 10 milligrams of gluten a day, so how much is in one single breadcrumb? |
If the majority of us who have celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity can tolerant a diet that consists of 10 milligrams of gluten per day, without serious repercussions, then why do we need to be so vigilant about avoiding cross-contamination?
Yes, a single breadcrumb is toxic.
But just how toxic is it?
The idea behind the current FDA labeling law is that the average person with celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity wouldn't ordinarily eat enough gluten-free products, day after day, to reach the daily maximum threshold of 10 milligrams.
While that may be true for some of us, gluten-free products are not the only place where gluten hides.
Gluten residues are going to be in almost all processed foods, to some extent, as well as in our environment. The Fasano study on safe gluten thresholds accounted for that fact by how the study was designed.
The 10 mg and 50 mg capsules given to participants in that landmark 2007 study (used by the FDA to formulate the gluten-free labeling law) was given on top of the participant's normal gluten-free diet.
However, participants were not confined to a metabolic ward.
They continued to live their normal gluten-free lives throughout the three month study period, so cross-contact with gluten to some degree was factored into that ultimate safety threshold.
On paper, this works great.
The 10 mg and 50 mg capsules given to participants in that landmark 2007 study (used by the FDA to formulate the gluten-free labeling law) was given on top of the participant's normal gluten-free diet.
However, participants were not confined to a metabolic ward.
They continued to live their normal gluten-free lives throughout the three month study period, so cross-contact with gluten to some degree was factored into that ultimate safety threshold.
On paper, this works great.
If most of us stick to fewer products than 17 servings of foods with 20 ppm of gluten or less, we'll be fine.
But in real life, that idea doesn't work so well.
Not even for the average celiac!
The amount of gluten found in one single breadcrumb is so mindblowingly high that it will literally change the way you look at gluten-free food and cross-contamination for the rest of your life.
Guaranteed!
Before we address the specifics on breadcrumbs, let's look at what parts per million (ppm) actually is. Ppm is a weight ratio, a percentage of a given substance. There isn't an absolute amount of gluten in a product.
Currently, the FDA has decided that the ratio of gluten in a gluten-free product must be less than 20 ppm.
What does that mean?
A simple illustration can be done with rice and beans.
If you take a pile of rice that contains 1 million grains of rice, count out 20 individual grains of rice and replace those 20 grains with 20 dried beans, then you can confidently say that the entire pile of rice is now contaminated with 20 ppm of beans.
That is a very small percentage, only .002% of the whole pile of rice. However, the more foods you eat at .002%, the more absolute gluten you're actually consuming overall.
Quantity matters.
One pound of food with gluten residues of 20 ppm will introduce twice as much gluten into your system as one pound of food with only 10 ppm, due to the higher percentage rate.
If you stuck to a 10 ppm diet, theoretically, you could eat twice as many contaminated products as you could if everything you ate contained 20 ppm.
A little more than one pound of gluten-free food at 20 ppm will result in a gluten consumption of 10 mg per day, the upper limit that Dr. Fasano believes is safe for most celiacs.
To put this into perspective, two ounces of gluten-free bread, what you'd normally eat as a sandwich, comes to a little bit more than 1 mg.
Each ounce of gluten-free food, if 20 ppm, contains about .56 mg of gluten.
If you can safely eat 10 mg a day, then a little more than 1 mg isn't a lot to spend on a single sandwich. At that percentage rate, you'd have to eat 18 to 20 slices of gluten-free bread per day to go over the 10 mg safety threshold.
Even if you consumed 18 to 20 ounces of assorted gluten-free foods per day, it is still not likely that you would reach the 10 mg limit because many products contain much less that 19 ppm.
This is why many celiac organizations recommend you don't eat more than 17 servings of gluten-free food per day.
Gluten Free Watchdog does a lot of monthly testing, and to date, the greater majority of the foods she has tested have tested considerably less than 20 ppm.
The quantity needed to reach 10 mg is why Dr. Fasano and other celiac experts believe the current labeling law is sufficient to protect us.
If you had:
However, keep in mind that sensitivity levels vary, so the above examples may or may not apply to you. If you are a super-sensitive celiac, like I am, then damage will result when you consistently eat much less than 20 ppm every day.
For the average celiac, it is quite possible that gluten-free food products are not where the largest danger resides.
Ever since I discovered that dairy products were not as clean of gluten residue as gluten-free food lists and experts claim, I have been looking closer at our diet and trying to root out as many potentially problematic foods as I can.
My world got rocked a good one a few weeks ago when I read a blog post over at I Hate My Gluten-Free Life. The post was about how handy gluten-free products can be in keeping you safe from environmental cross contamination, such as gluten residue on the outside of a product's package.
Retrogirl77 has a lot of problems with cross contamination.
She has to wash the outside of every package or container before she opens it to keep herself safe from stray traces of gluten that might have gotten themselves stuck to the outside of the package or container.
What she has learned is that gluten-free mixes, such as brownie mix or a cookie mix, can actually cut down on the potential for getting accidentally glutened.
Why?
Because that way, she only has to deal with a single package rather than a variety of flour and starch containers.
Before I started reading her blog, I never thought about gluten residue being on the outside of the packages we bring into the house. However, after watching more attentively when hubby and I went grocery shopping, I have seen countless ways that you can easily get glutened just by going to the grocery store.
This new idea, that gluten-free foods might be safer than combining your own individual ingredients, was earth shattering for me. I had never thought about gluten-free products in that way before. I have always seen them as more like an enemy to be wary of.
That post got me questioning my previous assumptions.
To put what I'd learned into a useful perspective, however, I went in search of exactly how much gluten is in a single breadcrumb. I remembered seeing a few photos out on the web where 20 ppm was represented as a single breadcrumb, but I wanted to know the exact parts per million.
The results of that search were quite shocking.
I am no longer thinking in terms of parts per million now. I am talking about an absolute gluten amount that is much higher than that.
If a slice of gluten-free bread contains just over half a milligram of gluten, then how many milligrams does a regular slice of bread have?
According to Gluten Free Watchdog, it's been reported that 100 grams of traditional wheat bread has 124,000 ppm of gluten. If that stat is accurate, then a 1-oz slice of wheat bread comes to about 3,515 mg of gluten.
Jane Anderson, the blogger who writes the gluten-free section of Very Well (what used to be called about.com), is a super-sensitive celiac. When discussing the amount of gluten that might make you sick, she talked about a couple of older studies that found inflammation in celiac patients who consumed as little as 24 to 30 mg of gluten.
That 24 to 30 mg of gluten is about 1/425th of a slice of wheat bread, what you or I might call a single breadcrumb.
To put that in a better perspective, 50 mg is the amount that the Fasano study showed causes damage to the villi of almost all celiacs. And since 50 mg of gluten is equal to 1/8 teaspoon of flour, we are talking about half of that.
So a single breadcrumb = 24 to 30 mg gluten, the amount of gluten you might also find in about 1/16 teaspoon of flour!
Have you ever tried to measure out 1/16 teaspoon of flour?
A single breadcrumb or 1/16 teaspoon of flour contains 3 times more gluten than what the FDA has defined as gluten free.
All of those pictures on the web that bloggers were posting after the gluten-free labeling law went into effect were grossly underestimating the amount of gluten that a single breadcrumb has.
When you cut that breadcrumb into three pieces, it represents about 10 mg of gluten, the maximum amount of gluten you can eat in a day.
That one-third of a breadcrumb isn't what you can ingest a few times a day and be okay. The equivalent of 20 ppm in absolute gluten would be closer to 1/20th of 1/3rd of a breadcrumb.
And that's just the amount that the average celiac can ingest per day. A super-sensitive celiac would react to trace levels far lower than 1/60th of a breadcrumb.
Given how small a molecule with 20 ppm would be, it makes it easier to understand why you have to be so vigilant when it comes to cross-contact with gluten. It doesn't take much more than a trace to make you sick.
Since gluten is sticky, a 60th of a single breadcrumb could easily be stuck to your hands and you just wouldn't notice it.
Biologically, damage occurs when the immune system is not able to get rid of the gluten molecule fast enough for the inflammation to subside before another exposure occurs. Exposures can build up, one on top of the other, which is what actually damages the villi.
If exposure is consistent and chronic, such as eating gluten on a regular basis, the damage can be huge.
But damage can also be sustained and maintained during periods of low-levels of consistent exposure, such as accidentally ingesting those unseen breadcrumbs or sticky molecules while on a gluten-free diet.
Understanding how much gluten is found in a single breadcrumb in our environment also puts more perspective on the problems faced by manufacturers.
While 20 ppm is far too high for super-sensitive celiacs to eat consistently, part of the reason for that could be due to the amount of gluten you are accidentally ingesting from your environment, and not just from the gluten in the food you eat every day.
It is the total load of gluten you ingest that matters.
If there is a substantial source of cross-contamination in your life, that load will always be high, causing you to react to things you ordinarily wouldn't react to. That can make tracking down the real source of the problem extremely challenging and difficult.
The bottom line is that there really isn't any consistent way to go about weeding out the gluten.
Tracking down the sources of gluten in your lifestyle will be a challenge. The important thing to remember is that there is no source that is too crazy or obscure to not check out.
Since the amount of gluten in a single breadcrumb is huge, 24 to 30 mg, you never know where you're going to find that pesky little fragment that is giving you trouble.
But in real life, that idea doesn't work so well.
Not even for the average celiac!
The amount of gluten found in one single breadcrumb is so mindblowingly high that it will literally change the way you look at gluten-free food and cross-contamination for the rest of your life.
Guaranteed!
What is Parts Per Million (PPM)?
Before we address the specifics on breadcrumbs, let's look at what parts per million (ppm) actually is. Ppm is a weight ratio, a percentage of a given substance. There isn't an absolute amount of gluten in a product.
Currently, the FDA has decided that the ratio of gluten in a gluten-free product must be less than 20 ppm.
What does that mean?
A simple illustration can be done with rice and beans.
 |
| Gluten-free food cannot have more than 20 ppm. What does 20 ppm of gluten mean in real life? Twenty beans mixed into 999,980 grains of rice! |
If you take a pile of rice that contains 1 million grains of rice, count out 20 individual grains of rice and replace those 20 grains with 20 dried beans, then you can confidently say that the entire pile of rice is now contaminated with 20 ppm of beans.
That is a very small percentage, only .002% of the whole pile of rice. However, the more foods you eat at .002%, the more absolute gluten you're actually consuming overall.
Quantity matters.
How 20 ppm in Gluten-Free Food Affects You in Real Life
One pound of food with gluten residues of 20 ppm will introduce twice as much gluten into your system as one pound of food with only 10 ppm, due to the higher percentage rate.
If you stuck to a 10 ppm diet, theoretically, you could eat twice as many contaminated products as you could if everything you ate contained 20 ppm.
A little more than one pound of gluten-free food at 20 ppm will result in a gluten consumption of 10 mg per day, the upper limit that Dr. Fasano believes is safe for most celiacs.
To put this into perspective, two ounces of gluten-free bread, what you'd normally eat as a sandwich, comes to a little bit more than 1 mg.
Each ounce of gluten-free food, if 20 ppm, contains about .56 mg of gluten.
If you can safely eat 10 mg a day, then a little more than 1 mg isn't a lot to spend on a single sandwich. At that percentage rate, you'd have to eat 18 to 20 slices of gluten-free bread per day to go over the 10 mg safety threshold.
Even if you consumed 18 to 20 ounces of assorted gluten-free foods per day, it is still not likely that you would reach the 10 mg limit because many products contain much less that 19 ppm.
This is why many celiac organizations recommend you don't eat more than 17 servings of gluten-free food per day.
Gluten Free Watchdog does a lot of monthly testing, and to date, the greater majority of the foods she has tested have tested considerably less than 20 ppm.
The quantity needed to reach 10 mg is why Dr. Fasano and other celiac experts believe the current labeling law is sufficient to protect us.
If you had:
- An ounce or two of gluten-free cereal for breakfast
- A sandwich for lunch, made with 2 slices of gluten-free bread
- 2 ounces of cooked pasta for dinner
- And a grain snack during the day
However, keep in mind that sensitivity levels vary, so the above examples may or may not apply to you. If you are a super-sensitive celiac, like I am, then damage will result when you consistently eat much less than 20 ppm every day.
Where Does the Largest Danger Reside?
For the average celiac, it is quite possible that gluten-free food products are not where the largest danger resides.
Ever since I discovered that dairy products were not as clean of gluten residue as gluten-free food lists and experts claim, I have been looking closer at our diet and trying to root out as many potentially problematic foods as I can.
My world got rocked a good one a few weeks ago when I read a blog post over at I Hate My Gluten-Free Life. The post was about how handy gluten-free products can be in keeping you safe from environmental cross contamination, such as gluten residue on the outside of a product's package.
Retrogirl77 has a lot of problems with cross contamination.
She has to wash the outside of every package or container before she opens it to keep herself safe from stray traces of gluten that might have gotten themselves stuck to the outside of the package or container.
What she has learned is that gluten-free mixes, such as brownie mix or a cookie mix, can actually cut down on the potential for getting accidentally glutened.
Why?
Because that way, she only has to deal with a single package rather than a variety of flour and starch containers.
Before I started reading her blog, I never thought about gluten residue being on the outside of the packages we bring into the house. However, after watching more attentively when hubby and I went grocery shopping, I have seen countless ways that you can easily get glutened just by going to the grocery store.
This new idea, that gluten-free foods might be safer than combining your own individual ingredients, was earth shattering for me. I had never thought about gluten-free products in that way before. I have always seen them as more like an enemy to be wary of.
That post got me questioning my previous assumptions.
To put what I'd learned into a useful perspective, however, I went in search of exactly how much gluten is in a single breadcrumb. I remembered seeing a few photos out on the web where 20 ppm was represented as a single breadcrumb, but I wanted to know the exact parts per million.
The results of that search were quite shocking.
I am no longer thinking in terms of parts per million now. I am talking about an absolute gluten amount that is much higher than that.
How Much Gluten is in a Single Breadcrumb?
 |
| Super-sensitive celiacs are not overreacting when we try to track down every trace of gluten in our lives |
According to Gluten Free Watchdog, it's been reported that 100 grams of traditional wheat bread has 124,000 ppm of gluten. If that stat is accurate, then a 1-oz slice of wheat bread comes to about 3,515 mg of gluten.
Jane Anderson, the blogger who writes the gluten-free section of Very Well (what used to be called about.com), is a super-sensitive celiac. When discussing the amount of gluten that might make you sick, she talked about a couple of older studies that found inflammation in celiac patients who consumed as little as 24 to 30 mg of gluten.
That 24 to 30 mg of gluten is about 1/425th of a slice of wheat bread, what you or I might call a single breadcrumb.
To put that in a better perspective, 50 mg is the amount that the Fasano study showed causes damage to the villi of almost all celiacs. And since 50 mg of gluten is equal to 1/8 teaspoon of flour, we are talking about half of that.
So a single breadcrumb = 24 to 30 mg gluten, the amount of gluten you might also find in about 1/16 teaspoon of flour!
Have you ever tried to measure out 1/16 teaspoon of flour?
What Does this Mean in the Real World?
A single breadcrumb or 1/16 teaspoon of flour contains 3 times more gluten than what the FDA has defined as gluten free.
All of those pictures on the web that bloggers were posting after the gluten-free labeling law went into effect were grossly underestimating the amount of gluten that a single breadcrumb has.
When you cut that breadcrumb into three pieces, it represents about 10 mg of gluten, the maximum amount of gluten you can eat in a day.
That one-third of a breadcrumb isn't what you can ingest a few times a day and be okay. The equivalent of 20 ppm in absolute gluten would be closer to 1/20th of 1/3rd of a breadcrumb.
And that's just the amount that the average celiac can ingest per day. A super-sensitive celiac would react to trace levels far lower than 1/60th of a breadcrumb.
Given how small a molecule with 20 ppm would be, it makes it easier to understand why you have to be so vigilant when it comes to cross-contact with gluten. It doesn't take much more than a trace to make you sick.
Since gluten is sticky, a 60th of a single breadcrumb could easily be stuck to your hands and you just wouldn't notice it.
Biologically, damage occurs when the immune system is not able to get rid of the gluten molecule fast enough for the inflammation to subside before another exposure occurs. Exposures can build up, one on top of the other, which is what actually damages the villi.
If exposure is consistent and chronic, such as eating gluten on a regular basis, the damage can be huge.
But damage can also be sustained and maintained during periods of low-levels of consistent exposure, such as accidentally ingesting those unseen breadcrumbs or sticky molecules while on a gluten-free diet.
Understanding how much gluten is found in a single breadcrumb in our environment also puts more perspective on the problems faced by manufacturers.
While 20 ppm is far too high for super-sensitive celiacs to eat consistently, part of the reason for that could be due to the amount of gluten you are accidentally ingesting from your environment, and not just from the gluten in the food you eat every day.
It is the total load of gluten you ingest that matters.
If there is a substantial source of cross-contamination in your life, that load will always be high, causing you to react to things you ordinarily wouldn't react to. That can make tracking down the real source of the problem extremely challenging and difficult.
The bottom line is that there really isn't any consistent way to go about weeding out the gluten.
Tracking down the sources of gluten in your lifestyle will be a challenge. The important thing to remember is that there is no source that is too crazy or obscure to not check out.
Since the amount of gluten in a single breadcrumb is huge, 24 to 30 mg, you never know where you're going to find that pesky little fragment that is giving you trouble.
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