Gluten Free Oats

The topic of gluten free oats is not quite as cut and dry as the other gluten free products. The reason is that Oats are not reliable for being gluten free. They are easily cross-contaminated from wheat, rye or barley. This cross-contamination usually occurs from the usage of shared equipment across different harvests. A recent study of three of the leading commercial producers of gluten free oats concluded that none of them could be relied up to be gluten free. In fact, because of the high levels of gluten they actually redefined "gluten free" for the study to mean less than 20ppm. Even so, nine of the twelve samples that were taken from these three primary commercial producers had gluten levels ranging from 23 ppm to as high as 1807ppm - a far cry from being gluten free.

So how is cross-contamination addressed? Well simply put it means that you need to isolation the entire process, from the growing stage to the processing stage. Everything and all equipment must be isolate so as not to transport contamination from one source to another - cross contamination. The biggest area affected by this is in the harvesting equipment. For years this equipment was deemed too expensive to have duplicate but separated purposed equipment. But the results speak for themselves. Those companies who have completely revamped their entire process from start to finish have come out on top and with very low gluten ppm values.

So, what can you do? You need to thoroughly research the company that you are purchasing from and drill them on their gluten PPM to find out just how close to gluten free your gluten free oats really are. But it is nothing to be overly dramatic about because research has shown that most people with celiac disease can safely eat small amounts of pure, uncontaminated oats (under the supervision of your doctor). Recently new specialized growers using dedicated fields and specialty equipment have made it possible to obtain high quality gluten free oats.

The debate between physicians about whether small amounts of oats are safe or not for patients with celiac disease has been going on for decades. The protein composition of oats is very different than that of wheat, barley and rye, but some doctors still caution that oats could have toxic effects on people with autoimmune responses to those grains. So, in fact, the jury is still out on this debate and you're likely to here passionate arguments on both sides of topic.

So once you have your gluten free oats and have cleared them for your diet with your physician, what kind of good stuff can you make? Well, just about anything that you could make with regular oats, such as, cooked oatmeal, oatmeal waffles, oat flour crepes, honey oatmeal bread, pizza crust, oat meal cookies, no back crunch cookies - you name it, if it's got oats in it, there's probably a corresponding gluten free version of the recipe floating around out there somewhere.