DO WE CHEAT?

Are we faithful or unfaithful to the gluten free diet? And if we are unfaithful, why do we cheat?

To answer this question, many surveys have been done to celiac people during the years. And the answer changes according to the age, the lifestyle, and the difficulties that people might have to follow a gluten free diet.

It has been showed that 10 up to 15% celiac people have cheated on their gluten free diet at least once or more than once!

The reasons why are several:

• Little information. Besides the fact that today people are getting more and more informed about celiac disease, there are still many that don’t understand the importance to follow the diet, especially if their symptoms are not that serious.
• Wrong information. “A bread crumb wouldn’t do you any harm” “How serious is the celiac disease that affects you?” “It’s been two years, now you have healed, you can eat some gluten, right?”
• Social events: going to restaurants that are not well informed about celiac disease not to oblige friends to go to places where you can eat only gluten free (this is an attitude typical of many teenagers).

This happens because eating is more than just nourishing ourselves. The act of eating is strictly linked to our lifestyle, our desires: social, emotional and cultural ones.

When we say the word “diet”, we often think of deprivation, sacrifice, that we can no longer eat what we like but actually diet is a much wider word that can embrace health, lifestyle, pleasure and happiness.

Next time we speak about gluten free diet let’s think about it differently: it could be look for new, alternative ingredients that are not the same old wheat…!

At Baci di Dama we believe that good health rhymes with varying what we eat as much as we can, be creative in the kitchen, have some fun. So next time we cook, why not replace wheat with quinoa, black rice, buckwheat..?

You can surf in our website and see that eating gluten free can actually be as good and fun to share with friends as it is eating with gluten.