My Green Family. ramblings of one family's journey to green living

Many people ask me how difficult it was to cut out the gluten and casein from Tristan’s diet. It really wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. And judging from Maya’s gigantic smile in the picture its yummy too! The first month is difficult because you have to get used to reading the label on everything and finding alternatives. But once you get over the learning curve its pretty easy. We try really hard to eat a clean diet: no processed foods, no artificial flavors or colours, organic when we can and not a lot of sugar so that definitely made the transition easier. Luckily I stay home with the kids and I have the time to make almost everything for them from scratch. Odum and I still eat gluten and dairy as its a bit expensive right now for us to all eat this way.

Here are my tips and tricks for the gluten free/casein free diet. My next post will include some recipes, too much to put everything in one post!

Two things to keep in mind:
1. It usually takes 3 weeks for casein to be completely out of your system and up to 3 months to get rid of gluten.
2. Check the labels on creams, lotions, supplements, soaps etc to make sure they are also gluten and casein free.

Also I’m not a doctor, dietitian or nutritionist, so please don’t take my word as gospel!

Casein
Casein is the predominant protein found in dairy products. It’s even in some soy products. I looked for soy cheese and yogurt and all of the brands our store carries has casein in it. When you’re reading labels look out for the words: casein, sodium caseinate, calcium caseinate or milk protein. Calcium carbonate is ok. There’s a really great cookbook, the Uncheese Cookbook that I took a few recipes out of that weren’t too bad. They use a lot of nutritional yeast, tahini and miso to mimic the cheese flavor.

In terms of milk for the kids we use almond milk, it even comes in chocolate. Rice milk and soy milk did not agree with the kids tummies so we don’t use those. And I’ve heard a lot of great things about hemp milk, although I haven’t seen it in our grocery store.

Gluten
Gluten is the predominant protein in wheat and is found in anything made with wheat and that’s a ton of products. Eliminating gluten was definitely the trickiest part, but we had the most success once we did. You really have to be a label reader with gluten as it shows up in the most random places, like soy sauce. This is a link to a the Canadian Celiac Association that gives you a list of safe, unsafe and questionable gluten products. I’ve found that since we started the diet with Tristan almost a year ago grocery stores have really widened the variety of gluten free products they carry. Cheerios, pretzels, cookies, pastas you name our store usually carries it.

Wheat products are probably the hardest thing to replace in terms of taste and texture. Glutino and Namaste have great tasting products. Tinkyada has great pastas, I almost wouldn’t know the difference. For bread always go for brown rice bread not white rice, the white rice bread tends to be super crumbly. For flour you can buy gluten free flour mixes but I’ve never really liked them. There’s one type of flour I don’t know which kind but it is just disgusting and its always in the mixes. So I go for the brown rice flour and it works great, I’ve never had any problems with baking.

For most of our favorite recipes I’ve been able to tweak them. I use almond milk instead of cows milk, rice flour instead of white flour and so far I’ve had a ton of success. Tristan is also an extremely picky eater, he never eats veggies, so I puree or mash lots of veggies and hide them in meatballs, pancakes, breads, muffins anything! A great site for gluten free and usually casein free recipes is the Gluten Free Goddess, she makes gluten free look gourmet!

The gluten free/casein free diet can seem really overwhelming to begin with. So if you’re feeling overloaded just take it slow and try removing one thing at a time, first dairy then gluten. And if you make a slip don’t beat yourself up. Tristan accidentally got into some homemade (with flour) playdough at a playgroup and had a huge regression. It was heartbreaking for me to see, but I realized just what a big problem gluten was for him.

Any more tips for going gluten and casein free?