Gluten: What You Need to Know

An article by Joanna    4 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are that you have heard of gluten in the last five years. There are plenty of books, websites and I think I’ve even seen a TV commercial advertising a gluten-free diet. Walking down the aisles of the grocery store you can find gluten-free cookies, flours, breads, canned goods – even cosmetics! So what’s the big deal?

What is Gluten?
Gluten is an insoluble protein found in grass-related grains – like wheat, rye and barley. Gluten is what makes wheat flour dough have elasticity when it is kneaded, providing the leavening and structure of baked goods. Gluten forms when dough made from wheat flour is kneaded as glutenin molecules form a sub-microscopic network. If the dough is leavened with yeast, the fermentation of sugar creates carbon dioxide that is trapped by the gluten network, causing the dough to rise. During baking, gluten and starch stabilize the shape of the final product. More gluten makes a chewier product, and less gluten makes a lighter product. Most bread flours are high in gluten, while cake flours are low. The preparation of the product also makes a difference – kneading wet dough promotes the formation of gluten strands. The use of shortening and less water actually inhibits the formation of gluten strands – which is how a pie crust is able to be light and flaky.

Gluten in Action
Not a big fan of chemistry? Let’s take a field trip into the kitchen to get a low down on gluten. Let’s say we are baking bread and pie crust today. We will take out our ingredients and review our recipe. This recipe from King Arthur Flour makes a delicious white sandwich bread that my husband and son enjoy (yes, I know, I should be showing you a whole wheat recipe instead, but this one I’ve actually tested many times because my husband is VERY picky about his sandwich bread!). We notice right off the bat that we are using yeast for this recipe – a dead giveaway that we are promoting the creation of gluten strands. We are also using a decent amount of water, and not as much butter (shortening) as say, a pie crust recipe. Skimming down, we can see that we will be kneading this dough for about 7 minutes. We know in a pie crust recipe, that if we overwork the dough it will be stiff and likely to split before we even get it in the pan – this I know from experience, I hope you’ve avoided it!

When we take our bread out of the oven and slice it open, we notice that the slices are not solid. The bread itself is flecked with small dots of air pockets between the area of actual “dough”. These air pockets are what the yeast produced when we allowed the dough to rise. The yeast made carbon dioxide (C02), which was stuck inside the lattice of gluten that we made by using a high gluten flour, a decent amount of water and little shortening, and by kneading for 7 minutes. If we cut into our pie crust (let’s just say we were intending to fill it with fruit, so it’s unfilled at present), we will notice that there aren’t as many air pockets and the crust is fairly densly built – air isn’t going to just waft through it at any given moment, because there is not nearly as much gluten in this recipe with more shortening, less water and potentially a flour with a lower gluten content.

Gluten as Additive
One way to create an improved diet while we are eating is to play a balancing act with carbohydrates and proteins. For some foods, we are able to add the protein gluten in to the food to make it appear a more balanced – and nutritious – food. This way we are not consuming a high quantity of carbohydrates. Gluten, with its lattice of protein strands, is used as a stabilizing agent in foods like ice cream and ketchup – even in cosmetics! One note of warning – when labeling food, items that normally contain gluten which are produced gluten-free will be marked as gluten-free. However, items that do not normally contain gluten will not necessarily be marked as to whether or not they were produced with gluten.

Why Be Gluten-Free
Two huge reasons for switching to a gluten-free diet are being diagnosed with Celiac disease – which is an autoimmune disease of the small intestine – and gluten intolerance. In Celiac disease, the presence of gluten causes an inflammatory reaction that injures the villi (the small, finger-like protusions that help to digest nutrients) in the small intestine, sometimes even causing them to die and/or break. Gluten intolerance is an inability to digest the gluten protein – which is similar, but not as severe a reaction as Celiac disease. By not eating gluten, folks with these ailments will feel much better overall – not just their digestive health.

Even more people are considering to eat gluten-free now because of claims that gluten problems are hard to diagnose and that maybe more of the population than is expected is really suffering from gluten problems. Cutting all of one type of food out of your diet and then adding it back in gradually is a good way to see your ability to digest anything – gluten or something else of your choosing. More recently, claims have been made that a gluten-free diet can help with ADHD and autism as well.

Tune in next week for more information on gluten and a gluten-free diet, including what to eat or what not to eat to be gluten-free. You can catch me anytime at my blog, Now With Baby, or hit me up on Twitter – I’m @way2gomom! I’m looking forward to chatting with you!

While you’re here, you might also like to read:
Why I Don’t Do Soy
The Benefits of Eating Locally Produced Food
What Do You Mean By “Food Additive”?!