Gluten-Free Girrilla: January 2011

Thursday, January 6, 2011

On Being a Girrilla

The U.S. is a market-driven economy. If you have food sensitivities, you need to let people know about them. It's really the best way to educate companies and help them improve their products and procedures.

Most of the companies I have corresponded with have been thrilled to have my feedback. At the least, conversations have resulted in my learning more about a company's products, and the company learning more about my preferences.

Your voice can help a manufacturer find an alternate ingredient, modify their labeling, or come up with a new product line. One of my top three wishes is for chocolatiers to stop using soy lecithin as an emulsifier, and to replace it with sunflower lecithin, cranberry, or some other ingredient.

Some stores allow you to special order a product, providing impetus for the store to carry that product on a regular basis. At Whole Foods, I special-ordered one of my favorite shower gels from Pangea Organics. It is a gluten-, dairy-, and soy-free concoction, incorporating delightful organic herbs and oils and using a recycled container with minimal packaging.

I've written to companies simply to thank them for making a marvelous product. I like Naked Juice, Dagoba Chocolates, Flying Apron Bakery, Aubrey Organics, Hugo Naturals, Enjoy Life, Food for Life... and I'm happy to send a note when a congratulations are due.

Make it a habit to speak up for your health!

Here are some contact addresses to get you started:

Whole Foods Market: Contact Whole Foods
PCC Natural Markets: Contact PCC
Super Supplements: Contact the Customer Care Team
Bob's Red Mill: Contact Us
Lundberg Family Farms: Contact Us
Arrowhead Mills: About Us/Contact Us
Tinkyada Rice Pasta: We'd Love to Hear From You
Dagoba Organic Chocolate: Contact Us
Naked Juice: Welcome to Naked Juice
Kroger (QFC & Fred Meyer): Contact Kroger with Comments and Questions
Uwajimaya: We Want to Hear From You
Starbucks: Starbucks Customer Feedback
Costco: Costco Customer Service
Safeway: Contact Safeway
Odwalla: Talk to Us
Bissingers Handcrafted Chocolatier: Contact Us

Happy Commenting!

Where to go for... ?

Enterolab Located in Dallas, TX, looks for antibodies to detect food allergies. Blood tests are mostly unreliable for determining food allergies.

The Flying Apron Bakery in Fremont is a gluten-free, mostly soy-free vegan bakery. It is a quaint, fun place to visit, with terrific bakery items, soulful breads, and hearty savory dishes.
There are other bakeries around, but too often, bakeries touting their products as gluten-free will still rely on soy and dairy, which to me isn't really thinking about the problem of food allergies.

Dagoba Chocolate is the first chocolatier I found to create soy-free chocolate chips, eschewing the use of soy lecithin as an emulsifier. You can buy these chips at Whole Foods and other places.

Favorite Milk Picks

Hazelnut Milk - Chocolate, by Pacific Natural Foods of Tualatin, OR. These folks use sunflower lecithin in place of soy lecithin. Also available in travel-size containers good for the lunchbox (but unfortunately, the only store around here to carry the small boxes is PCC. I wish the other stores would wake up!)

Almond Breeze, Chocolate, by Blue Diamond Growers. Delicious almond-based drink, no soy.

Hemp Milk - Chocolate, by Pacific Natural Foods of Tualatin, OR.

Hemp Milk - Vanilla, by Pacific Natural Foods of Tualatin, OR

"Tempt" Chocolate Hempmilk, by Living Harvest Foods, Inc. Portland OR

Rice Dream Rice Drink - Chocolate, and Vanilla, by The Hain Celestial Group, Melville, NY. (Vanilla comes in small, lunchbox-sized containers, available in most stores.) I might drink the Hain products more often if the manufacturer offered better consistency in drink quality from batch to batch. In addition, the canola oil is not -- as far as I can tell -- an organic ingredient, which means it is likely to come from genetically modified canola. I've read that more than 80% of the canola in the U.S. is genetically modified.

Useful References

Basic and Clinical Immunology, by Daniel P Stites, Abba I Terr, and Tristram G Parslow. A Lange Medical Book, Appleton & Lange, Norwalk, CT.

Cell Biology, by CA Smith and EJ Wood. Chapman & Hall, London, UK.

Pathology Illustrated, by the late Alasdair DT Govan, Peter S Macfarlane, Robin Callander. Churchill Livingstone, New York, NY.

The Dark Side of Soy. Mary Vance Terraine. Utne Reader, July/August 2007.

The Ploy of Soy. Sally Fallon. Consumer Health Organization of Canada, March 2000, Vol 3, Issue 3.

White blood cells in lung produce histamine seen in allergies. Science Daily, Jan 12 2007.

November 15th, 2006 ASA FOOD INTOLERANCE Presentation by Riina Bray, Chair, Environmental Health Committee, OCFP

Soy - One of the nine most common food allergens. Health Canada.

About Me

B.S., Zoology, cum laude from the University of Washington, with undergraduate research in biochemistry, physiology & biophysics, and rehab medicine. A year towards an M.S. in Epidemiology, also from the University of Washington.

I've done research with children who had cerebral palsy, coordinated research projects for a specialized clinical chemistry laboratory at the UW and worked in high tech at Microsoft Corporation. Currently I work for Bellevue College in graphic design and social media.

Other projects

Images Without Sight

WALT Art