Delicooks

For some people, following a gluten-free diet is crucial for their wellbeing; for others, however, it may be merely a temporary lifestyle choice. Celiacs have little choice in the matter – they suffer from a chronic disease that affects the small intestine's mucosa that is sensitive to gluten (the protein in some cereals) in such a way that prevents the absorption of nutrients. In other cases, people may have a mild degree of sensitivity to gluten without having celiac disease. For them, gluten may trigger an allergy. So it is eliminated from their diet for a while and then re-introduced to see if the condition persists.

Cereals containing gluten and should be avoided in these cases. They include wheat, rye, barley and oats.

As a substitute, we can use rice, corn, buckwheat, amaranth, millet, quinoa or tapioca.

Changing your diet can be a complicated task but there are ways to make things easier: make a new shopping list, consider doing workshops or cooking classes on the subject, cook with other cereals and have tasty recipes on hand. An important step is getting used to reading the labels of many consumer products, as there you'll find information on whether the product contains gluten or traces of it. The second step is to get used to home cooking again, cooking that's more natural and less "industrial", based on fresh fruit and vegetables, along with one of the permitted cereals. You should add some kind of biological protein such as eggs, cheese or yoghurt, tofu, seitan or veggie burgers.

If you're not a celiac, you can later start incorporating older wheat varieties such as buckwheat or kamut: these tend to be less processed and are less likely to be genetically engineered. They provide  more nutrition and are therefore better than white wheat. This wheat, which is the most widely used in the production of pasta, bread, pizzas, flours, cookies and pastries, has undergone many changes over the past generations to make the cereal grain more robust, resistant to infection, pests and herbicides and thus more productive. But this means that its protein has become difficult for the human digestive tract to recognize, causing a reaction of rejection and self-protection of the organism. With a replacement of white wheat with other products based on spelt and kamut, this reaction often disappears,  a reaction that may not have been due to the gluten, but rather to the protein. In all cases it is always best that each case be evaluated by a health professional.