We now seem to be spending far too much time in supermarkets reading lables and it is becoming more and more frustrating. There appears to be only a small amount of gluten free and wheat free food available but when you start searching and reading the ingredient lables there is more out there - its just difficult to find. This is probably true for the other food allergies I need to ask friends and family and see if they are as frustrated as us!
Eating out in restaurants is also interesting; some places have a gluten free menu which sounds great but then it turns out that the steak is wheat free! oh and the salad is wheat free as well what a surprise! To be fair there are some better restaurants that provide detailed allergy information for all their dishes. We will start a list of food allergy helpful restaurants and add it to these pages soon.
Another frustration is not knowing how easy it is for the rest of the world to find this blog. We are aiming to write an entry every day and try and provide helpful information to other people with food allergies but it is difficult to know when google, yahoo and the others will get round to including us on their pages. Also, when they do we will probably be on page 10,000!
If you are reading this then please create a login and leave me a comment!! Also if you know any web sites or blogs that we could create mutual links with please let me know as this will help our non existant page rankings!!!
Making decent wheat free bread is obviously difficult! We have been trying to find both gluten free and wheat free bread but the ones we have bought so far do not taste that good. The breads we have tried couldn't be eaten in a sandwich and whilst it has been better when toasted it is still nothing like "normal" bread. On the plus side it does appear to keep for months if its un-opened but that probably shows how unlike normal bread it is!
We will continue to try and find the best bread; both gluten free and wheat free and will post a new blog with our recommendation. We will also try and make some bread and see if it could be eaten as normal or only as toast like the commercial kinds.
A friend has suggested that bread made from Spelt flour could be the answer but I think that is wheat free only; not gluten free. Either way we will try and find some!
Our daughter was six months old, exactly the right age to start weaning and as she was our second child we thought we knew what we were doing. So several months followed of trying her on a range of fruits, vegetables and grains, slowly introducing each one and watching her enjoy the flavours and textures.
We then started to notice that she had some rashes, most in the areas where you would expect eczema to be, elbows and knees, but some were on her face and she seemed to be getting puffy and more and more unhappy. She used to be a baby that happily went off to sleep on her own but now she was trashing around in the cot and couldn't settle at night. Then something clicked to explain what was going on. It seemed that a few minutes after having certain foods the rash got worse and she started to itch and get upset. We worked out that wheat and certain fruits were the cause; this was later confirmed at an allergy clinic. Since the diagnosis and eliminating wheat and fruit she has returned to a happy and healthy toddler.
We now have 5 family members with food allergies; one Coeliac, 2 with dairy intolerances, 1 with wheat intolerance and our daughter with a wheat and fruit allergy. We have also found out the difference between a food intolerance and a food allergy and are spending more and more time trying out the "Free From Food" ranges in our local supermarkets with mixed success.
