I bet you have no idea just how many things you eat have gluten in them.

Several years ago, when I was having problems with irritable bowel syndrome, I did some reading and, in my somewhat hypochondriac state (see “hypochondria and me“), decided that I had celiac disease. (I didn’t just go straight to a doctor to get a proper diagnosis because I was an underinsured grad student living in the US.) So I did everything I could to cut out gluten. And in the process I discovered just how many things have some amount of gluten in them – because wheat and other glutinous grains are used in the making of a whole lot of things. For instance, forget about a lot of salad dressings. Skip beer (clearly). Don’t lick envelopes. You’ll probably even need to change brands of toothpaste. (I just found a site with lists of things that have gluten in them: see this list and this perhaps even more eye-opening list.) I certainly couldn’t eat any of the going-away cake co-workers had gotten for my departure when I was leaving a job at the university library.

Lucky for me, I was wrong about having celiac disease (in the end, cutting out caffeine fixed my irritable bowel issues). But more recently, for different reasons, my wife has been trying to cut back on gluten, and let me tell you, it ain’t easy! (I can also mention that gluten-free pasta has a quite different texture than regular pasta, and I find it harder to get desirable results.)

It happens that I have a few friends who also have to be completely gluten-free. One friend at my church discovered in her 60s that she had celiac disease – imagine, she’d had a lifetime of digestive and nutritional problems, and finally, after six decades, she discovered she didn’t have to suffer from them! (At communion, for her and a few others, there are rice wafers available – which can’t even be touched by fingers that were just handling bread.) Another family friend could never have made it to 60 without knowing; his case was so bad he would have died in childhood if he hadn’t cut out all gluten from his diet.

For most of us, this might just seem like a “huh, too bad for them” thing. But if you happen to find yourself in the company of someone, say at a dinner party, who can’t eat anything with gluten in it, don’t think of it as a pertinacity or mere irritant. Think about how they have to manage to avoid so many foods for no other reason than that their bodies rebel against them. Think about just how many things have gluten in them – way more than you probably thought. For them, dining is like biking through a minefield. They’re not doing it to be difficult. They’d much rather not have to. But just imagine digesting broken glass – that’s what it can be like.

As it happens, November is Gluten-Free Diet Awareness Month. So are you aware now?

(Added note: some people who avoid gluten don’t have celiac disease or an allergy but are following advice based on indications that gluten may be connected to other health problems for them. They’re not being flakey. They’re just trying to be healthy. Avoiding gluten is so goshdarn hard, you know they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t have some really good reason to.)