My wife actually has celiac disease. It’s a real fucking disease that’s caused her all sorts of problems. Her food has to have less than 20 ppm of gluten in it, and it can’t even be made in a factory that makes other things with gluten. Not everybody with “gluten intolerance” is on a fad diet. She’d give anything to be able to drink Guinness again, or eat real bread.
But you mention gluten in a restaurant, and people start making fun of you because of all the health nuts.
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I feel for you both. Its a tough condition to deal with. One hand the fad means you have more choices; the bummer is, as a fad, there’s a backlash that you’re getting hit with too.
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I’m not gluten intolerant but eating a lot of breads, noodles, etc. tends to make me fat so I’ve cut back to a (roughly) paleo diet six days a week and immediately started losing excess weight. Getting rid of sugar probably didn’t hurt either.
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A lot of the time, dietary restrictions help because it means you’re paying attention to what you eat. You could be eliminating anything - say, reducing your salt intake - and you might see similar effects just because you’re not just mindlessly stuffing your gob. 
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Well it wouldn’t be good if you wanted a substantial meal, but then we all know it’s a good idea for people to have some greens now and then. Top them off with a slice of orange or two, and maybe complement the whole thing with some burgundy, and it doesn’t sound so bad. I might go there when I felt like a light snack.
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I don’t disagree with that. Cutting out sugar, baked goods, bread, etc. removes a lot of excess calories and simple carbs.
I don’t think I’d lose more than 14 lbs cutting out just salt though. 
Celiac /= gluten intolerance. Gluten intolerance is a seperate, novel, as near as I can tell now largely disproven disorder that was technically called “non-celiac gluten intolerance”. What people are complaining about here, and what the guys mocking in the video above is not celiac, its the nebulous ill defined intolerance to gluten, or the lifestyle diet that posits gluten as evil deadly stuff for all humans. Both of which are BS.
I’ve got a number of friends with Celiac, most of them are even more annoyed by the gluten free trend than I am. From what I understand most of your new gluten free products that have cropped up don’t hit the standard necessary for Celiac patients. They’ve got more than that 20ppm of gluten in them. So for my friends with Celiac, truly gluten free is technically more available. But its becoming exponentially difficult for them to differentiate between that truly gluten free stuff that’s safe for them, and “gluten free” trend products that actually aren’t safe. So they’ve got more variety, and more availability of the food they need. But paradoxically they’re more likely to make a mistake now and end up sick.
On top of that the difference between trendy gluten free menus and safe gluten free for Celiacs at a restaurant has become a problem. With gluten trend menus you don’t need to worry about cross contamination. With Celiac (depending on severity) it very much is a problem. So not only do my friends with Celiac have to really, really, stress that. But as a person who works in restaurants I now have to have lengthy conversations with everyone who mentions gluten about Celiac, cross contamination etc. Often telling Celiac patients that sadly, we don’t have the staff or space to handle cross contamination properly. Despite our gluten free menu items. So the lady with the purse dog and long list of entitled demands gets special treatment we really don’t want to give. And the person who we’d genuinely like to make allotments for is shit out of luck. Then there are the restaurant workers who are just so sick to death of the subject and will ignore gluten free requests, or out and out hide bread in gluten free dishes out of spite.
The same thing has been happening with allergies as well lately. The “is cross contamination an issue” question has been a life saver. Easy way to vet claims of food danger without insulting anyone.
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Well its not just that what your eliminating contains excess calories. There’s a well documented effect where by any attention paid to diet leads to weight loss. By virtue of paying attention to any one thing, salt, meat intake, carbs, avoiding sugar, hell even deciding you wont eat things with Ys in the name you now have to think about and check everything you eat. That’s can cause you to avoid things that are more calorically dense, or lead to you noticing calorie levels of the meals you eat, eating less of certain things, varying your diet more, skipping meals etc.
Its one of the things that makes diet research so hard. Even just having people write down/track what their eating while attempting to research “regular” or non-intervention diets causes people to eat better and lose weight. So your control thereby becomes one more diet change.
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Yes, yes. I do read things too. Thanks though.
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i tried to explain that to them. apparently live insects are not considered vegan.
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Fuck.
Right.
Off.
I can’t imagine anybody choosing to go gluten-free for the hell of it. It’s incredibly limiting - there is Nothing Fun About Gluten Free - just lots of delicious foods you can’t eat any more. And then you get people taking the piss - sure, why not make life harder for someone who already can’t eat pizza? Assholes.
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Including an ex-coworker of mine who claimed, when challenged about breatharianism, “Science doesn’t know everything!”.
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Yeah, and that’s a hell of a catch-22. My niece has a four-year-old daughter with celiac disease, and the lengths she has to go to in order to ensure her daughter’s diet remains safe are exhausting. She really has to make a pest of herself at restaurants, and everyone’s first instinct is to roll their eyes at her, but she just has to remain politely tenacious and insistent about the standards the food must meet (until the point where the politeness simply needs to melt away in the face of stubborn ignorance). It really ends up limiting where the whole family can eat, even though every other joint claims to have a “gluten-free” menu.
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Because eating huge amounts of calories and carbs is a big chunk of why most of the first world is 30 to 40% fatter than previous generations and cutting out bread and other wheat products removes most of the carbs we eat, leading to folks often being thinner? That’s why all of my friends but one that don’t eat gluten have done it. The one that did it for other reasons was because eating gluten sends her to the hospital.
Well, at least one of my countrymen has made money from it:
But yes, he has stopped short of marketing the diet.
I assume you’re aware that “paleo” is a prefix, right? Paleo-what?
(ducks) XD
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His ayahuasca video is pretty great.
In my experience most restaurant staff aren’t ignorant of these sorts of issues. They’re exhausted and aggravated by the shear volumes of bull shit claims, and bizarre expansion of special diet needs. And the raw, frustrating, unmanageable requests for increasingly complex special treatment. I once watched a couple sit, order drinks and an appetizer, consume said appetizer, order more drinks. Then the women asked to server if she can order a particular entree without the onion. She explained (pretty late in the game) that her husband was deathly allergic to onions. The waitress was horrified and started to apologize and explain that the appetizer they had just eaten contained onions. The woman said that no her husband was only allergic to raw onions. The waitress explained that the now long eaten appetizer contained raw onions, and the appetizer contained cooked ones, and attempted to figure out the particular terms of this mans allergy. The woman began shouting about how no! he’s not allergic to those onions! he’s allergic he’s allergic to these onions! while pointing at the menu. We gave up, swapped them to a different waitress and just kept onions out of their meal. We realized later they had been in the night before and both eaten salads with big ole slices of raw onions all up in that shit.
90% of dietary issues we get look like this. I had a table of six once drink 2 rounds of drinks, demand our vegan menu, then storm out without paying because we didn’t have one. The restaurant was advertised as meat centric, and nose to tail etc. The waitress told them we didn’t have a specific vegan menu, but she wanted to speak to the chef to see what off menu dishes he could do, as the chef got excited about experimenting with vegan food. Wasn’t apparently good enough. I later found none of the people in the group were vegan (we called the cops, cops found them eating oysters at another place). I’ve had people tell me they were allergic to fat. People tell me they have x medical condition where they can not have y ingredient, how its a matter of life and death. Then pull a container of that very same food out of a pocket and sprinkle it all over the dish. Usually salt, vinegar, oil, or some other condiment. Its insane. It makes us suspicious of people who genuinely have an issue. Unfairly sure. But with reason.
If you’ve got celiac don’t just ask for or assume a gluten free menu, don’t refer to yourself as gluten intolerant or be vague. Tell us you’ve got celiac first, and explicitly. Call ahead is even better. We know what it is, in all likelyhood we know what it takes to serve you safe food, and we definitely know if our kitchen can handle it. I once spent 20 minutes away from my bar reading ingredients lists in the dry good room to make sure there were no nuts in a customer’s meal. If there’s a legit issue we care. But we have to be able to tell, we have to know the terms of what you need. It also helps if you understand something of the requirements of a restaurant kitchen, and what it takes to properly deal with your needs. And if you aren’t patient, sensible and kind about it (almost all people with actual issues are) people are gonna lump you in with the crazies.
I’m sure your niece feels like a pest. But provided she’s being clear, I’m sure noone at the actual restaurant thinks so.
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Depends on the restaurant. The ones that are professional about it get repeat business. The others don’t.
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