If you haven’t taken the time to review current TSA regulations, you may not realize that you can carry food with you on an airplane. Not only can you carry it, it can be in opaque containers larger than 3.5 ounces.
I have carried nuts, fruit, tuna, muffins and boiled eggs. I place the loose items in Tupperware® containers. I purchase tuna in a pouch. I peel the boiled eggs and place them with a sprinkle of salt and pepper in a reused sour cream container.
For ease at the X-ray machine, I put all the containers in a gallon zip top bag that I remove from my carryon and place in the plastic tub along with my shoes. I have never been detained, searched, or asked for explanation because of the food.
Gluten-Free Carryon Food
Carrying gluten-free snacks has several benefits. Perhaps the most important is that having a gluten-free item within reach keeps me from being tempted to grab the first thing I see when my plane lands late, I am starving, and I have to scramble to make my connection. Another benefit is that I don’t have to pay the inflated prices charged by many airport vendors. I can also enjoy a snack on the aircraft along with the other passengers even when the airline doesn’t offer an acceptable option.
My greatest concern isn’t always whether I will be able to find a gluten-free snack or meal. Because I am hypoglycemic, my greatest concern is often whether I will be able to find a gluten-free snack or meal before I go too long without food. Having the option of carryon food eases this concern so I can feel good about planning as much travel as much as my budget and schedule will allow.
If you have been hesitant to plan a trip involving airline travel, there’s no need to limit yourself. Get those bags packed and have a great trip!
Ever wonder why your digestive system seems to be rebelling even though you’ve been meticulously gluten-free? Me too.
Being quite the social butterfly, I used to think I must be getting bad information from waiters on a regular basis allowing minute amounts of gluten to infiltrate my diet. I no longer believe this.
Lacking a definitive scientific study on which to rely, I will simply tell you what I’ve learned through trial and error. The less gluten-free grain I consume, the better I feel.
Mind you, the effect is not immediate, but it is quick. It takes about a week of eliminating complex carbs from my diet for me to suddenly feel 10 pounds lighter, have my bowel function to return to normal, have less sudden energy drops from low blood sugar, and to feel totally free of intestinal discomfort.
It is possible that Elaine Gottschall had it right when she wrote “Breaking The Vicious Cycle” outlining the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. While not widely accepted by the current medical and nutrition community as significant, Elaine’s book was not written by an untrained, uneducated, or uninformed lay person.
Elaine was a biochemist and cell biologist whose daughter was a patient of Dr. Sidney V. Haas. As you may know, Dr. Haas was a pediatrician and researcher who in 1924 published a medical paper detailing his use of the banana diet for treatment of Celiac Disease. His research led to the development of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). During his career, Dr. Hass treated over 600 cases of Celiac Disease and in 1951, along with his son, published a medical textbook entitled “The Management of Celiac Disease”.
The basic premise of the SCD is that the elimination of all carbohydrates that are polysaccharides (complex carbs) from the diet in favor of monosaccharides (simple carbs) can correct malabsorption and reverse the course of many intestinal disorders by starving out an overgrowth of bacteria or yeast from the system.
The first time I followed, yes that’s right I said the FIRST time, the SCD, I ran a 101º fever for a week. After that week I began to improve. After a year on the diet, my belly felt better than it ever had in my adult life, and my skin, which had always been prone to breakouts, was completely clear. After a year and a half on the diet, I began to add back complex carbs – yummy tortilla chips, gluten-free crackers, arrowroot cookies – oh yeah! Except that after a while I went from oh yeah to oh OWWW!
No matter what I would like to be true, I feel better without grain. I feel better without potatoes. I feel better when I limit the chocolate, sugar, milk, and soybeans in my diet. When I consume tortilla chips, my belly hurts. When I bake with potato starch, my belly hurts. When I eat gluten-free pasta for 3 days in a row (I make a mean mac & cheese and the leftovers are awesome) my diarrhea returns.
I don’t know if all grains act as toxins to my system triggering a brain response or whether my symptoms are attributable to bacterial overgrowth or whether it’s a combination of the two. I’m not sure I need to know. I know that my system responds positively on the SCD. I know it makes logical sense because eliminating foods that are harder for my digestive system to break down takes a load off my body. My body can then redirect its energy to healing and proper functioning. What more do I really need to know?
Of course I need to know what I can and cannot eat. That’s easy. I can buy “Breaking the Vicious Cycle”, or visit http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info/legal/legal_illegal_a-c.htm.
Waiters and chefs in restaurants will need to know what I can eat, so I’ll carry Cooking2Thrive® SCD server cards with me to communicate the information easily.
That covers what I need to know. You may want to know if there are good SCD recipes available.
That answer is easy as well. Cooking2Thrive will soon release a series of chef-tested recipes that are SCD compliant and scrumptiously tasty. These recipes include: Empire Waist Cheese Crackers, Health Nut Applejacks (pancakes), Lemon Kiwi Muffins, Coconut Pound Cake, Cheesecake, Cinnamon Shortbread Cookies, 3 Pepper Fried Chicken Tenders, Meat Loaf, Pistachio Encrusted Chicken, Personal Pizza Margherita, Gorgonzola Tarragon Deviled Eggs, Stuffed Summer Squash, Apple Slaw, and many more.
Hopefully science will eventually support the trends many of us already anecdotally observe. In the meantime, if you’re gluten-free and experiencing recurring digestive problems, please consider taking the burden off your body. Follow the SCD for awhile (if it’s SCD compliant, it’s automatically gluten-free). You too may find that with no grain you see more gain.
We’ve become so accustomed to drive through food that we think in order to be “fast”, a meal must include a wait in the car and a sandwich of some sort. To think of preparing a home cooked meal without using processed food sounds overwhelming or like an activity to be saved for that special occasion. For many of us, this becomes reason enough not to consider a gluten-free lifestyle or to haphazardly adhere to its restrictions. So what is the reality? Does being gluten-free really take too much time?
Last night Ben and one of his friends showed up an hour before we were scheduled to go to a movie. Knowing Ben, I guessed that he had showed up early looking for food, so instead of waiting for them to ask, I offered chicken soup. A couple of embarrassed shrugs later they had piping hot bowls of Eight Days a Week Rosemary Chicken Soup topped with shredded parmesan cheese, some Killer Beans, and dried apricots. Without any effort greater than looking for clean bowls and spoons, these young men were consuming a tasty, healthy, satisfying meal. Including the 4 minutes of microwave warming, it didn’t take any longer than driving through one of the 6 fast food restaurants they had passed on the way to my house.
These beans are killer good!
Both of these young men are gluten eaters and both of them are familiar with my household, so they knew I might not have a loaf of bread or box of crackers handy. They could have easily grabbed a quick sandwich on the way instead of opting for a gluten-free meal. And yet they didn’t. The second I wondered why, I was transported back in time to my grandmother’s house.
My parents owned a business across one street and a large yard from my grandmother’s house. Through her 60s and 70s, my grandmother walked to work every day. I worked for my parents periodically and would sometimes follow my grandmother home at the end of the day. Without fail, when I walked through the door she would offer me food. It might be chili with some cottage cheese and pears, or a slice of ham with English peas and sliced tomatoes, or if I was really lucky some beef and noodles with a carrot and raisin salad. The fare was always simple, ready in a few minutes, and always delicious. My sister and I both loved to stop by.
No matter how much I may like some fast food french fries, they are never as delicious as the simple homemade dishes my grandmother had handy in the refrigerator. For us those foods were “fast”, but what about for my grandmother?
My grandmother taught me how to make chili so let’s start with that. I can make a big batch from start to finish in 30-40 minutes. All the ingredients are readily available from my pantry with the exception of ground beef or ground turkey. 30-40 minutes for 8 servings is no more than 5 minutes per serving. As an added bonus, the cost savings is huge!
Now let’s look at a dish I haven’t yet mastered. My grandmother cooked beef cubes for beef and noodles in a pressure cooker. I don’t have one of those because I fear I’ll blow up the kitchen, but I’ve read that it takes 10-15 minutes at high pressure to cook beef cubes. The noodles can be cooked while the beef is being pressured. That means this dish probably takes 45 minutes including prep time and it is a family favorite. She always made enough for at least 12 servings so that’s less than 4 minutes per serving.
Of course these entrees don’t tell the whole time story, but being a great planner my grandmother would reheat an entree she had cooked for Sunday dinner and serve it with freshly cooked vegetables on Wednesday making the whole process look effortless and feel inviting. All of us can easily do that.
Yes, I recognize that times have changed. Everything moves faster. We work more. We have more scheduled activities. I have a 60+ hour per week job and I know how it feels to juggle work, family, and a social life. Given our current lifestyles, does gluten-free really take too much time or do we just assume that it will?
Let’s go back to the meal I served Ben last night as an example: I cooked the chicken soup in three steps on different days. Step one was brining and took 5 minutes of prep. Step 2 was cooking the chicken. It also took 5 minutes of prep plus 1 1/2 hours of cooking, so I did that last Saturday when I had a block of time at home. Step 3 included prepping vegetables. On the day I made the soup, I had already cleaned and prepped carrots, squash, and onion by chopping additional amounts when I was oven-roasting vegetables earlier in the week, then storing them in the fridge until the weekend. I had prepped the sugar snap peas (I like to trim off the ends) the night before while watching TV. With all that done, Step 3 took less 30 minutes including cooking time.
While I was brining the chicken, I was also soaking beans for the Killer Beans as well as for the soup. While I was cooking the chicken, I also cooked the beans. My prep time for 20 servings of food totaled less than an hour. In my household these servings were consumed in 8 meals. Adding in reheating time, the time consumed prepping, and each serving averaged 2 1/2 minutes of time in the kitchen. Only 2 1/2 minutes. That includes the initial cooking and prep time and it’s still less than the time I would have spent in 8 stops at a fast food restaurant and much less time than eating 8 meals in a sit-down-to-order restaurant.
Am I saying that I’m as consistently prepared as my grandmother, or that I don’t sometimes feel overwhelmed? No. But I recognize that many times when I feel overwhelmed by the idea of fixing dinner more than one night per week, all I have to do is shift my thinking away from the current cultural trends and remember how rewarding it was to eat at my grandmother’s table. I immediately feel renewed energy and excitement for getting into the kitchen to immerse myself in the tastes, colors, textures, and smells of cooking. The added bonus of eating a tasty meal at my kitchen table without worrying about dripping food on my blouse seals the deal for me. Get me out of this car & into the kitchen!
The next time you’re tempted to abandon the idea of strict adherence to a gluten-free diet because it takes too much time, take a moment to think about your mother’s chicken and dumplings, some piping hot cornbread, or the smell of cookies fresh out of the oven. Remember how you felt walking into a house that smelled like warm cinnamon. Go ahead, smile, relax and realize that you can easily have those feelings in your own home tomorrow by making a tiny shift in how you spend your time. The time you would have spent waiting in restaurants or your car can be spent at home.
Caring for myself and my family by providing a beautiful, delicious, healthy, gluten-free meal is absolutely worth whatever time it takes in the kitchen. And as we have seen, that time is less than the time I would spend waiting for food at a restaurant or drive through!
Be brave. Do your own time tests. The worst thing that can happen is you’ll make some great memories for your kids.
*Eight Days a Week Rosemary Chicken Soup and Killer Beans are original Cooking2Thrive® recipes.
The local newspaper recently featured an article entitled, “Excluding gluten”.(1) It was a basic exposition about the abundance of choices now available in a gluten-free version. This article, like many I’ve read lately, leaned toward proclaiming the gluten-free diet as necessary for a few, but mostly a fad made popular by Hollywood.
Today, I received a newsletter from Isabel De Los Rios of Beyond Diet.(2) In an article describing how to eliminate inflammation, she states: “If I had to choose just 1 thing to do right now to help reduce your inflammation it would be to greatly reduce your wheat and gluten intake.”
Eliminating wheat from your diet can have an astounding impact on how you look and feel.
Wheat wasn’t always so harmful like it is today. In the past, we had many different strains of wheat, but in modern times, in order to increase production, agricultural scientists created two hybrid strains. Right now more than 99% of the wheat grown worldwide comes from those two hybrid crops.
Genetically modified foods in any form can have an extremely negative impact on our health and weight. Dr. William Davis, a Wisconsin based cardiologist, points out that the hybrid wheat strain shows only 95% of the same proteins as its parent wheat strains: the other 5% are completely unique. This unique 5% of proteins is responsible for so many people’s wheat sensitivities. It’s becoming a huge epidemic and most everyone is allergic or sensitive to wheat in some form.
Which article is more accurate?
The rapid increase in the incidence of Celiac Disease, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and ADHD over the past 50 years seems to lend weight to the theory that we have a huge epidemic on our hands. Whether that’s because of a change in the amount of wheat we consume or in the wheat itself is not as critical to our health as is the recognition that for many of us, the need for a gluten-free diet is far from a fad.
It is interesting to note that the dietician quoted by our local newspaper predicts that “except for those who must absolutely maintain a GF regimen, the diet will come and go because ‘it’s really a hard diet’.” The different positions taken by this dietitian and Isabel De Los Rios (also a licensed dietitian) are striking, and common, making it difficult for some to discern whether or not sticking to a gluten-free regimen is truly important.
If you have had a physician or dietitian tell you that maintaining a gluten-free diet is hard, I hope you will take a moment to reflect on the fact that this is not a medical opinion. It is a personal belief held by the person who is telling you. Since it’s a personal opinion, there is no need to defer to it as the truth and dismiss the gluten-free diet as too difficult before you even try it. Chances are that if you are having this conversation with a health professional, the medical evidence points to a need for the diet.
Gluten may be the culprit when you have the following symptoms:
Fatigue or malaise – feeling tired and exhausted much of the time
Vague abdominal discomfort or significant abdominal pain
Upset stomach
Bloating
Flatulence
Recurring diarrhea or constipation, or one followed by the other
Steatorrhea – presence of excess fat in feces that may cause stools to have an oily appearance and float
Bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine
Gastric reflux – heartburn
Growth delay or failure to thrive
Unhappy with your weight
Eating problems – anorexia
Run-down
Weakness or lack of energy
Chronic fatigue
Joint pain
Poor coordination – unexplained falling
Peripheral neuropathy – tingling or burning in arms & legs, loss of sensation, or inability to control muscles
Coughing after every meal
Runny nose and sinus problems
Anemia – chronic iron deficiency
Osteoporosis or growing pains
Dermatitis, eczema, itchy or bad skin
Chronic dry eye
Nose bleeds or easy bruising
Alopecia – baldness or diffuse hair loss
Runny nose and sinus problems
Headaches or migraine
Depression, moodiness, behavioral changes
Can’t think clearly
Poor sleep
Hyperactive or cranky
Down syndrome
Short stature
Failure to thrive
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Autism
Mental health problems
Seizures
Hypoglycemia
If you can eliminate these symptoms simply by avoiding wheat, rye, barley, malt, and oats (other than certified GF oats), isn’t it worth a try even if it were hard? If you can eliminate these symptoms, feel better than you’ve ever felt, and enjoy a more full and joyous life with your loved ones, isn’t it worth the small investment of time and energy it takes to change old habits?
With the myriad gluten-free choices now available from restaurants, grocery stores, drug stores, and online, living the lifestyle becomes easier every day whether or not you choose to cook. All it takes is a bit of education, support and commitment. When you need additional encouragement and support, Cooking2Thrive® is here to help.
Conflicting opinions may abound regarding the difficulty of complying with a gluten-free diet, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that this lifestyle is not a fad, but an increasing medical necessity. With this in mind, we hope you’ll trust your body’s signals, seek a second opinion, and be willing to invest in your own healing.
Feeling fantastic and loving every minute of it!
Cheri
