Crowd-sourced data suggests restaurants’ gluten-free meals might include gluten
Study from Columbia Mailman School of Public Health finds significant contamination in pizza and pasta, and at dinnertime.
More than half of gluten-free pizza and pasta dishes in restaurants tested positive for the presence of gluten, according to a study recently published on the American Journal of Gastroenterology website.
In addition, researchers found that about one-third of supposedly gluten-free foods had detectable gluten—but that might be due to cross-contamination, said lead author Dr. Benjamin Lebwohl, who practices at the Celiac Disease Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and is an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.
“The solution may be better education for food preparers,” he said in a prepared statement released by Columbia Mailman School.
Approximately 1% of Americans have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes bloating, constipation and pain in the small intestine, as well as other systemic issue. The main treatment for the disorder is to avoid foods that contain gluten, such as cereals, breads and pasta.
“Patients have long suspected that gluten contamination in restaurant foods is a frequent occurrence, and these results support that,” Lebwohl said. “Our findings suggest that pizza, pasta and foods served at dinner were more likely to have a problem.”
The data was crowd-sourced, as users of the portable Nima Gluten Sensor uploaded the results from tested restaurant foods throughout the United States. The device’s manufacturer supplied for study 5,624 food tests taken by 804 users over 18 months.