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Science Quickly

Gluten-Free Restaurant Foods Are Often Mislabeled

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2019

⏱️ 2 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One in three gluten-free dishes tested at restaurants contained gluten—especially GF pizzas and pastas. Christopher Intagliata reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

0:22.7

.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.jp. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.5

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:38.8

A lot of restaurant menus these days have gluten-free options.

0:43.0

The problem is, many of the dishes may not be gluten-free at all.

0:46.1

About a third overall.

0:47.6

32% of gluten-free-labeled restaurant foods had a gluten-found result.

0:52.5

Benjamin LeBwell, a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at Columbia

0:56.2

University. His team got that one-third number by crowdsourcing data from 804 restaurant patrons,

1:02.3

who used handheld gluten testing devices to scan more than 5,600 restaurant food samples from across the U.S.

1:09.9

The devices can detect gluten at slightly lower

1:12.5

levels than the maximum concentration the FDA allows for packaged foods, 20 parts per million.

1:18.0

So there could be some harmless false positives in the data. But we suspect, given that large

1:23.6

proportion, that this is clearly a bigger problem than in packaged food, where probably

1:29.5

less than 2% of all packaged food has detectable gluten of greater than 20 parts per million.

1:34.5

The results are in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

1:37.9

And for those who need to avoid gluten for health reasons, LeBwall has these tips.

1:42.4

Food that was tested around dinner time was more likely to

1:45.1

have gluten detected than food earlier in the day. And avoid allegedly gluten-free pizzas and

...

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