When is a food gluten-free?
That may seem like an obvious question but, as The Washington Post reports, the Food and Drug Administration has struggled to answer it for seven years.
In 2004, Congress ordered the FDA to come up with a threshhold by 2008 dictating when a food can be labeled as free of the gluten protein, which many people avoid for health reasons. However, there still is no national standard, and none appears forthcoming.
“The FDA has spent years calling upon experts to have open-forum debates, town hall meetings — we’ve been having reiteration and reiteration,” Dr. Alessio Fasano of the University of Maryland’s Center for Celiac Research, told the Post. “I really don’t understand why it’s lingering up in the air when it really should be a no-brainer.”
As a result, the exploding gluten-free food market, which has zoomed from $100 million in 2003 to $2.6 billion today, is loaded with foods that have significant amounts of the protein they claim to omit.
Gluten content is an important medical concern. Some 3 million Americans suffer from celiac disease, in which gluten attacks the small intestine, causing anything from indigestion to certain cancers. But a diet free of gluten — which is found in wheat, rye and barley — avoids the problem.
Another 17 million Americans, according to some estimates, are gluten-sensitive, which means that they develop symptoms ranging from abdominal pain to tingling extremities if they consume foods that have the protein.
The FDA points to complicated technical issues as the source of the delay, but Australia, Canada and Brazil have settled on a gluten-content limit: 20 parts per million.
Without any federal standard to rein in producers, two independent organizations have been established to verify products’ gluten-free bona fides, but that has not prevented dangerous episodes of false advertising. For instance, dozens of people in North Carolina became sick after buying supposedly gluten-free products in 2009. It turned out that the bread, marketed under the label Great Specialty Products, was just regular bread repackaged as gluten-free.
I think there must be an American organization that will implement a food testing with Gluten to prevent and reduce the risk of gluten in many food makers. Like now, almost millions are suffering from celiac disease which is very harmful.