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

I feel I must respond to this post. I realize the researchers meant well and I do think that celiacs can tolerate oats as long as they are in fact GF oats. The problem really is getting processed oats that are truly GF. Now I can imagine the researchers did this research in a laboratory environment under lab conditions. And they probably started out with pure oats that they identified and raised, and processed them when they did the testing. However, those lab conditions don't exist in the farms and mills and food-manufacturing world we live in. Farms are not sterile. Neither are mills.

Here is what I posted to Rosalie. It is a bit anecdotal but it tells exactly what we are up against with the problem of finding a truly GF oat product:

I bought a product called "Cosmic Kitty Herbs" for my cat. It is a bag full of grass seeds. A look at the ingredients says

"Barley, variety not stated, 39.66%
Oats, variety not stated, 39.66%
Wheat, variety not stated, 19.83%
Pure seed, 99.15%
Other crop seed, 0.56%
Inert matter, 0.28%
Weed seed, 0.01%
Noxious weed, none
Germination 91.0%"

What they tell you to do with these seeds is bury a scoop of them in a little pot one-inch down in the soil and water them, give them sun, and they will germinate. When the grasses shoot up the cats see them and come nibble on them. And it worked. The cats saw the shoots in the pot and came over and started nibbling on the grass shoots. I guess they do that to help their digestion. I think that's what it says on the package.

Anyway

Dang if I can tell which one of the seeds in this package are the oats. They all look so much the same in the package that it would take a practiced, trained eye of a botanist to be able to point out which is which and what the differences are between them. In fact when they were growing in the pot I still couldn't tell which was which. When they got real tall I could start making out which was the wheat (that was obvious). But I still couldn't tell the barley from the oats.

My thinking was maybe I could grab the oat seeds out from the package and try growing a mini crop of oats. But I don't know how to process them so I gave up on the idea. But I began to see what the problem is in separating out oats from wheat from barley just by this little thing I did.

If you want to see how difficult this is, the difference in spotting the differences between wheats, oats, and barley, I bought these kitty herbs at the local supermarket here, Safeway. I looked up Cosmic's web site and found the product. You can see it here: http://www.cosmicpet.com/detail.asp?col=3&id=6  the "kitty herbs" are in the middle of that web page. Cost like $2  at Safeway I think.

But once I saw this with my own eyes I realized how improbable it is to expect there to be such a thing as commercially available oats which are truly 100% GF. After seeing the difficulty in identifying these seeds by my own eyes I could imagine making a GF oat product a goal in a mill which purchases oats from farms that raise wheat and barley also would mean a truly GF oat product by said mill would be practically impossible.

Now if someone can do the "oats only" thing, that is farm a crop of only oats, no wheat, no barley, no rye next to the farm fields, and then harvested only those pure oats, and then transported it to a mill that only produces oat products, i.e., this is the "dedicated oat farm and oat plant" scenario, then I would say the mill would have a good chance of making a truly GF oat product. But you can see the difficulties involved in such a scenario right?

And in our mass production, mass farming world, I doubt we'll ever see something like this happen. It would take a rich celiac who likes oats and has the money to farm only oats and can afford to buy his own mill to make nothing but GF oats, that's about the only scenario I could imagine that would lead us to a truly GF oat product.

See this pretty much tells what the problem is here, and that is the problem that the researchers testing for gluten reaction in children because of oats did not address in the lab. The problem is commingling of wheat, oats, and barley, and the extreme difficulty in identifying which is which. Now if the researchers at the lab doing that study would like to go into production and transfer their lab growing and milling of the oats to a mass production facility and they can figure out how to make oat milling production 100% GF all the time, that would be great and I would be willing to give their product a try.

However, I know now this is a virtual impossibility, so the reason this study was done, and who was funding it, these become questions in my mind. What was the goal of the study? To tell us we can eat oats because they are in fact GF, but since the oat mills aren't GF we shouldn't eat them? That kind of goes without saying. But as of now if I eat a bowl of Quaker Oats I'm messed up for a week. Now that's gluten for certain.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this. Buy some of those "Cosmic Kitty Herbs" for yourself and you can see what we and what the mills and farms and transportation, etc, etc are all up against in one day being able to produce a truly GF oat product.

Jerry

* Please carefully compose your subject lines in all posts *