You may want to bring in cupcakes to your workplace or for your child’s class, but there is one person who needs to eat gluten-free. Can you even find gluten free cupcake recipes and why is it such a big deal anyway? Well there are a few things you should keep in mind when preparing food for anyone with gluten intolerance. The first thing to understand is that gluten intolerance is different than a food allergy. It is often easy to avoid foods that cause an allergy, but gluten intolerance can be more difficult to manage because the gluten is so prevalent in so much of our food. Those who have to deal with gluten intolerance cannot properly digest food that contains gluten.
During digestion, there are a number of tiny hair-like structures called cilia located along the walls of the small intestine. Cilia act like little tubes and collect valuable vitamins and nutrients from your food. For people who suffer from celiac disease, their cilia do not work properly if there is gluten in their system. The gluten effectively blocks their tubes and they cannot get any nutrition at all from their food. Unless they eat gluten-free they will eventually become sick, and could even die.
Fortunately there are alternatives for people with celiac disease. There are entire cookbooks and tons of online resources for everything from nutrition tips to gluten free cupcakes. So next time you hear a request for gluten free, don’t worry! You can easily find a recipe that everyone can enjoy and make sure no one gets left out.