How to Live With Allergies to Wheat

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette, and I'm a registered dietitian, with the Austin Regional Clinic, and I'm going to talk to you, about how to live with allergies to wheat. Wheat you will find, is in a lot of different products. Not just in food products, but it can also be found in personal hygiene items, things like toothpaste, lotions, all sorts of different products, so you need to become very familiar with reading labels. A lot of times if you see the word starch, it could very well be a wheat starch, so it's a good idea, to always call the manufacturer, if you see that listed in the ingredients, and there's no other identifiers, so you're not sure if it's wheat or not. Go ahead and call the manufacturer, and ask them directly, if it is a wheat starch, and if so, you need to avoid that product. Other types of wheat, you'll see durum listed in a lot of pastas. Of course, that's wheat. You need to avoid that. Wheat bread, a lot of bread actually has wheat flour in it, even if it doesn't say it's specifically wheat bread, a lot of different blends of bread will have wheat in them. It's getting a little bit easier to buy some baked goods, because of the fact, that there are becoming more and more people, with allergies to wheat, so you'll find that there are a lot of manufacturers that have started to make wheat free products. Whether that's bread or cookies, or pasta, or different items like that, you can often find these products in specialty stores, or gourmet food stores, or health food stores. They will often have an area that's dedicated to wheat free products, so make sure you keep an eye out for those particular items. A real easy way, when you're initially getting started, as you're learning to read labels, is to make sure you're just using a lot of fresh foods. Fresh fruits and vegetables are not going to have any wheat in them. Fresh meats, and poultry and seafood, also won't have any wheat in them, so in the initial stages, it's very helpful to do a lot of your own cooking, cooking from scratch, and just avoiding any types of flour, so doing a whole lot of things that are whole foods, whether that be rice or potatoes, corn, using those types of things for your starches, and then again, your non-starchy vegetables, your fruits, and your lean cuts of meat, or fish, or poultry, in those initial stages, and then once you get the label reading under your belt, you can start adding back in, some particular products. For example, maybe a rice pasta, that doesn't include any type of wheat, so those are just a few tips for you, on how to live with a wheat allergy."