This recipe is another family heirloom from my Mother In Law.  She does have a real name, but we usually refer to her by her nickname, Mama Bear.  Given her upper Midwest farmhouse upbringing, Mama Bear is a heck of a cook, and this recipe is hers, so this is her appropriate acknowledgment.

Here’s the recipe for Mama Bear’s Gluten Free Golden Crispy Granola

Mama Bear's Gluten Free Golden Crispy Granola

Are health insurance companies generally being fair and honest when they reject claims from policy holders?

That would seem to be an important question in deciding how best to fix the U.S. health system. But it hasn’t been a focus of the raging health-care debate — possibly because the answer is not publicly available.

“This is one of the dark corners of the black box that is private health insurance,” said Karen Pollitz, a professor at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.

When 17-year-old Brianna Rice was diagnosed with celiac disease in February, she had health insurance.
She doesn’t now. In the months that followed her diagnosis, her insurance company, American Community Mutual Insurance,
combed through her medical records and ruled that her parents lied on her application last year. In May, American Community
not only canceled her policy, but also rescinded coverage all the way back to the day it started — Nov. 1.

Here’s another one from celiac.com:

The family’s situation shows just how quickly health insurance problems can lead to financial ruin.
With their daughter’s unpaid medical bills exceeding $20,000 and mounting, the Rices fear losing their home.
Brianna’s mother, Pat Rice says she has liquidated some of her retirement account to pay bills.

“The next step is really bankruptcy,” her husband said.

This story should strike a nerve with everyone who has celiac disease, or knows someone who does.
I wonder how many people with celiac disease might risk cancellation of their insurance if they lost their jobs?
How many people who obtain insurance in good faith, and later find they have celiac disase, risk being with a ‘pre-existing’ condition label?
It seems to me that a crafty insurance company could make an argument that nearly all celiac disease is ‘pre-existing,’ especially in older people.

Given how much wheat is produced by American farmers, why do we need to import wheat gluten? Because it’s cheaper than buying domestic gluten. We may be the world’s largest exporter of wheat, shipping 1 billion bushels to other countries in last year’s growing season. Yet we export relatively little wheat gluten. To extract the gluten from wheat, you have to separate it from the starch, by repeatedly washing and kneading wheat flour. But only four U.S. companies go through this process; last year, they produced roughly 100 million pounds of wheat gluten, about 20 percent of the domestic demand.

Full Article

Here’s an excerpt:

The simple truth is that cats and dogs are, by nature, primarily meat eaters. Dogs are historically scavengers, whose natural diets, according to a recent study by biologists Ray and Lorna Coppinger, consisted of “bones, pieces of carcass, rotten greens and fruit, fish guts, discarded seeds and grains, animal guts and heads, some discarded human food and wastes”³. In the wild, a dogs diet included only the smallest amounts of grains, while cats are almost totally carnivorous, and subsist in the wild on a diet made up almost exclusively of small rodents. The natural diets of both cats and dogs provide large amounts of animal protein and fats, water, and little in the way of carbohydrates.

Read the full article

There’s still a lot of science to be done. And should you try such a diet, you probably shouldn’t expect any 30-day miracles. But there may be something to eating in an anti-inflammatory way.

“[Chronic inflammation] is an emerging field,” says Dr. David Heber, a UCLA professor of medicine and director of the university’s Center for Human Nutrition. “It’s a new concept for medicine.”

The point of an anti-inflammation diet is not to lose weight, although it is not uncommon for its followers to shed pounds. The goal: to combat what proponents call “chronic silent inflammation” in the body, the result of an immune system that doesn’t know when to shut off.

The theory goes that long after the invading bacteria or viruses from some infection are gone, the body’s defenses remain active. The activated immune cells and hormones then turn on the body itself, damaging tissues. The process continues indefinitely, occurring at low enough levels that a person doesn’t feel pain or realize anything is wrong. Years later, proponents say, the damage contributes to illnesses such as heart disease, neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease or cancer.

In general terms, following an anti-inflammatory diet means increasing intake of foods that have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. (Antioxidants reduce the activity of tissue-damaging free radicals at sites of inflammation.) The diet includes vegetables, whole grains, nuts, oily fish, protein sources, spices such as ginger and turmeric and brightly colored fruits such as blueberries, cherries and pomegranates.

Foods that promote inflammation — saturated fats, trans fats, corn and soybean oil, refined carbohydrates, sugars, red meat and dairy — are reduced or eliminated.

It would seem logical that a diet that could dampen an overactive immune system could help prevent or slow diseases that are caused or exacerbated by inflammation. And evidence is certainly mounting that such diseases include heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. (See related story online.)

Studies with animals suggest that the diet’s followers may be on to something.

“If you feed rodents different diets, you can very strongly modulate inflammation,” says Dr. Andrew Greenberg, the director of the Obesity and Metabolism Laboratory at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. “Fish oil, for example, ameliorates inflammation in rodents.”

Here’s a link:  LA Times

http://www.slate.com/id/2223745/

Excerpt:
But diagnosed celiacs only account for a small fraction of the bloated and still-expanding market for gluten-free products. (In total, the disease affects just 0.75 percent of the population.) // The remainder are those consumers who believe, for one reason or another, that gluten is hurting them, too. According to Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland and a leading expert on the disease, almost half the people who show up at his clinic are on the gluten-free diet before they’ve even been tested for celiac. For every patient whose intestinal biopsy turns up positive, he says, nine or 10 more test clean but commit to going G-free all the same.

These patients are described as having “gluten intolerance,” a nebulous condition that amounts to something like celiac-lite: They feel pain or discomfort after eating wheat, rye, or barley but lack the hallmark signs of intestinal deterioration. The notion that you can have the symptoms of celiac but not the full-blown disorder is based on the idea, first proposed in 1992, that a person’s reaction to gluten can be plotted along a sensitivity spectrum—with celiac patients falling at the most vulnerable extreme. Since there’s no way to “prove” a case of gluten-intolerance in the lab, the diagnostic criteria are rather lax. To qualify for the condition, you need only discover (with or without medical supervision) that going “G-free” makes you feel better—in body or mind or spirit.

It’s an exciting time to be gluten-free. There’s a lot happening, with new products, studies, articles, books and online information becoming available on a daily basis. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep track of it all.

Rather than trying to be any kind of comprehensive gluten-free blog, Gluten-Free Galaxy will try to share the best, most relevant, and most interesting news from the gluten-free world.

Gluten-Free Galaxy is just that, a serendipitous journey through the rapidly-expanding gluten-free universe. Along they way, we hope to make fresh, new, and wonderful discoveries and to share those with our fellow gluten-free travelers.

Welcome aboard Gluten-Free Galaxy! Our journey will begin shortly. Enjoy and share with your friends and loved ones.