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

When it comes to ingesting gluten, the parts per million of gluten content
of a food can serve as a guide as to whether a food may be considered
gluten-free but in real life, it is also how much you eat that matters.

If you accept, as suggested in studies over the years, that most celiacs can
tolerate 10 milligrams (mg) of gluten per day without adverse effects and
you also accept that 20 parts per million (ppm) is a safe level then the
question becomes how much of a given food at 20 ppm can you safely ingest? 

Ppm can be expressed in any units you choose. 20 snowflakes per million
snowflakes; 20 water drops per million water drops; tons per million tons,
etc. In this case, we'll use grams. Ppm can be expressed as a fraction 20
grams/1,000,000 grams or a decimal 0.00002.

First let's consider how much 10 mg actually is. A typical grain of rice
weighs roughly 30 mg so we're talking about the weight of about 1/3 of a
grain of rice in pure gluten. 

Now 10 mg is equal to 0.010 grams (g). To find out how much we have to eat
of a food containing 20 ppm gluten to ingest 10 mg, we divide that dose by
the gluten level in ppm. The calculation is 0.01 g/0.000020 = 500 g. Since a
pound is equal to 454 grams that means we would have to eat more than a
pound of a single food containing 20 ppm gluten in a day to exceed a 10 mg
dose.

What if a food contains 100 ppm gluten? You'd have to ingest 0.01 g/0.000100
= 100 g or about 3.5 ounces to get a 10 mg dose.

Would you knowingly eat just one ounce of a food containing 100 ppm gluten
(about 3 mg of gluten)? Your call.

The intent of this note is to put ppm in perspective, not to pick an
argument with the zero tolerance folks with whom I wholeheartedly disagree.
But when you think about it very few of us eat more than a pound of any
single food in a day so a 20 ppm standard sounds pretty reasonable to me. 

Let the flames begin!!!

Joel Elias
Pittsford, NY

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