Disclaimer: Paleo purists beware! The following text contains numerous mentions of cereal grains, and their toxic ingredients, so read past this point only if you are sure you can do so without becoming extremely agitated. Kindly check your stone axes and clubs at the door. LOL.
At the risk of being considered a neolithic moron, I'll admit that while making a delivery today, I stopped at a supermarket, hoping to find some "safe" cereal, (there is no health food store in that particular city). After failing to find my old standby, (Arrowhead Mills Organic Sweetened Rice Flakes), I foolishly attempted to locate a suitable substitute, in the rows and rows of choices that were on display. I was very surprised at what I found.
Very, very few packages appeared to be in complete compliance with the new labeling law. The discrepancy centers around a couple of ingredients found in almost all popular cereals - malt flavoring, and barley malt extract.
We all know that malt normally comes from barley, and barley malt is definitely a forbidden item to anyone on a GF diet. Amazingly, none of the packages I looked at, (and I looked at dozens of them), correctly listed either product as a derivative of a source of gluten, namely barley. According to the labeling law, when a derivative of a source of an allergen is listed on a label, it must be immediately followed by the parent source, (in this case barley), in parentheses; or, a separate statement must appear just below the ingredient list, identifying the allergen sources, (that is, it must say something such as, "This product contains Dairy, Wheat, Soy, etc.)
That puzzled me, so I did some research, and found that apparently most of the cereal manufacturers consider those products to contain negligible amounts of hordein, (the gluten protein in barley), or hordein peptides. IOW, our health lies in the balance, because the labels are based on a judgment call by an employee at a cereal manufacturer. In this case, conventional wisdom, (among the cereal manufacturers), seems to be that since the malt flavoring is taken from a water rinse of malted barley, it cannot contain gluten. Apparently cereal chemists consider this to be a flawed claim. Please read this response by a USDA cereal chemist, after he was asked to comment on a claim by a Kellog company spokesman. Apparently the lady didn't believe what the guy from Kellog had told her, so she took it to a higher level:
http://www.celiac.com/st_prod.html?p_prodid=417
Post number 5 in this topic, explains how barley malt extract is made:
http://www.glutenfreeforum.com/lofivers ... 23222.html
The bottom line is that many/most food manufacturers feel that any product that contains less than 200 ports of gluten per million, (ppm), can be safely labeled as gluten free. Apparently that's the reason why all those cereal labels appear to be in violation of the new labeling law.
If you think that this whole concept is absurd, and that the tolerance level on gluten should be absolutely zero, be sure to read the article on the Codex Alimentarius, which I will post in a separate topic. In the meantime, consider this quote from that article:
Why do I feel just as confused as ever, about ingredient lists on labels? <sigh>The conclusion is that in many countries food labeled as "gluten free" will almost definitely contain gluten.
Tex
