A good friend of mine has Celiac disease, which means he can’t eat any gluten. While eating “gluten-free” has for some reason turned into the hip thing to do in recent years, for him it’s a serious health concern that makes going out to eat or grocery shopping a whole ordeal.
It’s gotten much better a few years in, but early on in his diagnoses, he would have to carefully inspect the packaging for almost everything. While there are a ton of products out there labeled “gluten-free” the requirements for that label can mean that there is still enough gluten to cause a problem for someone with Celiac.
The Gluten Project is a search engine of sorts for certified gluten-free products that my friend can actually eat. Everything in its database of 35,000 products has been certified by the Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO).
With it, you just type in what you’re looking for (just like any other search engine) and it will return results of what products are out there. You can also click on a few popular search items like pasta and beer to get immediate results.
For the most part, you’re just looking at a list of products, so once you know what you can buy you’ll still have to figure out where to buy it. A few of the items have links out to where you can snag them online, and the goal is to make it so the products with online shopping options are eventually the majority which will make the tool much more helpful.
For someone who is newly diagnosed and is still in the ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ phase of figuring out what they can eat, it can be a solid resource to point you in the right direction.
This content was originally published here.