Cleaning Up Your Kitchen

First things first: Let’s get your kitchen safe and ready for cooking! Before you start filling up your refrigerator and pantry with precious, fresh, naturally clean food, you need to get your house in order. This requires a hard look at your living situation and how you and your family function around food. Do you live alone or with a partner? Do you have children or roommates who don’t need to be gluten free? How much control do you have over the food in your home and the places it’s stored, prepared, and cooked?

If you live alone or are otherwise in charge of your family’s food, you get to control the rules because you are probably the one doing the shopping and cooking. But communication is key—it’s not just setting rules, but explaining them fully to the people you live with you so that keeping a safe kitchen becomes a team effort. Everyone in the household needs to understand why you are doing this and how important it is. If you find yourself not fully in charge of your space, you may need to stand up for your needs—your very life could depend on it! A clean kitchen truly is the foundation for regaining your food freedom. These are the ground rules I recommend with great seriousness:

1. GO GLUTEN FREE, HOUSEHOLD-WIDE. It may sound drastic, but if it is at all possible, the entire household should go gluten free, whether it is medically required for everyone or not. Those who don’t have a problem with gluten and want it can get their gluten on the outside. It may be easier than you think to get everyone on board. You’ll get to participate fully in family meals because they will be safe for you, and you can help keep your family healthy by eating clean foods from the earth that just happen to be naturally gluten free. Household members can also help you stick to your plan by not waving temptation in your face, as it can be difficult to go cold turkey at first. (I can tell you this, however: Once you feel how much better things get when you get gluten completely out of your life, and then get “glutened” a few times and have a relapse, you will have a very strong motivation to avoid the stuff.)

2. DO A CLEAN SWEEP. Go through every cabinet, shelf, and drawer and rid yourself of all the boxed or packaged “food” that contains a long list of ingredients. If it’s processed, trash it, gluten or no gluten. Keep an eye out for the few exceptions—very simple foods like brown rice or quinoa, for example, may come in boxes or packages, but in most cases, the ingredient lists will be just one or two items long. My rule is: If you want to eat something out of a box, first look at the ingredient list and count. How many ingredients are there? If there are more than four or five, I would toss it. Can you read and pronounce all the ingredients, or do they look like chemical additives and artificial things? If the latter, toss it. And do you know what each ingredient is? If you see items that you cannot pronounce and you aren’t sure what they are (even things like “natural flavors,” if they don’t specify what they contain), I recommend the trash can as the best place for them.

3. IF IT’S MOSTLY SUGAR OR STARCH, TOSS IT. Refined sugar, or even unrefined sugar (like raw sugar, raw honey, and pure maple syrup), is bad for your gut in large amounts. A little natural sugar can make life a joy, but the refined stuff is pure poison. If sugar is the first ingredient in any food item, even if it seems “natural” or is labeled “gluten free,” put it down and back away.

4. CLEAN UP YOUR HARDWARE. After you have gotten rid of what’s hiding in your cabinets, pantry, refrigerator, and freezer, it’s time to look at your appliances, dishes, and anything that touches the food you eat. If you live alone, it’s easy to thoroughly clean your appliances (although toasters are hard—you may want to get a new one), cookware, and serving ware, not to mention dish rags and kitchen towels, and keep everything totally free of cross-contamination. (Also look out for gluten crumbs in your condiments!) If you live in a house where gluten also lives (although see the first item on this list), then it is absolutely crucial that you have a separate, totally pure, gluten-free-upon-pain-of-death toaster, pots and pans, dishes, and utensils. I’m not kidding. Just keep them separate, and ask that all gluten-containing products and appliances be kept clearly separate and preferably covered.

You can make this fun—try picking out dishware or utensils in a different color that stands out and makes you happy, and makes it easy for everyone to distinguish what’s yours. Label if necessary: GLUTEN FREE ONLY! If you have children who must be gluten free, different colors and large labels make it easier for them to quickly identify which items are for them. (But again, if you have children, see item #1 on this list!)

While it may seem like an investment to spring for separate gluten-free dishes, utensils, cookware, and appliances (like your own special gluten-free toaster or toaster oven), this is particularly important… crucial… if you or anyone in your family has celiac disease. Remember, just one-third of a teaspoon of gluten will harm or kill the villi in your small intestine and make you ill. Cross-contamination is a huge issue and one to take seriously, both for you and other household members. Again, communication is key here. People you live with and/or interact frequently with (such as at work) need to understand that this is not just a whim of yours. It is a serious health requirement.

FOOD LABEL FACT: ORDER MATTERS

Food labels can be informative, but they can also be deceiving. You just have to know what to look for. It’s useful to know that ingredients are listed in order of how much the food contains. For example, if sugar is listed first, that food has more sugar than anything else.

SUGAR AND STARCH STEALTH

Sugar comes in many guises. If an ingredient list says “sugar,” that’s pretty self-explanatory. Unless you live in a cave, you probably also know that high-fructose corn syrup is a highly processed sweetener that the health-conscious want to avoid. However, refined sugar comes under many other names that aren’t so obvious. If you see any of these on a food label (or longer names that include these words), avoid! (Note that they often end in “-ose” or “-ol.”)

Carbitol

Corn sweetener/corn syrup

Dextrose

Diglycerides

Disaccharides

Fructooligosaccharides

Fructose

Galactose

Glucitol

Glucose

Hexitol

Inversol

Isomalt

Lactose

Malt and maltose

Maltodextrin

Mannitol

Rice syrup solids

Sorbitol

Sucrose

Also, be wary of refined starches, like tapioca starch, potato starch, rice starch, and cornstarch. These ingredients have been stripped of their natural fiber and nutrients so they are almost the same as sugar, as far as your body is concerned.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PURE FOOD

Pure food is vital for a healthy life, for everyone, but especially for a celiac. A strictly 100 percent gluten-free diet, because your life depends on it, can be difficult, now that “gluten-free eating” has become a fad. While gluten can cause inflammation for everyone, and many people without celiac want to eat this way, it can cause confusion. The unfortunate side effect is that many people don’t take the necessity for living clean or gluten free seriously. They joke about it, or they just aren’t careful, and that can mean you get exposed to gluten. For a serious celiac, that can be especially dangerous—you could be ill for days or even weeks. But even if you don’t have celiac disease and you still know you can’t or don’t want to put gluten or dairy or anything else into your body, that’s your right too. We know gluten causes inflammation in everyone, not just in those with celiac disease, and we know that many of the people who react to gluten also react to dairy products. We also know that many food additives are harmful, even altering your hormones or brain. So why should you have to be exposed to gluten just because waitstaff, restaurant cooks, food manufacturers, or friends and family don’t take your concerns seriously?

It’s your health and you get to decide what goes in your body. The more we talk about this and communicate our concerns and knowledge, the more we hold people accountable and demand clean food that contains what it is supposed to contain and nothing else, the more chance we have of changing attitudes about food purity and improving the health of entire communities.

And if you do get glutened or otherwise “toxified” by some noxious food, I suggest taking some activated charcoal and/or a dairy-free source of acidophilus (a probiotic supplement), drinking tons of water, and sweating it out by taking one of the detox baths here and here if you are not feeling too weak.