Most processed foods have wheat gluten in them in some form. Learning to live on a diet of gluten free food has been a challenge for me and somewhat of an escapade. Luckily, I live in a good city for option diets and lifestyles. In the beginning, I did not think that it would be so hard. Portland has gluten free restaurant food available in several different places. I figured that it would just engage eating wheat free or particularly made gluten free pasta and bread. As a matter of fact, your typical vegan restaurant will have a staff so knowledgeable that they can tell you exactly what gluten free food to order. I didn’t realize that wheat gluten was an ingredient in so many dissimilar things. This makes it very easy to eat out with minor inconveniences. Although gluten sensitivities vary, for some people even a little bit is too much.

Some people with wheat allergies have an even more hard condition than I do. Even though there are some places you can not go to, about half of the restaurants out there still have some sort of gluten free food. In my gluten free diet, I can have certain kinds of wheat with the gluten removed, but people who are allergic to the wheat itself can’t. Of course, I would advocate going out to eat until you are familiar with how to eat gluten free foods. That means basically no premade baked goods unless they are made of spelt or some other alternative grain. It must be a tricky life. Sometimes you can get surprised by something that isn’t supposed to contain wheat but actually does. Usually, the people I know who have to eat gluten free foods tend to stick with a few preferred restaurants. It happened to me once, and the results were disastrous.

It really hurt my stomach and made me feel sick for the rest of the night. The upside is that having a gluten free food diet requires me to cook a lot more. In the long run, this is almost certainly better for my health anyhow.

Getting to know what recipes hold gluten can take some time, so stick with things that you are sure you can eat. It is a real hassle to go to some new restaurant and have to worry about whether or not there’s going to be an ingredient in it that makes you sick, so once you find a place that agrees with you, you tend to stay there.