Before I was Gluten Intolerant (GI) I loved to cook. For about 10 years now I have had more of a love/hate relationship with food. The biggest change has been my feeling about potlucks and eating at other people's houses. When I first found out that I should live gluten free, I had no idea exactly how to accomplish that. The first list of foods to avoid was daunting. I wondered what there was that I could eat. At first I had to shop only at the Food Co-op or at the local health food stores. As the years passed, the availability of gluten free foods on the local grocery store shelves has exploded. I am so thankful for all those people who have worked to make "gluten-free" appear on product labeling. It saves me soooo much time shopping! We went to Wal-Mart the other day and I saw that Betty Crocker had a boxed mix for Gluten-free brownies. There must be money to be made in the GF field if Betty Crocker is on board!
The main issues I have about cooking GF are: the convenience foods are expensive compared to the similar non-GF products; it takes so much longer to cook everything from scratch (sometimes it feels like my days are spent either thinking about what to cook or cooking it or cleaning up after cooking); and finally, what's with all the refined sugar-full products?!
While learning about how full our common foods are with refined wheat and why that refining isn't necessarily good for us, along with that I realized how full our diets are with refined sugars and that is taking so many of us right into diabetes and obesity. In our local GF store I would venture a guess that at least half of the products have plenty of refined sugars in them. I have found that while trying to live GF you try to replace the foods you used to eat with GF alternatives. But it is the refined flours and sugars that got you to this health situation and we are just trying to replace those ingredients with something similar, only GF. That isn't really the point, is it? I lost 50 pounds when I first found out that I was GI. It was because there were no refined flours and sugars in my diet until I found those replacements. And when I found GF replacements. I gained those 50 pounds right back and they brought a few more friends as well.
