<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

Sorry for being late with this summary.  Seems like a simple question,
but I bit off more than I could quickly chew, much less digest, in
asking it.  Although there were only about seven or eight replies,
important parts of a full summary of two of them would require getting
quite technical.

Some of the replies were not at all technical.   Three people said
forget about it,  just go by the ingredients and/or your reactions,
either because "they don't test" or because the tests aren't sensitive
or comprehensive enough to detect everything that might hurt you.  One
said run a test on yourself by starting with consuming  just lemon
juice, then adding things one at a time to see how you react to them.

The latter advice wouldn't have done the trick for me (or some others
who wrote that they too were very interested in finding out how how
things are tested) because glutinous foods don't (or at least didn't
used to) produce an immediately discernible reaction.  It was rather the
build up of damage subtly over a long period of time that did me dirt.
That subtle damage is the rule rather than the exception is a reason why
most people with CD are never diagnosed.  It's why four people's answers
were about concerns that stuff that listed only GF ingredients might
have some contaminant that bad for one or one's kids.

What I won't post because of length nor even summarize adequately here
are lengthy and intelligibly worded descriptions that I received from
one of the people on this list who works in a lab testing proteins.  She
uses similar methods to those used to test for the presence of our
favorite villain proteins.  She consulted literature and spoke with a
lab colleague to get more information for this topic.  She described in
terms I could pretty well follow (I took biology and chem last in HS
over 60 years ago) just what the lab does in performing the tests.  She
also gave me answers on how sensitive, discriminating and reliable
testing could be to help me answer whether it is possible for amounts of
offending molecules large enough to harm a CD could elude the test.  Her
co-worker reports that it is possible to detect amounts of specific
proteins down to one nanogram, far less than could accumulate to a
harmful amount.  So for her, the issue is not what testing can do but
rather what testing is actually being done.  I learned about no
specifically agreed upon standards, much less enforceable ones, required
for goods, medicines, or other stuff to he called GF,  other than that
companies should take  pains  to insure that nothing but listed GF
ingredients were allowed in a product so labelled.

As for a brief reference I liked, I'll cite Article #10 in the CSA
Library Series <http://www.csaceliacs.org/gliadinfood.html>.

OM
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