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

QUIZ:

1. You bought mustard and pickles at the grocery store. These products
contain “distilled vinegar” according to the ingredients labels, and the
label does NOT say “contains: wheat.” Are the mustard and pickles
gluten-free?


2. Rum, gin, whiskey, and vodka are distilled beverages. If they are not
flavored with something that contains wheat (would be declared on the
label), rye, or barley (usually in the form of “malt”), are they
gluten-free?


3. What is wrong with the following statements (they have all been cut and
pasted from various blogs and forums on the topic of celiac disease)?

a. “Most alcohols are distilled in such a way that any wheat gluten is no
longer present.”

b. “Even trace amounts of gluten that make it past the filter system can be
harmful.”

c. “It seems improbable to me, too, that gliadin could survive the
distillation process.”


ANSWERS:

1.Yes, unless you have reason to believe otherwise, in which case you should
simply avoid them.


2. Yes.


3a. All alcohols, if distilled, have been removed from any type of gluten.

3b. Distillation is nothing like a filtration. We are not separating small
from large, there is no filter. Filtration would be like how your coffee pot
separates water from the coffee grains. A tear in the filter would result in
a big problem, right? Do you see how distillation is not the same thing as
filtration?

3c. Do we care whether gliadin (a name given to part of wheat gluten)
“survives” the process or not? No, because it has been left behind to stew
in its own juices in the distillation pot. Your stuff (the ethanol) has
floated away, and entered a new, clean pot. Some people have this idea that
we heat the fermented mixture to smithereens and it somehow decomposes the
molecules of gluten, or "kills" them (as if they were living). Clearly, such
a process would be ineffective or else we could simply “cook,” “roast,”
“fry,” or “burn” the gluten out of our foods, and we know that we cannot do
that.


Cheers,

Megan

* Please remember some posters may be WHEAT-FREE, but not GLUTEN-FREE *
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