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

Thank you all for your information.  I pretty much learned that since
Gluten is a protein simply frying it isn't going to destroy it.  I guess I
was hoping those tiny little crumbs of bread floating around would be burnt
to a crisp and not be a problem.  Apparently I was wrong.  For those of you
who asked to see some of the answers here are two that seem to some up
everyone's responses pretty well:

There's a difference between sterilisation of food and major breakdown
of
food.  Coeliac disease is caused by a protein.  Those chips and other
foods
deep fried contain proteins (as well as starch - in the chips) and this
is
not destroyed by the cooking, merely altered slightly.  Unfortunately,
this
alteration in cooked gluten and the fragments of gluten called gliadins,
which also trigger the disease, is not enough to destroy the triggering
ability.

From my close study of my wife's diet, I believe it's right to say that
cooking does reduce the effects of gluten somewhat (although I have seen
 no scientific evidence of this).  However this is only a change in degree
and unlikely to ever be enough to make it safe.
Most coeliacs seem to be affected by about 50 milligrams a day of
gluten/gliadin (that's the name of the wheat proteins; barley and rye
have other names for their different "glutens" and "gliadins".  The numbers
are roughly the same).  That's a bit more than 1/600 of an ounce!  Now it
doesn't take much contamination in the oil to put a large percentage of
that onto your chips, chicken-leg or whatever from the oil (as a teenager,
I used to work evening in a Fish and Chip shop over here in the UK and the
bits  of batter were much more likely to be large fractions of an ounce!).

another e-mail less scientific:
Gluten is not a germ to be killed but a string of amino acids--proteins.
Think of it as beef, also a protein...deep frying it does not change it--it
is still beef...Only way to change the molecular structs is to turn it into
something other than beef--Burn it to charcoal--pure carbon, pretty hard to
do in oil at 375 degrees.

Risk comes when you put g.f. food in the oil and these bits of gluten in
the boiling oil get stuck to it.  Good example of Cross Contamination--
gluten getting from one place to another by indirect means.

Fish fries are a Friday night ritual in Milwaukee.  Shortly after I was
diagnosed, I went to one at our church.  Unbreaded fish was in ths same
cooked as the breaded fish...I might just as well have eated the good
breaded fish for as sick as I got...

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