This year’s awards are bigger and better. Why bigger? Well, there’s more categories and we need more of your opinions. Why better? For starters: Prizes!

Before I get ahead of myself, though, are you familiar with the Best of Gluten-Free? If not, here’s an introduction from the survey page itself:

Do you think your favorite gluten-free brands and products deserve some recognition? Ever wanted to high-five your favorite gluten-free bread or give your favorite gluten-free cookie a big bear hug?…

The Best of Gluten-Free Awards are designed to select the best gluten-free products available and to give recognition and thanks to the companies that provide them.

But what about those prizes?

The survey consists of 55 questions about your favorite gluten-free cookies, pastas, restaurants, travel and more. We estimate it will take you 10-12 minutes to complete, although you don’t have to finish the entire survey in order to have your vote count.

Simply by finishing the survey, you’ll be entered to win one of a variety of prizes: Amazon Kindle Fires, our favorite Gluten-Free Dining Cards and the new Essential Gluten Free-Baking Guide Part 1, and more! There are more than $2,000 worth of prizes being given out, and 75 winners.

To qualify for entry, you do have to complete the survey. But what if there’s a question you don’t have an answer for (maybe you don’t have a favorite gluten-free pie crust mix, for example)? No worries: you simply select “Other” and write in “none” or “no answer” and everything will be groovy.

Speaking of that “Other” box: we love write-ins! If your favorite isn’t on the candidate list, type it in — if we see a dark horse contender, we’ll revise the survey to include them in the pre-selected choices.

To share the survey with your friends or readers (if you’re a fellow blogger), hop on over to the survey page and pick up some HTML for a badge.

Survey will end on March 1, 2012; prize winners will be announced shortly thereafter and Best Of Gluten-Free winners in the spring.

Remember that leaving your favorites in the comments of this blog won’t count when we are looking for winners for the Best-Of Gluten-Free or the prizes — so head on over to the site, it’s survey time!

If not, check them out. Their website is full of good information whether you’re newly diagnosed, old-hat at all things gluten-free, or just wondering whether or not gluten is giving you problems.

Speaking of which: if you’re newly diagnosed via biopsy, the center will send you a care package full of tasty gluten-free samples and other materials. Just give them a call (see more here).

The Celiac Disease Center also puts out a free quarterly e-newsletter, and this quarter’s headline story was worth sharing: Evolving Diagnostic Criteria for Celiac Disease.

You’ll have to download the PDF if you’d like to read the article, and I don’t want to steal the writers’ thunder, but I do want to point out a few highlights to entice you over to the full article:

1. The article was written by Dr. Stefano Guandalini, an internationally-recognized expert on celiac disease, and Ronit Rose of the Celiac Disease Center.
2. The European Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN) is the body largely responsible for codifying diagnostic criteria for celiac disease. They created criteria in 1969, and revised them in 1990 in light of new research.
3. Now, given all the new, new research, the critera have been modified to be, “sensitive to the fact that today we know celiac disease is an immune disorder affecting not just the intestine, and that doctors see many more patients developing celiac disease who are either completely without symptoms or have symptoms that are far removed from the gastrointestinal tract.”
4. The new criteria are slightly different for children who are symptomatic and asymptomatic, and provide for a different course of action depending on the child in question. In some traditionally symptomatic cases, diagnosis can be made without need for biopsy.
5. Although the criteria are focused on children, they will likely be accepted as an appropriate standard for adults as well.

What was your (or your child’s) path to diagnosis like? Was there a biopsy?

For some of you, today is your lucky day. Well, actually, your lucky day was some time in the not-too-distant past — today’s just the day we’re posting about it.

Subway has made two big announcements regarding their gluten-free offerings.

The first:

All Subway stores across the state of Oregon will now have gluten-free options.

Why did Oregon “win” this special treat? Gluten-free Portland has an excerpt from the press release, which explains that during testing, Oregon stores sold the most gluten-free sandwiches. Logical enough — if I were a gigantic sandwich-selling corporation, I’d go to the places with the most buyers first, too.

The Statesman Journal, whose photo of Subway’s gluten-free buns graces this blog post, confirms that all of Oregon now has access to safe sandwiches and brownies.

I said there were two big announcements, though. What’s the other?

As you might have guessed, it’s two new cities on Subway’s steady march to a gluten-free America. If you live in Duluth, MN or Superior, WI, you too are a gluten-free test market for Subway.

If Oregon is any indication, states will go entirely gluten-free only if the cities that are being tested sell sufficient quantities of GF items. So if you live somewhere near a test market and you’d like to have Subway as an option: stop reading this blog already and go get yourself a sandwich!

A new book published by Ontario home economists, titled The Gluten-free Baking Book: 250 Small-batch Recipes for Everything from Brownies to Cheesecake, promises just that. Although I haven’t reviewed the book to be able to speak to the quality of the recipes, I thought the premise alone was worth a write-up.

Some people don’t have a microwave or prefer to minimize their use of one. And even the most microwave-loving person out there occasionally craves a baked good that needs more traditional treatment.

Note that I said “baked good,” not “goods”. Unless you’re cooking for a large group, the yields of many conventional gluten-free recipes can be unwieldy. Or dangerous for your diet (who can resist a freshly-baked gluten-free muffin or three, especially when the options are to eat quickly or let your hard-earned money grow moldly and sad?).

While it’s not so hard to halve a recipe, often this still leaves too much food for one or two people. And scaling a recipe much farther down can be difficult on a molecular level, given the finicky, scientific nature of baking (and gluten-free baking in particular).

According to the Winnipeg Free Press, the $27.95 paperback was created with a nod to the higher costs of gluten-free ingredients, and after authors Donna Washburn and Heather Butt, “heard time and time again how much people crave variety and the ability to bake something that is quick, easy to clean up and doesn’t require hours of baking in the kitchen.”

The article goes on to say that the book includes

• how to find baking equipment for smaller batches, techniques and ingredients.
• a glossary to guide readers to the ingredients that can be used in gluten-free baking
• the nutrient content in every recipe
• recipes for pizza, muffins, brownies, cakes, crisps, puddings, cupcakes and other baked goodies in two to four size servings.

To order the book (available in the US and Canada) or learn more, visit the authors’ website bestbreadrecipes.com. Or, visit publisher Robert Rose for a preview of the book’s interior and a link to add it to your Amazon wish list.

Do you have a favorite small-batch recipe?

Counting the Pounds?

Celiac disease is a little different in the United Kingdom.

For starters, it’s called coeliac disease. Fun!

For seconds, if you’ve got a diagnosis you can also get access to reduced-priced gluten-free staple items like bread, pizza bases, and flour mixes. Your general practitioner can write you a prescription for a fixed number of gluten-free food “units” based on your gender and age, which can be filled at the pharmacy.

Double fun! If you want to read more, check out Coeliac UK’s site; there are a handful of PDFs to the right, including one that lists all the different brands and items available on prescription.

Problem is, the county of Oxfordshire (home to Oxford University) wants to ban gluten-free foods from prescriptions.

The county says they will save an estimated £350,000 ($545,000) by eliminating gluten-free food from the list of items people can get on prescription. According to the Witney Gazette, the county is home to approximately 6,000 people with coeliac disease and writes about 25,000 annual prescriptions for gluten-free food.

A spokesperson for the National Health Service’s Oxfordshire trust explained that gluten-free food was put on prescription when coeliac disease was rare and safe food was hard to come by, but now that it is so common the need is less dire for government intervention. The spokesperson added, “The NHS does not provide food on prescription for other groups of patients whose diseases are associated with, or affected by, the type of food they eat.”

The chief executive of Coeliac UK countered by explaining that, “The primary care trust has said it does not give food on prescription to other groups with food intolerances. Coeliac is not a food intolerance, it is an auto-immune disease. It’s very wrong of them.”

This comes only months after public outrage was stirred at accusations that the Welsh NHS was paying £20-£32 per loaf of gluten-free bread. It’s unclear how accurate this number actually was; check out celiac.com’s analysis of the issue, including a statement from Genius bread. Or, have a gander at Wales Online, whose article also indicates the figures may be inflated and includes listings of comparably-steep markups on other pharmacy items like cold & flu tablets or cold sore cream.

How are the people of Oxfordshire (or the readership of the Witney Gazette) feeling about the issue? Check out their comments for some interesting perspectives on life with coeliac disease in the UK.

What do you think?

Technically I suppose that isn’t true. The cheering-up really happens after you’ve brought the bars inside and opened one. After all, one of the “perils” of having random food to try is that sometimes, it doesn’t taste very good.

Ah, the glamorous, perilous, life of a blogger.

Happily, the Angell Crisp bars that I tore into the other week were deee-licious. To borrow the company’s description, they were “a classic combination of smooth, creamy milk chocolate and crispy rice. Every bit a candy bar, but gluten-free, and made from the same organic and Fair Trade Certified® ingredients as the rest.”

The bar itself was shaped similarly to a Twix^® bar. The filling was nicely chewy without being caramel, and the crispy rice was a nice textural twist. A few of the specific things I liked about the Angell Crisp bars:

• they come in adorable packaging
• as promised, they’re clearly candy bars, clearly supposed to be a treat
• even so, the portion size and nutritional info are responsible; I didn’t feel gluttonous eating one
• thanks to a motto of Eat No Evil, the bars sport a highly socially responsible pedigree

More on that motto: the bars are both organic (USDA and Oregon Tilth) and fair trade (Fair Trade USA).

Angell Bars makes a few other flavors, but those are not gluten-free — so I wanted to find out more about the Angell Crisp bar and the company’s processes for avoiding cross-contamination. The official response:

Our facility is very serious about manufacturing procedures to avoid contamination.  The equipment is cleaned thoroughly between runs and potential contaminants are segregated.  We also send a number of samples from every run out for testing, and they have always come back well under the 20ppm threshold…

To see if a store near you carries the bars, you can check the website; if there’s nowhere convenient, you’ll be pleased to know that Angell Bars are available via Amazon.com in 12-pack boxes.

Have you had Angell Crisp? What did you think?

I get awfully tired of packing my lunch for work. Or sorting out the gluten-free dining options near my office and wondering how gluten-free they really are.

Enter Kettle Cuisine and its gluten-free soups, found in my grocer’s natural freezer section. This is a working person’s dream. Each box contains a 10 oz single serving in a microwavable bowl. This makes them even more convenient than a can of soup.

So far I’ve tried the Roasted Vegetable Soup and Chicken Soup with Rice Noodles. The vegetable soup was surprisingly filling and the chicken soup, while not like mom’s, was very good.

Kettle Cuisine makes ten gluten-free soups in all including Three Bean Chili, Organic Mushroom and Potato, Southwestern Chicken and Corn Chowder, Thai Curry Chicken Soup, and New England Clam Chowder, among others.

The company has been certified as a gluten-free manufacturer by the Gluten Free Certification Organization (GFCO) and the soups are cooked in its USDA-inspected kitchen in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Through January 31 you can submit photos of places you’ve taken Kettle Cuisine via its Facebook page and have a chance to win a free trip to Boston.

Talk about feeling left out over here in America. Sheesh.

Although I first learned about this when a friend forwarded me this blurb on gluten-free fast food from CNN’s Fortune blog, the gluten-free bun is apparently not a particularly new introduction.

Still, I thought some of you intrepid gluten-free travelers might want the info should you find yourself in Europe. And if I wasn’t aware, at least one or two of you were in the bunless dark too.

A greater search around the Internet brought up some reviews, which I’ll share below the jump. When I enlisted a friend to check McDonald’s Norwegian website, I got a second shock: Burger King offers gluten-free buns too, at least in Scandinavia!

So how do these buns taste? Well, according to the reviews online, they’re not half-bad — especially if you’re craving some fast food while abroad.

Spain

Gluten Free Appetite posted the press release announcing McDonald’s gluten-free buns back in June (it’s translated into English).

Sweden

Gluten Free Mrs. D wrote about her first gluten-free McDonald’s, and also her memories of McDonald’s in Russia twenty years ago (not GF, but really interesting!).

Norway

Gluten Free / Dairy Free NJ has great photos as well as a comprehensive review of the Olso gluten-free experience — Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.

Glutenfri.org is a resource for safe options in Norway, and although the descriptions are in Norwegian, Google Translate does a decent job of piecing information together.

Finland

Aptly enough, Globally Gluten Free was my top result when looking for news.

As always, it’s advisable that you take the same precautions internationally that you take at home: if you don’t feel that the people at the counter understand the precautions required to keep you safe, don’t eat! One easy way to simplify the process is to carry gluten-free dining cards, which are available in many languages including Spanish.

Have you had a fast food hamburger on a gluten-free bun while abroad? How was it?

No one wants to be Mr. Bump!

Thanks to Celiac.com for posting a review of a November study out of Sweden on health-related quality of life, which makes an interesting companion to the study on celiac and depression I wrote about last week.

This study is titled, “Delay to celiac disease diagnosis and its implications for health-related quality of life,” and it examined pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Slightly more than 1,000 members of the Swedish Society for Coeliacs completed a survey and their results were translated to quality-adjusted life year (QALY) scores. These scores were then compared to ones from a survey of the general population.

Unsurprisingly, undiagnosed celiac disease significantly lowers a person’s health-related quality of life (HRQoL). The average score in the year prior to diagnosis was 0.66, whereas the general population in Sweden scores a 0.79.

The overwhelming majority of responding celiacs reported compliance with the gluten-free diet (96%) — and, happily, the overall score for respondents increased to 0.86 after diagnosis and treatment.

The full study also took a look at gender, and their, “results confirm that CD females experience a lower HRQoL than males,” both before and after diagnosis.

Taken as a whole, the study is just one more clear indication that testing for celiac is important. The average time-to-diagnosis continues to lessen thanks to increased awareness, but its still several years on average.

Do you know anyone who is refusing to get tested? If so, you might want to show them these numbers (or the celiac.com analysis)!

Many women (and men) report feeling great after they finally learn they have celiac disease and begin adhering to a gluten-free diet. It normally takes years, still, for a diagnosis — so it makes sense that after so long feeling awful, people would be pretty happy.

However, many people on a gluten-free diet feel stressed when they realize just how often gluten lurks in the world around them. Anyone who’s been on the diet long enough, I guarantee, has had at least one day where they throw their hands up in the air and sigh at the hassle of it all.

A new study published in Chronic Illness sheds a little extra light on the subject of mental health and celiac disease in women, and the results are notable.

The study involved a web-based survey of 177 women with doctor-diagnosed celiac disease. Most were compliant with the gluten-free diet. According to the abstract, the extensive survey assessed, “dietary compliance, illness symptoms, psychiatric functioning, and disordered eating.”

Despite adhering to the prescribed diet, many of the survey participants reported an impaired quality of life. A substantial percentage, albeit a minority, “met criteria for the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders: 37% (n = 65) met the threshold suggesting depression, and 22% (n = 39) for disordered eating.”

The US National Library of Medicine provided an analysis of the study, going over precisely those findings.

I’m not sure whether or not the findings surprise me. Sticking to the diet is hard. And the joy of learning new foods, well, sometimes I’d trade all the millet in the world for a month of never having to think about what I eat.

One thing to take away from the numbers, though, is the indication that being gluten-free can be tough — so you probably shouldn’t do it alone. There are support groups (for example via the Gluten Intolerance Group or the Celiac Sprue Association) all across the country, and they can be great resources for moral support, up-to-date information, recipe ideas, and even (sometimes) free samples from companies eager to feed you.

There are also a lot of places you can go on the web, if you’re feeling shy or there isn’t a sufficiently local support group for you. Celiact.com has published a list of the top 30 gluten-free blogs, and yours truly is honored to be among such esteemed company (and such good reading!). There’s even a social networking site just for gluten-free people, with more than 11,000 members: Gluten-Free Faces.

Where do you go when you’re feeling the gluten-free blues?