General Mills / Betty Crocker brand has gluten free products you can find in your local grocery store including such items as Betty Crocker Bisquick mix and dessert mixes such as devil’s food cake, yellow cake, chocolate chip cookie mix and brownie mix…..all gluten free! 

General Mills gluten free printable take-along list at
http://liveglutenfreely.com/_inc/Gluten_Free_Products.pdf

As for finding these items around town, try Fresh and Easy. They do carry some of these items.

I have known for some time that Fresh & Easy Grocery stores have some gluten free items such as Glutino crackers and Glutino pretzels as well as Barabara’s GF cereals  but, I was at a loss to figuring out what other items in their store may be gluten free.

So, I asked the deli person at the Lakewood location on Paramount and was handed a 2 page list of GF items.

Then I did a little web search and found out that Fresh & Easy is determined to start marking their gluten free items. See their blog at
http://www.freshandeasy.com/blog/2010/01/gluten-free-at-fresh-easy.html

As for the 2 page printout, you can get that by clicking here :

http://freshandeasy.com/Content/pdfs/QualityYouCanTrust/GlutenFreeShoppingList_20100311.pdf

On the list are items such as tapenades, dips and their store brand salad dressings. This a great list to have when I am shopping in my neighborhood and not into driving over to the nearest Trader Joe’s store.

UPDATE>>>>After trying several Fresh & Easy brands of items on their ‘no gluten added’ list, I cannot endorse Fresh & Easy so heartily. While some items have been fine like their mango salsa I have had several sick days from eating their store brand items like their potato salad, black olive tapanade & their spinach and artichoke dip.

My guess is that they do not work as hard as Trader Joe’s to avoid cross contamination when the food is prepared at their plant….so back to Trader Joe’s who I can count on not to get sick!

No Thanks To Fresh & Easy!

It was funny. I was walking around the Trader Joe’s on Atlantic in the Bixby Knolls area with my clipboard in hand. My clipboard has the Trader Joe’s list of gluten free items and as I was riffling through the pages, an employee of TJ’s came up to me to ask is she could assist me with finding any GF items.

She knew just by watching me with my list in hand that I must be a celiac.

Now, I have to tell you that I found that very refreshing.

It’s nice when someone pays attention and gives a hoot about your dietary needs.

Last month, at another Trader Joe’s, one of the employees told me that they can’t please everyone when I asked why TJ’s couldn’t label their foods as GF.

Turns out the TJ’s is working  to get the GF label onto their product line but it will happen over time which means I will still be walking around with my clipboard for another year, at least.

Still, to have someone tell you that they can’t please everyone when you are someone who has special needs, is a rebuff, to say the least.

Anyway, this other employee took the bad taste out of my mouth for  Trader Joe’s by being attentive and recongnizing that using a 7 page cheat sheet to shop is a real pain.

I hate to whine and I hate to make a big deal about being a celiac but, let’s face it, we are just as important as the vegans and those who shop only organic and the diabetics and all the other people on the planet that have the 5 most common allergies, are we not?

You bet we are!

Stay tuned. As I find more places around Long Beach, CA that work with and for us celiacs, I’ll report back here.

And don’t be afraid to leave comments to let us know what you find works for you in the Southern CA area!

Oh, and here’s that link for the Trader Joes No Gluten Used list : http://www.traderjoes.com/attachments/NoGluten.pdf  (Right click and save to your computer. You will need Adobe free reader on your computer to open this list.)

Since my last post, I have been digging around in more grocery stores in Long Beach, CA (not to be confused with Long Beach, NY

I found that there is a grocery store that does have several aisles dedicated to alternative and healthy foods.

The Vons in Bixby Knolls on Atalantic (4550 Atlantic Avenue to be precise) has several aisles to the far left when entering the store. These aisles are beyond the deli section.

In these aisles they have several gluten free items including crackers, soups, salad dressings, noodles, cookies, and a few other items. This is also where I can find my organic canned goods.

Also, this Vons has a dedicated section of the produce area for organic produce.  Somehow, I missed this but a friend told me to look again and it is there. Find it in the middle of the produce section on it’s own island of produce.

The produce is in good shape and not so very overly priced. It is the only place in town where I can find fresh organic berries. Not even Wholefoods or Trader Joes has fresh organic berries this time of year.

I haven’t tried any other Vons stores but when I get around to a different area of Long Beach/Lakewood/Signal Hill, I’ll take a look and report back.

In the meantime,
Eat Well!

I was quite delighted to find that General Mills is offring a line of gluten free goods.  They have a new website to tell us all about it at http://www.liveglutenfreely.com. They have soups which I am especially interested in along with the normal baking products.

But, then, I wondered.  Where can I actually find these products in Long Beach?  Or better, said, can I even find these items in Long Beach grocery stores!

Long Beach grocery stores don’t have health food sections which is where special items marked gluten free are often found. Well, at least, in other cities.

I recently spent the past 16 years of my life living in the mountains of Colorado and shopped in Colorado Springs. Now, those grocers knew that if they offered a health food section of 4 - 5 rows with good foods of all kinds, not just GF foods, then people will shop these aisles.

An believe me, Co Springs has a Whole Foods and Vitamin Cottages and other places to get GF and health foods so you can’t say Long Beach grocers cannot provide health food sections in their stores due to the abundant competition in LB/Lakewood….but they don’t.

I was amazed to find out that Long Beach grocery stores do not have a clue on how to provide healthy alternative foods to their customers. I guess they all just want us to go to Whole Foods and Trader Joes and Vitamin Cottages, & I guess, they don’t need our business because they don’t even try.

Oh, one store does. You can find GF crackers and other foods marked GF at Fresh and Easy Stores. I love Freash and Easy Stores.  You can find them around LB and surrounding areas  here.

As for finding these General Mills GF items….well, I’ll let you know. I doubt I will find them on the shelfs at my local Vons/Ralphs’s/Food4Less and so on. But if I do, I’ll let you know!

And, please, if you find any place in LB/Lakewood who carries them, post a comment here so we can all find them with ease.

One more thing. The General Mills website has a locator for these items but all I could get was Manhattan Beach, CA stores because, for some reason, they kept not recognizing my address which I take to mean there is no where close by carrying these items.

I just came across Trader Joe’s gluten free list of their store brand products (actually they won’t claim the term, ‘gluten free’ but rather say, “no gluten ingredients used”).

The list is really handy but I truly do not understand why Trader Joe’s does not visibly mark their GF products on their labels. Everybody worries about getting sued, I guess.

There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the lists attempts to explain why they might not want to label their foods directly as gluten free.

Here is how thier disclaimer reads:
“Please use this guide at your own risk. Unless a brand name is specified, it is Trader Joe’s Private Label.
Please Note - this guide is a sampling of many of the products we carry in which No Gluten Ingredients are used, but it is not a comprehensive list. We do our best to keep the information as up to date and as accurate as possible, but we do introduce and discontinue products all the time, and some products may be available based on season or region, so keep your eyes open and always read product labels.

Here is some info fron the list with my comments in italics….
• Our suppliers follow Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP’s) to segregate ingredients on shared equipment and/or in the facility. This is good to know since many products state that the items was produced in a facility that also manufactures wheat products.
• Always read the label - ingredients and suppliers may change. Good advice.
• Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye and their derivatives such as malt or spelt.  We all already know this.
• As a general rule of thumb, dairy, juice, meat and produce do not contain gluten or any gluten derivatives. Okay…maybe but I always read the labels.
• Under Trader Joe’s Brands, ingredients listed as “natural flavors” or “spices” do not contain gluten or gluten derivatives. This is SUPER good to know since this is where we celiacs get caught never being sure when reading any labels…not just Trader Joe’s.
• Use common sense and remember the motto: When in doubt, leave it out. I would call this a ‘covering their ass statement
• The most recent product additions will be in bold, blue typeface

Below is the link to get this 7 page list.

Just a note: You should right click the link belows and save to you computer to download or just click to open ina window on your computer and print from there.

You will need Adobe PDF reader installed on your computer which most people do  have. If not, it free to download and install. Just search online for it using the keywords,  free adobe reader.

Here’s that link for the list : http://www.traderjoes.com/attachments/NoGluten.pdf

Here is the link to Trader Joe’s website page where I got the list: http://www.traderjoes.com/static/lists.html (opens to a new window on your computer).

Good eating!
Honor

Here I am sick just when I started this new website for Long Beach Celiacs such as myself. Good thing, though, because this reminds me to tell others to watch out for those medicines.

Many pills have fillers and the most obvious is modified food starch or so often listed on medicine boxes as simply ‘food starch.’

I have a cold (so far, I hope that is all it is) and so it meant a trip to the drug store to get decongestants along with some immune boosters.

For decongestants, I found that Sudafed does not give me a gluten attack. That’s good to know for starters.

But, did you know that Dan Active is not good for celiacs? Thank goodness they say on the package that it is processed in a plant that also processes wheat.

Who needs to be sick with the cold or flu and then get a bad bout of diarrhea and add dehyrdration to the mix!

Other meds that I am taking that have not caused a celiac attack are Airborne (zesty orange), Sambucol (black elderberry cold and flu medicine) and Zicam tablets. Also, Nyquil has been okay for me.

One more note is to pretty much stay away from store brand medicines. I didn’t take the time to read the labels of Walgrens “same as” meds that are supposed to be the same as the brand name but in the past, I have often found that the cheaper store brands contain fillers (some that are listed and others hidden so that the attacks come after ingestion).

Botton line, cheaper anything usually contain fillers.

Now back to bed to recuperate so I can make our next scheduled Long Beach Gluten Free Meetup.
Stay well,
Honor

When I first found out I was gluten intolerant, I thought I had to give up all baked goods.

Well, I love pies, donuts and all that great fattening food and was not happy denying myself.

I rationalized that it would help me lose weight but deprivation is a hard thing for me to swallow (get the pun?).

So, imagine my delight when I found the freezer at Whole Foods full of baked goods!

I seems that Whole Foods has their own line of backed goods that are made especially for us celiacs (it’s nice to be catered too :).

You can find out more at http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/gluten-free.php and don’t stop there.

Visit you local Whole Foods Market and find all the GF goodies in the freezer section. It’s a dedicated area of the freezers to ask and you shall find….

Good eating to you!
Honor