Walk through a grocery store and you’ll see “GLUTEN-FREE” printed on everything.
Sometimes that’s important.
If you have celiac disease, gluten isn’t some marketing discussion. It’s a real problem.
Other people find they simply feel better without it.
Fair enough.
But somewhere along the way, gluten-free also became shorthand for healthy.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Look at What Replaced It
Take a gluten-free cookie.
Remove the wheat and you still need to make a cookie.
So manufacturers may use rice flour, potato starch, tapioca starch, sugar, oils and all sorts of other ingredients to make the thing taste and behave like a cookie.
It may be completely gluten-free.
It’s also still a cookie. 😂
That doesn’t make it evil.
It just doesn’t magically turn it into health food.
I’ve learned to ask a much simpler question about food:
What am I actually eating?
Not what does the front of the package say.
Not which dietary tribe does it belong to.
What’s actually in it?
For me, eating lower carb and eventually becoming carnivore-ish has worked extremely well.
Peggy eats differently.
Other people thrive eating foods I rarely touch.
That’s okay.
The common ground I keep coming back to is pretty simple:
Eat real food most of the time.
If avoiding gluten makes you feel better, pay attention to that.
But don’t assume a package became healthy because somebody printed “gluten-free” across the front.
Turn it around.
See what’s actually in there.
Sometimes the back of the package tells a considerably different story than the front.