Cutting out wheat, or reducing your intake, may seem easy: bread, pasta, cake. However, if you look at the ingredients of packaged foods you may be surprised at where the wheat appears. It is even in some types of crisps to help the flavouring stick. While some of the foods won’t contain large amounts of wheat, it all adds up. It is also worth being aware of this if you need to cater for somebody with allergies and intolerances.
So, what can you do to reduce your wheat intake with a full understanding of where it is in your diet? Check the ingredients lists!
Wheat as an Ingredient
In terms of identifying wheat on ingredients lists, it has been made much easier by law. Legally, all sources of gluten have to be identified and highlighted in ingredients lists. Although, it is worth bearing in mind that not all gluten comes from wheat so the detail of the gluten source should be checked if it is only wheat that you are focusing on.
When looking at ingredients lists, wheat may appear as:
- Wheat
- Bulgar wheat
- Cereal binder or filler
- Durum wheat
- Farina
- Flour
- Hydrolysed wheat protein
- Kamut
- Semolina
- Spelt
- Triticale
- Wheat bran
- Wheat germ
- Wheat gluten
- Wheat malt
- Wheat starch
- Whole wheat
And/or, it may be a component of the listed ingredients:
- Breadcrumbs
- Couscous
- Rusk
In some cases a food may have a note of “may contain” or “not suitable for…” in relation to wheat or other potential allergen (there are 14 food items that have to be clearly labelled due to their common allergenic properties, in the UK). This means that there is a risk of contamination either at source or during processing, but that the allergen has not been intentionally added to the food. In fact, it is due to the risk of contamination that most oats are not labelled as gluten-free, despite oats themselves not containing the gluten proteins. Those that are labelled as gluten-free have been carefully handled at all stages to minimise the cross-contamination risk.
For more information about UK allergen labelling take a look at the Food Standards Agency website.
Notes
It is important to remember that for many of us, consuming wheat will not be a problem. However, we all need to vary our diets to maximise our nutritional intake. It is also important that we are aware of what we eat, and reading the ingredients instead of relying on what we “know” or the front-of-pack marketing can help with this.
For wheat-free meal planning ideas, check out this post that I published in April.
