General Chat

Hi Joy
Thanks, it was kind of you but as you now know we are old hands. My OH has known of the problems of GF for about 55 years. He has a non blood nephew who was diagnosed as a baby and so remembers the dreadful tinned bread.

It is not the surgery that decides, ours was actually much better at prescribing than others in the area. It is the local commissioning bodies that make the decision. Lots of them are now not allowing anything. I think the law has changed but they are not required to restart if they had already ended it
:-P
I can’t see that people would volunteer for that trial. I met several that think they have a problem and stop eating gluten and then refuse to start eating it again so that they could be tested. That even goes back to when you could get almost everything on prescription. I even knew of a breast cancer patient being refused prescriptions and told to buy it from the shops. As soon as she felt well enough she went back and argued the toss and won. It was very odd as my two were getting lots of stuff and she wasn’t and it was the same surgery, different GP.

I find that awful, names, for anyone suffering from breast cancer. She did right to go back and state her case.

I was furious.

I have a mild intolerance to gluten, in the form of very uncomfortable gastric wind. For preference, I now buy gluten-free breads, bagels and rolls, usually from the frozen case. There are a number of American and Canadian companies that have been making these for many years. I also buy gluten-free flour from a long-time mill down in the US.

Plus I always carry Gas-X or Gas-X Ultra with me so that if I cannot avoid gluten, I can quickly chew or swallow one of them.

It's dairy that causes me the really sick response, but I have found soy milk no problem. Soy sauce, yes .... but that Gas-X solves it for me.

I know what I get is nowhere close to what other people go through, it is just a very mild intolerance.

You probably know that French fries (chips) may be dipped in flour before frying to make them brown faster. Frozen fries are very likely to do that. I discovered the former when eating out here with a friend from England who had been diagnosed a couple of years earlier as being coeliac, and who had learnt by experience about the flour.

I was amazed some years ago when a restaurant refused to serve me fires with bbq'd ribs ....... never had a problem with fries, but the server refused point-blank. Apparently the frozen fries they used were made from reconstituted mashed potatoes, and she could not guarantee that they did not contain milk or wheat flour.

Well done that server.

With chips and fries you also have to ask if they have a dedicated fryer, because everything else fried is covered in batter.

We were lucky with our local fish shop as it had a separate vat for frying gluten-free items.

I hope it still does, but we haven't tried them since before March last year.