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We've all been victim to those persistent celiac urban myths.  They circulate among the celiac community for years & years like the email hoaxes about drug laced toxic tatoos & surgically skilled kidney thieves in hotels.  Remember the myth about envelop adhesive?  Many of us believed for years, that we could get "glutenated" from licking envelops, until someone finally did some research & found out that envelop glue is made from tapioca starch!  I wonder how many celiacs are still afraid to lick envelops?  After all, many of us still fear ketchup, vinegar, cheese, nuts, dried fruit & probably dozens of other safe food products simply because someone once thought they got "glutenated" from something or the other that was made from something or the other that made them sick!  We are SO vulnerable.  (Okay, okay, I'll speak for myself -- I'M SO VULNERABLE!  Ha ha ha!)



The celiac urban myth I really want to see authoritatively disproven is this one:  Medications are a MAJOR source of gluten.  I KNOW this is not true, but to date, no one has been able to authoritatively debunk it.  I truly believe this is an outdated & over hyped celiac urban myth based on a horror story from the past century.  You know the story about the celiac woman dying in the hospital & discovering that 11 or her 18 medications contained gluten.  So when she got off the medications, she recovered.  Hmmm... who can be sure it was gluten or the medications that were killing her????  I personally don't believe the details of this story are accurate as there was no testing done on the medications for gluten content.  Besides even if this story did happen and her medications did contain gluten, it happened a LONG time ago before our current level of gluten awareness.  



Times have changed, but rumors persist.  I believe the reason the gluten in medication myth won't go away is because most pharmaceutical companies will not definitively guaranty their drugs are GF.  But when push comes to shove, I challenge anyone to find a commonly prescribed or OTC medication that actually, really, truly contains gluten.  We often assume that "not GF" means "contains gluten", but that's not necessarily true.  So the urban celiac myth that medications are a MAJOR source of gluten persists along with fear and paranoia from both sides:  the celiac consumer fearing the omnipresent gluten and the manufacturer fearing the omnipresent threat of litigation.



Hopefully someday this will change.



Valerie in Tacoma
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