I Thought It Was Gluten - But It Wasn’t: Other Triggers to Watch For

If you’ve ever been sure you got glutened – only to find out it was something else – you’re not alone. I’ve been there too. 

Sometimes we do everything right, avoid all the gluten, and still end up with symptoms that feel just as bad. Today, I’m breaking down some of the most common non-gluten triggers that can mimic a gluten reaction. 

I’ll share how I spotted my own hidden triggers, what you can do to track yours, and how to start feeling better faster. And at the end, I’ve got a bonus tip – the unexpected trigger I only discovered last year that changed my day-to-day life.

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It’s a space where you can connect with others living gluten-free, ask questions, swap tips and recipes, and get support from people who truly get it. Whether you’re newly diagnosed or a seasoned gluten-free pro, you’ll feel right at home.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Non-Gluten Triggers
• 2:33 Cross-Reactive Foods Explained
• 4:54 Common Food Intolerances Beyond Gluten
• 7:47 Non-Food Items That Cause Reactions
• 9:15 Stress, Sleep and Gut Health
• 9:57 Tomatoes: My Unexpected Trigger
• 12:14 Closing Thoughts and Resources

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:00

Quick reminder before we get started on this episode this podcast is based on my personal experiences and isn't medical advice. If you've ever been sure you've gotten gluten, only to find something else, it's something that's happened to me before too. Sometimes we do everything right, avoid all the gluten and still end up with symptoms that feel just as bad. Today, I'm breaking down some of the most common non-gluten triggers that can mimic a gluten reaction. I'll share how I spotted my own hidden triggers and what you can do to track yours, and how to start feeling better faster. And at the end, I've got a bonus tip for you the unexpected trigger I only discovered this last year that has changed my day-to-day life. Welcome to the Gluten-Free Engineer Podcast. I'm your host, keri Saunders.

Carrie Saunders: 0:46

In 2011, I was diagnosed with celiac disease, a moment that changed everything, but I was determined not to let it hold me back. With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer the gluten-free lifestyle, breaking down recipes, safety tips, travel hacks and everything in between to rebuild a life I love. Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance or simply choose to live gluten-free, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we simplify the gluten-free lifestyle, make it fun and prove that you don't have to miss out on anything. Welcome back to the show.

Carrie Saunders: 1:20

Today we're talking about other potential stomach issue trigger foods besides gluten, and I know that I have found across all the years that I would sometimes blame me getting gluten on stomach issues when they wasn't. I would later found out it wasn't necessarily gluten that was a trigger, because sometimes you can be so careful but the symptoms don't necessarily go away and it can be something else that we're actually sensitive to, and once we've removed gluten, it's a lot easier to figure out that we still don't feel good. We're listening to our bodies more when we've removed gluten for health reasons and it's really easy to blame gluten, but sometimes it's something else. I've come across so many other foods I've alluded to on this podcast that I can't eat besides gluten too, and identifying these can reduce your stress and improve your health and improve your overall life. I mean, yes, there are a good 10 or so items that I don't eat regularly or at all in my life, but boy I do, do I feel so much better and so it's so totally worth it.

Carrie Saunders: 2:33

Now, one of the triggers can be cross-reactive foods, and this is kind of common across people with celiac and gluten intolerance. Some foods can trigger a similar immune response, and examples of that can be dairy oats, even if they're gluten-free, corn, and even brown rice. They can mimic. They have some proteins in them and some of those not quite all of them that can mimic the gladden protein that is in a gluten, and so some people cross react to those and I have found for me personally, I do not tolerate oats.

Carrie Saunders: 3:12

I can from a digestive standpoint, but I can't from a brain fog, and it actually flares out my allergies to eat oats. Corn, on the other hand, causes me the opposite distress that you might like consider gluten to do. It causes me constipation and slow bowel movements. It just causes my system to just kind of stop and it obviously can get very uncomfortable if that happens too much. So corn can actually do that to me, particularly the green version of corn. Now, honestly, just a few weeks ago I tried the vegetable version, so corn on the cob and while it didn't cause me any digestive problems, that version of corn caused me to get tired, it caused me to get stuffy in the nose, it caused my throat to kind of feel tight and itchy. So you might want to experiment with trying to eliminate any of those three. Dairy, oats and corn are very typical to not tolerate. Well, when you have problems with gluten, and in general many people can't tolerate them and they don't even realize it. So what you can do is you can take a period of time where you know it's going to be easy to remove any of these foods that I am talking about today, that you think you might have some problems with it too. Remove them for at minimum two weeks really three or four would be more ideal and then introduce it and have it be the only new food that you introduce, and then it should be pretty obvious whether you're a toleranter or not.

Carrie Saunders: 4:49

Now there's some other food intolerances that I ran into. The biggest one is soy. Probably several years ago three or four maybe more now my husband was having some severe pain issues and we couldn't figure out what it was. So I helped him do a food elimination diet and when we started, adding foods back in, soy was a big issue for him. It causes major brain fog, it causes his pain to, you know, increase, and so when we were doing this experiment and introducing him back into the soy, I got a bag of edamame.

Carrie Saunders: 5:27

Frozen edamame beans they were plain, absolutely no sauce. Frozen edamame beans they were plain, absolutely no sauce, just literally edamame beans in it. We microwaved them just so that we weren't introducing anything else and then we had him eat a few spoonfuls. He completely fogged out on me. He was staring across the room. It was really kind of wild to see how fast he reacted to it. So I thought to myself well, why not? I see what I do. Because I wasn't eating soy either, because I was supporting him in his food elimination. So I had a spoonful or two of soy, the edamame beans. I didn't feel bad at first, but let me tell you, the next morning I woke up with so much digestive distress. It explained the reason that sometimes, when I would eat Chinese and I was pretty confident the restaurant was being careful with cross contact with gluten it was actually the soy that was bothering me. Sometimes it was a hit or miss too. It didn't always bother me when I eat Chinese.

Carrie Saunders: 6:29

Another thing that could cause it could be eggs, nuts and nightshades. I have recently found out that, while I don't have any typical reactions to nuts that you would typically think of, nuts are causing peanuts in particular, not necessarily pistachios. Those kinds of nuts are okay, but peanuts in particular were causing me to have allergy flare-ups too, and I have a dust mite allergy. It's not super severe but it was enough that it was causing me to go to the allergist. But I found removing nuts peanuts in particular and brown rice, makes that go away and as soon as I have a little bit of that it comes back up. Also, nightshades and red peppers, eggplants, tomatoes all of those are in the nightshade family. Sometimes those are a high food intolerance for people and some of these symptoms can mimic gluten reactions. And I'm going to hint a little bit to my bonus at the end of this is one of the nightshades is causing me some severe gluten reactions and I'm going to hint a little bit to my bonus at the end of this is one of the nightshades was causing me some severe gluten reactions. So I would encourage you to do the food elimination on any of these if you feel like you need to work with your doctor if you feel like that's necessary to and figure out what works for you.

Carrie Saunders: 7:47

Now, trigger number three is something that you might not think of but we do talk about sometimes on the podcast is non-food items. So non-food items can be contaminated with gluten and with other things you're not compatible with. So lip balm, chapstick, supplements, medications, play-doh If you don't know that has wheat in it you need to get. We find the off-brand Play-Doh doesn't have wheat in it and there's surprising places that gluten can sneak into your system without even eating it. It could be lotion, it could be a shampoo. Anything you're putting on your skin can get into your digestive system, depending upon how you do your day. Many times you know we'll wash our hands and then we'll put lotion on because they're dry. Well then, if we go get a bag of chips or like some cookies or something and we're using your hands to eat them and we think, oh, our hands are clean because I just washed them, well, you put that lotion on your hands and you can get small amounts of gluten that way if your lotion has gluten in it.

Carrie Saunders: 8:49

Also, another trigger can be stress and lack of sleep. I know that if I don't sleep well for two to three nights in a row, a lot of my gluten symptoms can come back. And what my youngest child actually has is, if he doesn't sleep right, his digestive systems come back and it can feel really bad and it can feel like you've been gluten and sleep deprivation also makes any symptoms hit harder if you do get gluten and make it harder for you to recover. And then there also can be just general health issues like a leaky gut. A histamine intolerance can also mimic celiac disease already, and when your gut is already sensitive, more foods can cause issues than you think. So healing our gut is really important. We actually have a podcast episode on that too and how to help heal our gut. So when we've been diagnosed with celiac or a gluten intolerance, we need to focus on healing our gut so that some of these triggers aren't quite so bad to us.

Carrie Saunders: 9:49

So then here's my bonus tip the unexpected trigger I discovered this past year. I found out that tomatoes, even though they're naturally gluten-free. So then here's my bonus tip the unexpected trigger I discovered this past year. I found out that tomatoes, even though they're naturally gluten-free, were causing me digestive distress, allergy-like symptoms and headaches. I had been blaming, sometimes getting cross-contact or not really trying to quite figure it out. I know this is gluten-free, I cooked it myself, I absolutely know what everything is in here and I didn't understand why my spaghetti sauce was causing me digestive problems. I was blaming it on the spices, but it actually was tomatoes. Once I got the tomatoes out, my symptoms improved dramatically and I always knew they couldn't eat raw tomatoes. That was just something I can never do, but I always felt like the cooked tomato version was broken down enough I could tolerate it, but it eventually became that I couldn't tolerate anymore.

Carrie Saunders: 10:41

It was a reminder that sometimes it's not gluten at all. It could be something else that is causing our system to be upset. We could have eliminated gluten, healed our gut and then our gut's telling us hey, I don't like this either. It was masked by when you were eating gluten. So it's not the taking out gluten causes the other things to bother you. It just helps you be able to figure out what those other things are, because you've healed, because you've taken out your core trigger and now you're finding oh, I have these other triggers too I didn't really know about.

Carrie Saunders: 11:17

So make sure you're paying attention to patterns so that you can uncover other foods that your body doesn't tolerate. Well, many of these foods I talked about are foods that are in the top eight allergens, or they're just people that, or they're just people that there are foods, excuse me, that several, lots of people can't tolerate. Lots of people go on a no nightshade type of food diet because it just bothers them. That's just how the plant defends itself. It kind of makes you feel bad. So hopefully this episode helps you open your eyes that it couldn't. It could be not just only gluten, it could be some other things, and even though it might seem inconvenient at first, just remember how much better it makes you feel. That's how I can not eat ketchup with my fries anymore. I'm like it's not even worth eating ketchup on my fries anymore. I will just enjoy my fries without ketchup and be happier, healthier and just plain feel better.

Carrie Saunders: 12:14

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Gluten-Free Engineer. If you found value in this story, please share it with someone who might need encouragement on their own gluten-free journey. For more tips, recipes, resources and even links to my YouTube channel, head on over to theglutenfreeengineercom. It's your one-stop hub to make gluten-free living simple, fun and full of flavor, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss out on an episode. And we will see you next week. The Gluten-Free Engineer podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. I share my personal experiences and stories about living with celiac disease and navigating a gluten-free lifestyle. This podcast does not provide medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional for medical questions, concerns or advice specific to your health.