Celiac Disease Is Not A Gluten Allergy
Celiac Disease is an immune-mediated chronic condition
Ignorance is annoying
One evening, when I was newly diagnosed, I was out for dinner and drinks with my team after a soccer game. I was just learning how to navigate a gluten-free (GF) diet at home, and very awkwardly figuring out how to eat in a restaurant without getting sick.
It was 2009 and gluten-free menu options were extremely limited.
Instead of items being marked as GF right on the menu, like they do in a lot of places now, I had to ask for an allergy binder. It was up to me to go through the binder, look up any food I thought I might like, then search through to see if it had gluten under the various allergens listed.
I was already socially awkward and anxious, and this certainly didn’t help. It made me very uncomfortable. As I was stressing over what I could possibly eat, a teammate asked, “why don’t you just take a pill like I do for lactose intolerance?”
Because I can’t. It doesn’t work that way. At all.
Over the few years that followed, I encountered a mixture of dismissive folks, people who wanted to accommodate but had no idea how, and people who refused to even try.
