Tag Archives: Vitamins

Photo courtesy of Joe Brentin

Sometimes gluten can appear in strange places; places you’d never expect. When you’re diagnosed with Celiac Disease, or gluten-intolerance, it’s up to you to make sure your toothpaste, the ketchup bottle in your fridge, and even your vitamins don’t contain anything that can make you sick.

Some of these products may surprise you. For example, most people wouldn’t suspect their vitamins contained gluten when in fact gluten is a common ingredient in Read More »

Probiotics are friendly bacteria that live in our intestines. When our level of bad bacteria overbalance the good bacteria, we get a condition called dysbiosis.

The following video describes three probiotics that decrease inflammation and make certain vitamins we need for energy metabolism, mood and a number of other functions!

Ready to get healthy? REALLY healthy? Check out our Gluten Free Works Treatment Guide where we show you how to treat and correct over 300 symptoms. Standard medical treatment doesn’t account for nutrient deficiencies, medicine interactions or supplements. The Treatment Guide does!

Niacin, also called vitamin B₃, is required by all the cells of our body making it essential for vitality and life itself.

Niacin is essential for keeping our skin and digestive tract healthy, our brain and nervous system  functioning normally, certain key cell processes repaired, our adrenal glands producing steroid hormones at demand levels, sex glands producing the hormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone and, most especially, for producing energy to keep our body alive.¹

When absorbed from the small intestinal tract, niacin becomes part of a process including more than 200 enzymes involved in metabolism of carbohydrates, proteins and fatty acids, that is, chemical reactions that maintain life.¹ Niacin is stored by the liver.²

Niacin must be digested to release its absorbable forms, nicotinamide and nicotinic acid. These molecules are absorbed across the intestinal lining at low concentrations by sodium-dependent facilitated diffusion, meaning they need help to get into the bloodstream.¹ Read More »

Selenium is a trace mineral required for good health. We should not be complacent about the small amount of this essential nutrient needed because not having enough of it has serious consequences.

Selenium is required for antioxidant protection, DNA repair, thyroid hormone activation, immune system enhancement, production of prostaglandins, muscle function and protection against cancer. Read More »

Being gluten free means adapting a whole new relationship to food, something that shapes our every day lives, holidays and traditions. Considering how complicated and challenging being gluten free can be, it seems appropriate to make our New Year’s Resolutions at least related to improving our health and gluten free lifestyle.

Last year I had a slue of NYRs all about improving my gluten free lifestyle. You can check out last year’s list here but in summary, I decided to:

1. Be (even more) gluten free – this means making smart, safe choices at restaurants like getting a salad instead of french fries due to risk of cross contamination.

2. Become informed — I vowed to start following GF blogs so that I can stay current on what other GF advocates are up to.

3. Get techy — there are many phone apps out there that make being gluten free much simpler. I decided to start Read More »

There are a number of nutrient deficiencies associated with Celiac and other autoimmune disorders. These occur not only BEFORE diagnosis, due to flattened villi and malabsorption, but AFTER diagnosis as well.  It’s up to us to choose healthy, naturally gluten-free foods (like fruits, veggies, lean protein and brown rice) in order to feel the best we can. Even then, we may still have deficiencies.

I was diagnosed about 5 years ago. Although I have experienced dramatic improvements in my health, sleep quality, and energy level, I have still been dealing with some “weird” symptoms that I wasn’t sure were going to go away. These include eye floaters (which I’ve noticed for about 2 years now), shakiness and rapid pulse especially during the first half of the day, and carbohydrate intolerance. (Eating high carb meals have been giving me headaches). So…. I was VERY excited when I heard that Gluten Free Works was going to be offering . I couldn’t wait to try it out.

When I got my results back, I was AMAZED at how many nutrient deficiencies I still had after being Gluten-Free for this many years. I came up deficient in:

VITAMIN A (this explained the eye floaters)
CHROMIUM (I had never heard of chromium before now, but this explained my problem with carbs. I have since read that a deficiency in Chromium leads to DIABETES… so I’m glad I figured this out now, rather than later ;)
SELENIUM (had never heard of that one either) Read More »

The impact of nutritional deficiencies on health should be common knowledge among the medical professional community. All doctors, nurses and other medical professionals should be able to quickly and accurately identify and diagnose functional nutritional deficiencies in patients and correct those deficiencies. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Medical teaching institutions do not focus on nutrition, so many medical professionals are not equipped to recognize the signs of nutritional deficiencies until the patient is extremely sick. In most cases, the patient is able to function, just not at his or her potential. He or she may have weight issues, skin, hair or digestive problems, anxiety or difficulty concentrating. This is called a functional nutrient deficiency.

In  Part 1 of this article about nutrient deficiencies in the gluten-free population, I posed four critiques and questions that I promised to answer in today’s part 2. Without further ado, here we go…

Critique #1 questioned the small sample size of the research. I can’t do anything about that, and there’s not much to be said about it, so let’s move on.

Next, I think it’s easiest to address critique #3: How did nutrient deficiencies in the gluten-free population compare to Americans as a whole? To answer that question, I pulled data regarding nationwide averages from the USDA’s Community Nutrition Mapping Project. If I amend yesterday’s table that showed the percent of the gluten-free population who are deficient in given nutrients, and add to it a column for the national averages, this is what you find:

These numbers change the perspective a bit, I think. It’s not simply that the gluten-free population is nutrient deficient. When you compare us to the national averages, it gets slightly more complex. In some cases, such as folate, riboflavin, thiamin, and iron, we’re two or more times as deficient (as a group) than the nation. However, in other cases, such as B12, B6, and calcium, we still have greater rates Read More »

I was recently reading a press release from Nature’s Path Organic about two of their new cereals. The press release made a familiar argument: the cereals “provide gluten avoiders with whole grains… unlike many gluten-free cereals which forfeit nutritional benefits…” The implication is that many gluten-free cereals (and other gluten-free processed foods, by extension) are more highly processed in order to improve taste and texture. But they do so by sacrificing nutritional quality.

There is some truth to this logic. Foods made from whole grains are inherently healthier than heavily processed foods, and I’ll use our good old enemy – wheat – to demonstrate. I compared whole grain wheat flour (less processed) with white, unenriched wheat flour (more processed) across a range of nutrient measures. Not surprisingly, the wheat underwent a profound loss in Read More »

Getting enough of the nutrients we need is the most important component of getting well and staying healthy.  If the foods in our diet are deficient, then we must turn to supplements to make up the difference.

But what do the ingredient labels mean?  What are the correct amounts we should be taking?  Do vitamins really expire?

Nature Made, a producer of vitamins, minerals and herbal products designed to promoted good health, answers your questions.  Read More »