So you want to know what isn't safe? A whole lotta stuff. The 3 main foods that gluten is found in (wheat, rye, barley) are also ingredients in a major amount of other food products. For example, cookies are made of wheat flour, certain breads are made from rye and beer is often produced with barley. These are all examples of unsafe foods that contain gluten.

Gluten containing products aren't always so easy to spot however. Gluten is used in such obscure items as lipstick and envelope adhesive. It is for this reason that it is extremely important to read labels on any product that goes on or in the body. If you have been doing your own research into Celiac Disease and gluten, you may have heard about gluten being "hidden" in oddly named ingredients. This is true. Some of these names people are talking about are the following: maltodextrin, maltose, starch, caramel color, and a handful of others. The idea with these ingredients is that depending on how they are made they may contain gluten.

The reason these items may contain gluten is that some manufacturers produce these items using wheat, rye or barley in their processing. For instance, "starch" can be any kind of starch, either made from corn, potato or in some cases wheat. This is how gluten can be "hidden" in certain ingredients.

How do you tell how the ingredients were made? Well, there's no sure way to tell, but the best idea is to contact the manufacturer of the food to find out. It's recommended you search the internet through a search engine such as Google about whether or not that product is gluten free before you spend your time contacting the company. Odds are that someone has already contacted that same company about that same product and made that information available online. However, it is important to keep in mind that this information could be outdated or simply incorrect, so contacting the manufacturer is the ideal way of obtaining information on a particular product.

Cross contamination is when a normally non-gluten containing item comes into contact with a gluten containing item and consequently becomes contaminated with gluten from it's contact with it. It is this same idea of cross contamination that prohibits people with Celiac Disease from eating most forms of oats that are commercially sold. The same equipment used to process a lot of raw wheat crop is also used for oats, making most oats contaminated and inedible for people who cannot consume gluten. Below you can view an example of how cross contamination works.

Read, read, read labels! This is the only way you will know what you're putting in or on your body and making sure you aren't ingesting gluten in any way. At first this may seem pain staking, boring and maybe even frustrating, keep at it! It only gets easier and it will make your life a lot less complicated if you just master this simple practice of monitoring what you buy and consume carefully.

It is imperative to note that you will NOT always see at the bottom of an ingredient list all of the main allergens in the product. For example, when you look at a box of cookies you may see that under the list of ingredients it will say "Contains: Wheat, soy, eggs". But you will NOT always see this on all ingredient labels, and even if you do, STILL read the ingredient list looking for barley and rye and those other "hidden" ingredients.

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