3 Reasons Dairy Products Are Not as Gluten Free as You Think

After glutening hubby and myself for several weeks,
I learned that dairy products are not always gluten free!

If you're super sensitive to gluten, and even if you're not, staying safe isn't easy with all of the misinformation, myths, and misconceptions floating around the web.

How the body reacts to the presence of gluten residues differs between individuals, depending on your diagnosis, and seems to be directly connected to your self preservation response when you have celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, instead of an allergy.

Some of the information is simply outdated.

Bloggers who have moved past their gluten-free infatuation and learning curve and have started to do other things with their life have left the outdated info up on their parked blog.

Eventually, their hosting runs out and the host locks you out from accessing their blog, or Blogspot decides to clean house by wiping out all of the blogs that have been inactive, up to a certain date.

In the meantime, following outdated advice makes you more restrictive than you need to be. 

It won't hurt you to be overly cautious, of course, especially if you fall into the super-sensitive category. But some information being passed out today can be quite harmful, so in this post, I'm going to talk about dairy products and how they are not as safe as you might think they are.

Are Dairy Products Gluten Free?

One of the myths I see perpetuated again and again within the gluten-free community is that dairy products are naturally gluten free. Bloggers and celiac organizations will tell you that you don't have to be concerned with dairy.

In fact, when someone posted over at Reddit about butter not being as gluten free as they thought, one of the participants of the Celiac Subreddit asked if the post was a joke.

They then began to preach the party line about there being nothing "in" butter that could contain gluten because it's just cream, salt, and maybe some flavoring and processing aids.

The problem with that line of justification?

Gluten can hide in the cream, salt, flavoring, and processing aids, so the snarky remark was more than a little uncalled for.

Even so, I continue to see dairy products being placed on gluten-free safe lists like this, rather than in the caution category -- all the time.

What this one poster was saying wasn't new.

Standard recipes for butter should be gluten free, but only looking at the ingredients you'd use to make butter yourself is one of the reasons why so many of us stay sick for so long on gluten-free diets.

What is the truth about dairy products?

Milk, cream, and butter are not as gluten free as you might think!

I was glutening hubby and myself for several months eating a local brand of butter that wasn't gluten free. It wasn't a dairy issue because if I was sensitive or allergic to casein, the protein molecule in dairy, I would have reacted to all brands of butter.

But I didn't.

I only had trouble with one local brand.

As a result of this discovery, I started researching the safety of dairy products in connection with gluten contamination to find out exactly what was going on.

I wasn't closed to the idea that there might have been a chemical factor or preservative in the butter that I was reacting to, instead of gluten. Among my many health issues, chemical sensitivity is a real concern.

However, that isn't what I found out.

After thoroughly researching the potential for cross contamination in dairy products, here are the 3 most important things that I learned:

1) Many Dairy Products Contain Gluten Additives

When the low-fat craze began, manufacturers were drowning in milk fat that they didn't know what to do with.

Since medical professionals, nutritionists, and dietitians all recommend you eat low-fat dairy products, removing the cream content from the milk left the dairy food industry with an excess of heavy cream.

This milk fat is not discarded. It's turned into a wide variety of butters, creams, and cheeses.

Plain butter made from pure, gluten-free cream and gluten-free milk is technically gluten free, but many manufacturers use additives to beef up the flavor of the butter. And these additions can be derived from barley.

This practice is extremely common with unsalted butter since the salt and fat distribution is what gives butter its characteristic taste and appeal. Unsalted butter often needs a little something extra to achieve the same blissful reaction you get from eating salted butter.

If the butter manufacturer adds a gluten additive, it normally appears on the label under the term "natural flavoring." This makes it easy enough to avoid.

Avoid unsalted butter that lists "Natural Flavoring"
in the ingredients list. Use salted butter instead.

However, gluten ingredients and processing aids are also added to the milk and cream that butter is made from. In dairy products like yogurt, cheese, cream, and butter, gluten can be used as a:

• flavoring
• thickening agent
• stabilizer
• fat replacer
• coloring agent
• binding agent

This is becoming almost commonplace in cottage cheese. I'm finding more and more brands of cottage cheese are using xanthan gum, rather than guar gum, as a thickening agent now, and there's no way to tell which brand of xanthan gum the company is using.

Since some brands like Bob's Red Mill grow their xanthan gum on wheat starch, rather than corn, this practice can be quite problematic for those of us who are extra sensitive to minute gluten residues.

I think that might be what was going on with the butter we were reacting to.

Gossner Foods was a local Utah brand of dairy products when we lived there. There are three separate and distinct facilities that they use to process these products. Although their web page FAQ assures consumers that they don't add preservatives to their milk, they do use stabilizers.

All of their milk and cream produced in their milk facility is packaged to make them shelf stable. There is no way to do that without adding some type of stabilizer to the milk and cream.

What makes this type of marketing problematic for those with gluten intolerance is that barley, as well as processing aids or gluten ingredients added to products that manufacturers purchase from other retailers or facilities, does not have to appear on the label in any form.

This is the real reason why xanthan gum is so difficult to pin down. You don't know whether small traces of wheat starch are still in there.

The only warning manufacturers have to give consumers is an allergy warning about wheat if they, themselves, add wheat to the product. If they purchase xanthan gum from Bob's Red Mill or another company, they don't have to tell you what it's fed with.

Second-party ingredients fall outside of the allergy labeling law.

2) Dairy Isn't Processed in Gluten-Free Facilities

Eating anything made in a non-dedicated gluten-free facility
is risky for a super-sensitive celiac.

Dairy products, like most processed foods, are not processed in gluten-free facilities. Gluten-free dairy products are produced and packaged in the same building as dairy products with gluten. 

Many super sensitives have problems with products produced in non-dedicated facilities.

In addition, gluten-free dairy products can also be run on the exact same machines as products with gluten. For this reason, dairy manufacturers will not guarantee that their products are gluten free.

They KNOW there is a chance for cross contamination.

While many celiacs believe these package warnings are "cover your ass" statements (CYA) to keep the company protected from any legalities that might arise, were a customer to accidentally get glutened by eating the product, those of us who are very sensitive to gluten can tell you that these are not CYA statements.

That's a myth started by celiacs who don't want to question the potential contamination of their favorite foods.

The potential for cross contamination is very real in mixed facilities.

For example, Organic Valley's cottage cheese, both regular and low-fat varieties, are not gluten free. 

They clearly state that on their website, that the cottage cheese is not gluten free because it's processed in the same facility as their products with gluten.

Since the gluten ingredient used in the cottage cheese is brought into the facility, there is always a risk for potential cross contamination with their gluten-free products, even though Organic Valley does everything in their power to reasonably prevent that from happening.

There is always a chance that their butter might get contaminated with gluten during its processing. That is their stand, not mine.

3) Second-party Ingredients Make Glutenings Difficult to Pin Down

Along with processing aids not needing to be declared on the label, when a manufacturer purchases or uses a product prepared by another retailer or facility, they do not have to declare those ingredients on the label.

In fact, they don't even have to investigate what's in the ingredients they buy or use. And they can tell you that they don't add any gluten ingredients, even if they know that gluten is in there.

If you're trying to pin down whether a brand of butter is safe or not, you won't be able to do that by simply looking at the ingredient list. The list will say:

cream and salt; contains milk

It won't reveal processing aids used to soften the butter enough to mechanically form it into sticks, and it won't reveal stabilizers that were added to the heavy cream to lengthen its shelf life.

It also won't always warn you about the potential for cross-contamination during processing.

By law, they do not have to.

This was what the Subreddit poster was missing. All of that information is voluntary and rarely shows up on the label.

Since the food industry is totally focused on sales, sharing any information that might lower revenues is discouraged within the industry.

Visit Brand Websites for Information

It's helpful to visit a brand's web page to see if they disclose their stance on gluten there, as many of the more reputable brands do place that info on their web site, so that's what I did.

I went and visited the sites of the brands of butter I typically buy.

Challenge Butter

Challenge butter informs its customers that their butter is churned daily from fresh 100-percent real pasteurized sweet cream. Nothing artificial or synthetic is added to their salted or unsalted butter.

While that doesn't rule out natural additives used for coloring, the odds of the cream having gluten stabilizers added are slim to non-existent.

Their unsalted variety does list natural flavoring as an ingredient, so if you want to use this variety, you need to contact the company to see if that natural flavoring contains gluten.

I never use unsalted butter, myself, so I didn't bother doing that. In the U.S., most natural flavorings are based on corn, but that isn't always the case. If you prefer the unsalted type of butter, it's better to call and find out.

Land O' Lakes

Land O' Lakes, on the other hand, clearly informs their customers that the "ingredients" in their salted butter -- but NOT their light butter -- is gluten free.

Their natural and processed cheeses, margarine, and Fresh Buttery Taste Spread products are also gluten free, according to their website.

But keep in mind that the definition Land O' Lakes uses to define "gluten free" will be the same definition the FDA uses. This is a warning flag to me that there might be a little bit of gluten in there.

Land O' Lakes can't guarantee the cream they use to churn the butter is completely gluten free, nor that the butter won't have been contaminated during processing. What they do guarantee is that the butter, if tested, would test to less than 20 ppm.

Since hubby and I do not use a lot of butter, this has never been a problem for me.

Amish Country Salted Butter

Some brands form their butter into rolls
instead of sticks

The brand of butter I went back to after discovering the local butter wasn't gluten free was Amish Country salted rolled butter. It's rolled by hand at the factory into a 2-pound roll, so it doesn't include whatever processing aids are used by other manufacturers to form the butter into sticks.

Amish Country also claims to be additive free as well as GMO free.

However, the cream it uses to make the butter isn't free of the growth hormone used to increase milk production like Challenge butter is.

The Amish butter is available at Kroger, but it does cost more than it did in Utah. About 10 bucks for a 2-pound roll, instead of 8. The price is comparable to the Challenge and Land 'O Lakes at their regular price.

What Brands of Butter Do We Eat Today?

After going on L-glutamine therapy at the end of 2016 to heal the gut, and moving to Texas in April of 2017, we went back to using Challenge butter and Land O' Lakes because I stopped having the problems with butter that I was having before.

Thanks to the glutamine, and being able to track down all the sources of gluten that were giving me trouble, I didn't have to limit the amount of dairy I was eating.

Plus, Challenge or Land 'O Lakes is always going on sale for the holidays here. We can often get it at Kroger for $2 to $2.50 a pound, so at that price, we stock up and store it in the freezer.

Companies with Gluten Free on the Label do NOT Have to Test Their Products

The new FDA rules defining the term "gluten free" on the label do not require companies to test their products.

You need to understand that.

This is a huge misconception within the gluten-free community.

Certification companies do require certain testing and cleaning protocols, depending on each organization's rules and standards for certification.

But the FDA does not.

All the FDA has done so far is to set a standard for what the phrase, "gluten free," means.

So, you'll need to keep that in mind when choosing the right dairy products for your gluten-free diet.

The FDA doesn't require companies to back up their gluten-free claim with hard data, and according to Tricia Thompson's experience, they hardly ever follow up on complaints and reports for gluten-free misconduct, either.

In fact, she's been trying to get them to reveal if a company can place malt extract or malt syrup under the term "natural flavor," and the FDA flat-out won't answer her.

The guarantee that dairy manufacturers give their consumers is only to the best of their knowledge, for whatever that is worth to you.

To me, it means very little.

For the FDA, a company's word is apparently good enough.

Manufacturers do not have to test their dairy products, or any other gluten-free product, for the presence of gluten.

Just something to keep in mind as you try to track down all of the hidden sources of gluten in your life.