Thankfully shopping has become a less arduous task for wheat-watchers over recent years, as an increasing number of wheat-free ingredients and products have become available. Take a look in the ‘well-being’ and organic aisles, for instance, and you’ll find lots of interesting new wheat-free products from all over the world. Alternatively, you can buy the foods and ingredients that you need from health food shops, by mail order or on the internet (you’ll find a helpful list of stockists here).
Thanks to chefs like Jamie Oliver, cooking is now tremendously popular again – even amongst the young, many of whom are seeing it as cool for the first time. The TV food programs portray the fun and excitement of cooking and I want to show that cooking for food intolerance needn’t be any different. The recipes in this book will ensure that cooking is an enjoyable experience – no matter what your age or level of experience.
With today’s fast pace of life, shared family meals have inevitably become rare. Lifestyle changes and busy schedules mean that TV dinners and the general ‘grab and graze’ culture have become part of our way of looking at food and cooking it. However, I hope that the selection of quick, easy and comforting recipes in this book will encourage a return to everyone congregating in the kitchen and helping to prepare a delicious meal, as well as chatting and dining together.
My aim with this book is to provide plenty of delicious alternatives to products that normally contain wheat. You will therefore find the pages packed with wonderful breads, muffins, cakes, desserts and pies made with a wide variety of nutritious cereals such as rye, barley, oatmeal, rice, corn, millet and quinoa. And so that you can enjoy life to the full and not miss any of the normal foods that we eat on a day-to-day basis, I have also included many recipes that can be enjoyed by your family, your friends or at work – those who don’t suffer from intolerances won’t know the difference!
Improved health is the usual objective of those cutting out wheat – but it can have other advantages too. Wheat intolerance can be an important factor in a failure to shed excess weight. If you are eating a balanced diet and are in relatively good health yet still have difficulty losing weight, it may be that food intolerance is playing a part. This is because food intolerance can encourage the body to hold on to excess fluid. When the offending food is removed, weight loss often occurs. Abdominal bloating is often a sign that the digestive system is not dealing very well with a specific food and the most common food that is known to cause this problem is wheat.
The Trouble with Wheat
A large percentage of people eat too much wheat. If you think about the average daily diet, just three or four foods show up repeatedly. For example, an everyday breakfast of toast with butter and marmalade consists of wheat flour (bread), dairy (butter) and sugar (marmalade). A typical pasta salad for lunch would mean more wheat and dairy, whilst a dinner of pizza or chicken pie would again include wheat (in the pizza base or the pastry). And let’s not forget snacks – biscuits, doughnuts, crispbreads and bagels are all popular snacks and each one contains wheat.
Many people don’t think about the constituents of their meals and imagine they are eating lots of different foods. In fact, many meals are essentially the same but are processed, assembled or cooked differently.
Variety is the spice of life and one of the core principles of a healthy diet is exactly that – plenty of variety. If we eat a wheat-laden diet day in day out, year after year, it’s no wonder our systems become overloaded, give up the struggle and become sluggish. Our bodies need the whole spectrum of nutrients and we cannot get these if we eat the same foods repeatedly.
Wheat has a nutritious and wholesome image because it is considered to be a good source of carbohydrates and dietary fibre. However, whilst we undoubtedly need both these elements in our diet, today’s wheat flour is so over processed that the end product – the mass-produced bland bread that fills the supermarket shelves – bears little resemblance to the kind of healthy, wholemeal bread that our grandparents ate.
Since the arrival of mass production in the 1960s, wheat-filled foods have been the fastest growing items on the supermarket shelves. They are cheap and filling – which is what both the manufacturers and the majority of shoppers want – but, in order to produce the vast amounts of flour needed at the right price, wheat is sprayed with insecticides and fungicides. To then turn that wheat into bread can also involve an amazing number of processes. The wheat germ (which is high in vitamin E, has many of the B vitamins and is good for us) is often removed because it can turn rancid quickly and would therefore spoil the flour faster than the manufacturers would like. To make white flour, the bran is also removed; this is the outer part of the grain, which is a good source of niacin, iron, zinc, B vitamins and fibre. They may also irradiate the wheat in order to avoid contamination by insects. Having done all this, manufacturers then sometimes use chemicals, conditioners and preservatives to improve the texture and shelf life of the end product.
Unfortunately, all these processes result in most of the vitamins and minerals originally contained in the wheat being lost so the manufacturers often add synthetic vitamins and minerals, which the body has great difficulty absorbing.
Given this treatment, it’s little wonder that the nutritional value of your average mass-produced loaf of wheat bread, or other wheat-laden products, is often rather poor. Personally, I would rather make my own – with the help of today’s bread-making machines it’s not the arduous task it once was.
Intolerances and Allergies
One of the main reasons that people give up wheat is because they discover – or suspect – that they have an intolerance to it. The exact cause of food intolerance is as yet unclear. However, repeated over-consumption of a particular food undoubtedly plays a central part in its development – hence the most common culprits in food intolerance are wheat, dairy produce, yeast and sugar.
Food intolerance can cause a myriad of symptoms and although they are usually mild at first, they often gradually worsen over the years. This list below outlines some of the most common symptoms of wheat intolerance:
• A bloated stomach
• Regular flatulence (gas) or indigestion
• Diarrhoea or constipation for no apparent reason
• Fluid retention
• Grogginess on waking in the morning
• Feeling permanently tired
• Brain fog or sleepiness after eating a wheat-filled snack or meal
• Headaches
• Aches and pains for no apparent reason
• Skin conditions
• A craving for foods containing wheat
• Fluctuating weight despite having a very healthy diet, exercising regularly and drinking plenty of water
Food intolerance is notoriously difficult to detect because the reaction to the offending food is slow and symptoms are not felt for a few days. It is therefore not easy to connect the offending food to the symptoms it causes. Also, given that the culprit food is usually one that we eat very regularly, the symptoms can be on-going and we often attribute them to something completely different, such as stress. There are certain conditions that are now strongly linked to food intolerance; in particular an intolerance to wheat or dairy. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a prime example – when wheat is removed from the diet the condition often improves dramatically or clears up completely.
There are various tests available for food intolerance, though generally these should be treated with caution, as many of them are unreliable. Your doctor will be able to arrange for you to see a qualified nutritionist