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I just got sick after taking 3 mg of oral hyaluronic acid.  It's said to 
be gluten-free on their website, but a guy at the company told me there
were corn and wheat peptones involved in making it.  He thought all the
brands of oral hyaluronic acid probably are made the same way.

I'm virulently sensitive to corn as well as probably being very 
hypersensitive to gluten, so it could have been corn protein that made me
sick.  This oral hyaluronic acid is made from bacteria - they're grown on
something, probably something that's made from corn.  Xanthan gum is like
that - made from bacteria that are grown using corn-source food - and I've
read that it tests as corn-free in the lab.

It would be a very tiny amount of either corn or gluten that I got sick
from - something like one part in 20,000 of 3 mg - that is, about 0.15
micrograms.

They can say something is gluten-free even if it's made using wheat, as 
long as lab tests don't show any gluten.  I'm not sure of the exact laws
about it.  If you don't get sick from it, it's probably not doing you any
damage - on the website for this group there's a discussion by experts on
how much gluten a celiac can get without getting intestinal damage, and 
the amount they quoted was pretty large, about the gluten in one crouton
per day.

It's possible - but unlikely - that I actually got sick for some other 
reason.  I tried the oral hyaluronic acid, same amount, a week earlier and 
I thought I felt somewhat off about 4 hours later, but then I felt fine. 
I think I might have gotten sensitized to it, woken up my antibodies or 
something, in the intervening week.  Once, I thought I was reacting to
something and it turned out I had come down sick with a bladder infection. 
But, it's unlikely, because I know the time it takes for my reactions to 
come on, it's always pretty similar, and I got sick the right amount of time
after eating the oral hyaluronic acid.

There might have been about a couple of quadrillion molecules of 
gluten/corn protein in the 3 mg of hyaluronic acid.  That's something 
people don't really grok - the concept of "reacting to traces" is kind of
meaningless, because there are traces, and you can get 1/1000 of that 
trace amount - do you still react to that?  if you get 1/1000 of THAT 
trace, do you *still* react?  You could divide the amount of gluten I 
might have gotten by 1000, 4 times, and still have molecules of gluten in
there.

If it's made using wheat it's going to have SOME gluten in it.  Probably
everything around us has SOME gluten, just because we don't live on the 
moon, and there's gluten in ppb or parts/trillion amounts everywhere.

Laura

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