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Oats in the GF diet
| Not long ago, the gluten-free diet consisted of "no wheat, rye, barley or oats". Currently you will often see recommendations of "no wheat, rye or barley". So are oats now safe for the gluten-free diet? The answer is: some oats are safe for some people. This is a gray area, and those who are newly-diagnosed need more information to help prevent continued illness. The first problem with oats was that there were no oats available that were free from cross-contamination. That problem is now solved, and specially-grown oats are available from several companies, some of which are listed below. Note that the oats currently used to make commercial breakfast cereals, such as Quaker Oats and Cheerios, are not specially grown, and are not gluten-free. The second problem with oats is that, although a number of studies have concluded that they are safe in the GF diet, other research has shown that some people with CD do, in fact, react to oats. Current recommendations reveal that no one should try oats unless and until they are doing well on the GF diet and all of their symptoms have disappeared. When consuming oats, if symptoms reappear then the oats should be discontinued. It would be possible to have a reaction to oats with no symptoms, and the blood tests may not be sensitive enough to detect this. For more information, read these statements, which include numerous cautions: Beth Israel Deaconness Celiac Disease Center Recommendations on Oat Consumption
Oats that have been specially-grown and processed to be gluten-free are available from these companies:
GlutenFreeOats Cream
Hill Estates
More on the possible problems with consuming oats as part of the Gluten-Free diet: First, commercially-grown oats, unlilke the specialty oats, are almost invariably contaminated with wheat or barley. Jane DeMarchi from the North American Miller's Association spoke at an FDA meeting on Gluten-Free food labelling in August, 2005, explaining the milling process and why oats obtained from these large mills are expected to be contaminated. You can read the transcript and see the slides of her excellent talk, "Feasibility of Milling Gluten-Free Flours" on the FDA website. Four different lots of McCann's oats, a brand which was at one time thought to be gluten-free, were tested in 2004 (Thompson). One sample had no detectable gluten (less than 3 ppm), but the remaining three samples showed levels of 12, 23, and 725 ppm gluten. In this same study, Quaker Oats Old-Fashioned samples had levels of 338, 364, 971, and 1807 ppm gluten; Country Choice Old-Fashioned had one sample with no detectable gluten, and three other samples with 131, 210, and 120 ppm gluten.
One study indicating this is "The Molecular Basis for Oat Intolerance in Patients with Celiac Disease". (You can also read a news article about this study). People were selected for this study specifically because they believed they had reacted to oats in the past. Some of them were shown to be truly having damage from oats, while others in the study were not. Recently the Canadian Celiac Association released: "". There are important warnings in this statement, and there are also limitations in the studies on which it is based (Rashid).
In addition, six potentially reactive portions of the oat gluten protein were found in "Identification and Analysis of Multivalent, Proteolytically Resistant Peptides from Gluten". T cells reacted to oat gluten in a study by Kilmartin. CSA has a web page devoted to research on oats.
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