Keep in mind the following: It is not how bad you feel after consumption that tells you whether or not you are having an inflammatory immune reaction. This type of damage can take years to manifest into symptoms. That is one of the primary reasons that most people diagnosed with gluten problems don’t get their diagnosis until later in life. The inflammatory damage builds over time, and is typically not an immediate response. The food labeling laws don’t include oatmeal because there is not a firm scientific consensus. Many claim that celiac patients react to oats only because they are cross contaminated with wheat. And although it is true that many packaged grain products are cross contaminated, non cross contaminated oats have also been shown to cause an inflammatory reaction in patients diagnosed with gluten intolerance. The bigger problem here is that doctors and the gluten free food industry completely ignore the research on this topic, and continue to claim that oats are a safe substitute food. But before you make a decision to include oat cereal products into your diet, consider the research studies below:
Oats in a gluten-free diet increase the diet’s nutritional value, but their use remains controversial. Contamination with prolamins of other cereals is frequent, and some clinical and experimental studies support the view that a subgroup of celiac patients may be intolerant to pure oats. Thus, this issue is more complex than previously suggested. In order to produce oats that are safe for all celiac patients, the following topics should be addressed: selection of oat cultivars with low avenin content, research on such recombinant varieties of oats, development of assay methods to detect avenins in oat products, guidelines for the agricultural processing of oats and the manufacture of oat products, as well as guidelines for following up with celiac patients who consume oats