It can be stressful having gluten in your house. But is it necessary to have your home be completely gluten free? In today's episode I discuss how to make this work for you.
Previous episodes mentioned
Episode 2 - Keeping You Safe with Family and Friends when you have Celiac Disease
Episode 44 - Cross Contact Tips when you have Celiac Disease
Learn more about Ultimate Celiac System here
www.belindawhelan.com/ultimateceliacsystem
Join my free community and grab your copy of 11 Mistakes People Make Living Gluten Free here www.belindawhelan.myflodesk.com/11mistakes
Check out my Daily Health Tracker here
HEALTH TRACKER | The Healthy Celiac (belindawhelan.com)
And I would love to connect with you on Instagram thehealthyceliac
Please help share this podcast and head to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. Thank you!
Music Credit bensound.com
It can be stressful having gluten in your house. But is it necessary to have your home be completely gluten free? In today's episode I discuss how to make this work for you.
Previous episodes mentioned
Episode 2 - Keeping You Safe with Family and Friends when you have Celiac Disease
Episode 44 - Cross Contact Tips when you have Celiac Disease
Learn more about Ultimate Celiac System here
www.belindawhelan.com/ultimateceliacsystem
Join my free community and grab your copy of 11 Mistakes People Make Living Gluten Free here www.belindawhelan.myflodesk.com/11mistakes
Check out my Daily Health Tracker here
HEALTH TRACKER | The Healthy Celiac (belindawhelan.com)
And I would love to connect with you on Instagram thehealthyceliac
Please help share this podcast and head to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. Thank you!
Music Credit bensound.com
Now, if you are fairly new to living with celiac disease, or perhaps you are struggling with cross-contamination at home, you might be wondering if you need to have a 100% gluten-free home. Now, there's two answers to this, and basically whatever the answer is, is dependent on you and your situation. So I can't say for sure that yes, you need a hundred percent gluten-free home, or no, you don't need a hundred percent gluten-free home. It completely depends on your living situation and your needs. Now for me, we don't have a gluten-free home. Unfortunately. I would love that. I would actually love to have no gluten whatsoever in my house, but the reality is it just wouldn't work for our family. So we have five people in our household. So there's myself, who's celiac, my husband, who can eat whatever he wants. My son who is six years old and he has non celiac gluten sensitivity, and then his two sisters, so they can eat whatever they want. So my teenage daughter, she's 15, and then my youngest is almost four. So the girls can eat whatever they want and my husband can eat whatever he wants. So for them it's a little bit tricky to make them have gluten-free bread when they don't need to. And it's not only making them have something that they don't particularly enjoy, it's also the cost. So when you're talking five people in a household, it can get quite expensive just buying everything gluten free. I do totally agree with that. You know, there's things like bread that for me, my loaf of bread costs about$5 Aussie dollars, and my daughter's bread that she has is$2 a loaf, and it's about twice the size. So when you weigh up those times and things, it's, it's almost a no-brainer. So we do have steps in place to make sure that she keeps her gluten away from me when she's making sandwiches and things like that. And then with our youngest, we are very, very strict with her, with what she does with her food and what she touches and things like that. But she has been brought up hearing the words gluten free her entire life. She's heard it for nearly four years now. She knows what's going on. She knows that she's not allowed to touch her brother's food with her hands. She's not allowed to go near his food. She has to be super careful with me. So it is about educating those people in your household, and it is about making sure that you are keeping yourself or your child safe if it's your child that has celiac disease. Now, if your children are quite young, if you've got children very close in age, it can be harder to separate their food. When Coda, our youngest, was very little, I never gave her any gluten because the risk of her touching her brother's food or
Speaker 2:Touching me or just getting it everywhere was too risky. But now that she understands more, she does have gluten food. If she was to have say something like a cookie, she has to eat it outside<laugh> because she just gets her crumbs everywhere. And I figure she could just go outside, have a gluten, keep her safe, and it is fine. So there's steps like that that you can put in place, that you make sure that those in your household, that eat gluten, that have boundaries and there's steps in place to keep you safe. Now, my teenage daughter is not allowed to prepare her sandwich for school on the our chopping board. She is not allowed to prepare it near any of the other areas that I am preparing food. She will do it separately. I'm pointing on to the benches, if you know what I'm talking about,<laugh>. But she prepares it at the end of the bench on a plate, and that plate then gets brid off and put straight into the dishwasher. So there's no risk of any of that gluten getting anywhere near me or my son. And then that way she keeps us safe. She has separate condiments, so she has a separate jar of jam. She's a jam girl. She loves her jam on her sandwiches. She has a separate butter, things like that. She has to have separate. She has known ever since she was little that she has to use those separate condiments when preparing her food. Now, snacks, we have a great cupboard where we have all of our snacks separated and labeled in little bins. So all of the group gluten-free options are separate, and all of the gluten options are separate as well. So my daughters can have whatever they want out of there, but my eldest tends to just eat the things that have got gluten in. And then my son, obviously, he can go to those bins in the cupboard and he can pick whatever he needs that have got labeled gluten free. So in that respect, those items are packaged, they are separated from each other, so there's no risk of him getting sick because everything is actually separated and in packaging. So I feel completely safe that those items are in there and that there's no risk of him getting sick. He's very switched on with knowing what he can and can't eat. And my girls are super careful with making sure that if they grab something out and they change their mind, they put it back in the correct bin and know that, you know, their brother has to be looked after as well. So that is fine in our family when it comes to cooking, every meal that I make or that my husband makes is a hundred percent gluten free. I am not down for cooking separate meals for separate food preferences. That is just not how we roll in this household<laugh>. I just think that that is way too hard and way too risky. That's where accidents can absolutely happen. When I first got diagnosed with celiac disease, we went through everything. We went through our pantry, we went
Speaker 3:Through the fridge, we went through all of our spices. We got rid of everything that we would use for cooking that had gluten in it. There was just no way that we were gonna risk that if we were cooking and we needed a source to put in something and my husband grabbed the wrong sauce and then the entire meal is ruined and I couldn't eat it. So we made sure that in that respect, those types of things were replaced. So there are certain things that I definitely recommend that you make sure are gluten free in your household, but things like, yeah, like the snacks and the breads and the treat kind of things, I, I don't think that those types of things, you have to be making sure everything's a hundred percent gluten free. If you have got those boundaries in place and you make sure that those people that you live with are making sure that they're keeping their gluten separate from you and making sure that you have your separate condiments, you have your separate items that you, if you were to put a knife into, you're not gonna get that cross contact. You're not gonna get those crumbs into your separate condiments, things like that. It's very, very important. So we do have a few items in our fridge and a few items in our pantry such as peanut butter, Vegemite jams, like I mentioned, butters, those types of things that we do have separate. We have a peanut butter for myself. We have a peanut butter for my daughter, and they're both separated, they're labeled and there's no risk that she's going to accidentally grab my peanut butter. So yes, you can have different things for people. Yes, it can be annoying to have to have two of each thing, but it's worth it so that everybody's happy, I guess, so that you're saving money and so that it keeps you safe. And I do know of some people that aim to have a 100% gluten free household, and then when other people say visitors come in, or kids have friends over and they bring gluten into the household, it actually causes more mayhem because there's no boundaries. There's no steps in place to keep people safe. So when you've got people bringing their food in and you've already got a hundred percent gluten-free household, that's when mistakes can really be made. So I personally feel that when you have gluten in your household, it can make it easier long term when people bring gluten into your house. If you don't want gluten in your household at all, then you have to be really strict with your visitors as well. You have to be a hundred percent strict that they either don't bring any food to your house or they have to only ever bring gluten-free food. So it depends on you, it depends on your situation, how you feel communicating with people, how you feel, talking to your friends' kids. I know for a fact that my teenage daughter, she
Speaker 4:Always has friends over, they're always dropping in, they're always bringing their junk food<laugh>, you know, they've always got something that they've ducked into McDonald's or Hungry Jacks, or they're just, they have this food and we just make sure that they keep it away from me. We keep it, you know, they're not leaving their crumbs trails everywhere and the, the packets get put straight into the bin once they're finished. So it does happen in our house. It absolutely does happen. And I think if I was so strict, it would trigger my anxiety. I think if I was a hundred percent no gluten whatsoever, my daughter would be sneaking it in. My husband would probably sneak it in, maybe, I don't know. He probably wouldn't. He probably wouldn't<laugh> if I, if I said I don't want any gluten in the house, he'd probably support that. But my teenager, definitely not. I don't think she would be supportive of it at all. I think she would have a major meltdown because there's things that she loves that I would not be able to get her to have a glutened free version of disgusting things like two minute noodles. And you know, those types of things that you, you just, they're just there. They're just what she has and oh yeah, I feel like with her it would be really, really tricky. And if you live with people that aren't family members, again, that's another whole can of worm. So I have done a episode on this to keep you safe. So I will link below this episode so that you can listen to that one about having, uh, safe boundaries in your kitchen and what to do to be able to keep your food separate and safe. But I just wanted to touch on this subject because I know it's something that does cause a lot of anxiety for people and it does trigger a lot of people, but it's knowing that you can be near gluten for most people. I shouldn't say you can be. Most people can be near gluten and are fine. I know some people cannot even touch gluten. So it depends on you, it depends on your situation obviously. But if it's something that you feel you would like to do and you have a small family or money's not an issue, then do it. Make it work for you. Like I said, I would love to have a 100% gluten-free household. I really would. It would be fantastic. But then there is that whole anxiety thing of people bringing food in. So again, just make it work for you. Do what feels right and try all things you might try or going a hundred percent gluten-free in your house for a while and see if everyone's happy with that. Or you might need to just have boundaries like we do where certain food is prepared in certain spots in your kitchen and everyone knows what they can and can't do in your house. Whether it's bringing in gluten food and they have to eat it outside
Speaker 5:Like my daughter does with her cookies or that they clean up after themselves. They know what they've gotta do. It's just, yeah, steps in place boundaries, making sure everyone knows. So all of my daughter's friends that come to the house know that I have celiac disease, they know that I have to eat gluten free. So many of them ask questions, they're curious, they don't understand what can happen to me if I have gluten. So it's good to educate them as well so that they are careful for me and also for my son. So yeah, education, answering questions, talking about it, being open and honest. And if you have someone in your household that is disrespectful, that isn't supporting your needs, that's another whole can of worms. And I have done an episode on that as well. So I think it'll be handy to link to that one in the show notes as well. So I'll pop a link to that one. If you are listening to this and thinking, my husband refuses to eat gluten free, or my partner just doesn't want a bar of gluten free food, then that's an episode, that's another whole episode that I have discussed. So I'll pop a link to that one for you below. But yeah, I hope this helps you sort of see that it, it's, it's unique, it's a unique situation. It's what works for you and your family or your roommates who you live with. And yeah, it's about taking those steps and putting them in place to make sure that you are safe. So yeah, let me know if this helps you. Let me know whether you are a hundred percent gluten free in your household or whether you'd like to work towards that. So send me a DM over at Instagram at the Healthy Celiac and I'll talk to you real soon. Take care.