Gluten and Dairy Free Diet: Planning Meals for Home and School

Living without dairy and wheat is a challenge. When you first start to work with this diet you spend most of your time just trying to find substitutes for the foods you normally ate. However, after you get the hang of working with wheat alternatives and dairy alternatives, your next step is to make sure that you are not only adhering to the diet, but that you are also serving yourself and your family a healthy and well balanced diet. This is where many people get into trouble.

Calories

The first dietary issue that you need to take into consideration when working with the gluten and dairy free diet, is caloric intake. At first your child may lose weight as they will not eat as much of the new foods that you are serving them because they are unfamiliar with the taste and texture of these foods. However, as they become familiar with the taste and texture of non-dairy and non-wheat recipes, the volume of food they eat will increase. This is when you need to closely monitor how many calories each member of your family is consuming to keep their weight under control.

The age, height and activity level of each person is going to impact how many calories they need. To help you monitor the caloric intake of each member of your family, or at least the people on thegluten free dairy free diet, keep a chart of calories for the ingredients that you use to cook with. Then chart the food amounts and calories on a dry erase board.

Fat Content

Another element of the gluten free and dairy free diet that you will need to chart is fat content. While you will be using lower fat ingredients like soy milk and soy cheese, these products still contain fat. You will especially want to monitor how much hydrogenated fats are in your recipes. This is an unhealthy fat. When possible avoid using products with this type of fat.

Planning School Lunches

One challenge of putting your Autistic child on a gluten free and dairy free diet is dealing with school breakfasts and lunches. The school is not going to be able to cater to this diet so you will need to pack meals for your child to have at school. You will want to include breakfast, a snack and lunch. Variety is going to keep your child from getting bored with the foods you send. Celery sticks with Smart Balance peanut butter and raisins, carrot sticks or baby carrots, fruit snacks, dried fruits and sugar free Jello®, all make great snacks. For breakfast, eggs, turkey sausage or vegan yogurt all work well. For lunch you can include vegetable soup, chicken and rice soup, rice dumplings, turkey hot dogs without the bun, mashed potatoes, and beef stew all make great meals.

Planning Dinners

At home you can be more creative with what you make. You can try your luck working with gluten free breads, however, you're life will be much easier if you just forego bread and switch to rice and potatoes as your primary starches. Homemade stews and soups are going to be the easiest to keep gluten and dairy free. You can transform just about any recipe into a gluten and dairy free recipe by removing noodles and wheat thickeners. You can replace the noodles with rice and/or potatoes and replace wheat thickeners with arrowroot or corn starch.

Asian cuisine also will provide you with a lot of great gluten free and dairy free recipes to work with. However, because of soy sauce and other prepackaged sauces. Many of these pre-bottled sauces have wheat in them.

Again, variety is going to help you keep your kids satisfied with this diet. Try planning a different type of cuisine for each day of the week. For example, you can have Thai on Monday, Mexican on Tuesday, American on Wednesday, etc.

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Some Facts About Fat

It is important to understand that some amount of fat is necessary for proper functioning of our body. Excess fat is dangerous, and hence it is very essential to ensure that our fat intake is of right quality and quantity. Fats are considered essential for normal glandular activity, especially the adrenaline gland. Fats also function as regulator for the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K); and as a source of the essential fatty acids.

Types of Fat:

Saturated fat contributes the most to elevating blood cholesterol levels, especially LDL (the bad cholesterol) It also elevates the possibility of blood clotting. Typically saturated fat is found in animal fats and tropical oils. Hence it is very important to select low fat milk and limit/avoid cheese, all types of meats (especially red meat), butter ghee and tropical oils.

Unsaturated fats (poly and mono) have less of an effect on elevating blood cholesterol levels. Mono-unsaturated fats may help increase HDL (the good cholesterol). Polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) decrease the bad cholesterol and suppress clot formation in the blood. Hence it is very essential to prefer plant foods and use vegetable oil instead of hydrogenated oil for cooking.

Trans-fats are produced when unsaturated fat is hydrogenated to make it more saturated. Trans-fats tend to have more of an effect on elevating blood cholesterol levels, especially LDL, compared to unsaturated fats, but they have less of an effect compared to saturated fat . The ratio of saturated fats to unsaturated fats should be roughly about 0.8 to 1.0. This can be achieved by judicious combination of cereals, pulses, vegetables, milk and vegetable oils.

Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs): The two essential fatty acids are Alpha-Linolenic Acid (Omega-3 Fatty Acid) and Linoleic Acid (Omega-6 Fatty Acid). A good balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acid is very essential. Fish oil and flax seeds are very good source of Omega-3 Fatty acids for both non-vegetarians and vegetarians respectively. Omega-3 Fatty Acids lower bad cholesterol, triglyceride and prevent clot formation; besides lowering blood pressure.

One must also remember that refined carbohydrates and sugars also increase triglyceride levels; hence one must prefer natural foods and reduce consumption of sugar. Certain types of dietary fibers (soluble fiber) found in cereals, pulses, vegetables and fruits decrease cholesterol and triglycerides, hence one must make them a part of our daily diet.

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Fat and getting fatter: U.S. obesity rates to soar by 2030

By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK | Tue Sep 18, 2012 10:08am EDT

(Reuters) - If Americans stick to their eating and exercise habits, future historians will look back on the early 21st century as a golden age of svelte.

The latest in a long string of reports on the obesity epidemic in the United States presents the usual glum picture of the present, when 35.7 percent of adults and 16.9 percent of children age 2 to 19 are obese, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported earlier this year.

But for the first time, the report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation - the ninth that the groups have issued - also applies a time machine to those data. Using a model of population and other trends, the report "F as in Fat" projects that, by 2030, unless Americans change their ways, half of U.S. adults will be obese.

Building on the state-by-state obesity data CDC released in August, "F as in Fat" projects obesity rates of at least 44 percent in every state and over 60 percent in 13.

Since obesity raises the risk of numerous diseases, from type 2 diabetes to endometrial cancer, that will mean more sick people and higher medical costs, notes the report, released Tuesday.

In particular, it projects as many as 7.9 million new cases of diabetes per year, compared to 1.9 million new cases in recent years. There could also be 6.8 million new cases of chronic heart disease and stroke every year, compared with 1.3 million new cases per year now.

The increasing burden of illness will go right to the bottom line, it says: $66 billion more in annual obesity-related medical costs over and above today's $147 billion to $210 billion (out of total healthcare spending of $2.7 trillion).

That projection supports a study published earlier this year in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found that by 2030, 42 percent of U.S. adults could be obese, adding $550 billion to healthcare costs over that period.

'A TALE OF TWO FUTURES'

As with all projections, from climate models to Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," human actions can prevent the worst of the scenarios.

"This is a tale of two futures," said Jeffrey Levi of George Washington University and the executive director of Trust for America's Health. "We're at a turning point where if we don't do something now to mitigate these trends, the cost in human health and healthcare spending will be enormous."

Obesity is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) above 30. Overweight means a BMI of 25 to 29.9. BMI is calculated by taking weight in pounds and dividing it by the square of height in inches, and multiplying the result by 703. For instance, someone who is 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighs 185 (64 kg) has a BMI of 30.8.

The projections emerge from the increase in obesity rates among U.S. adults, which have more than doubled from the 15 percent of 1980, and children, which have more than tripled since 1980.

Although the percentage of obese children and adults was essentially unchanged between 2008 and 2010, CDC found, the "F as in Fat" model takes a longer view, explained mathematician Martin Brown of Britain's National Heart Forum, a nonprofit group, who led development of the model.

"You have to take trends over a number of years," he said. "In the age groups that matter, there just isn't much evidence of a leveling off in obesity rates."

As a result, many states projected to have the most obesity in 2030 do now, too. In 2011, 12 states had an adult-obesity rate above 30 percent, with Mississippi the highest at 34.9 percent. Colorado was the lowest at 20.7 percent.

The report projects that in 2030 in Mississippi, 66.7 percent of adults will be obese, as will 44.8 percent in Colorado, which will still be the thinnest state.

More surprising are projections for states such as Delaware, now the 19th-most obese state with a rate of 28.8 percent. The model uses 1999 as a baseline, explained Brown. "So if a state had a low rate of obesity in 1999 and is fairly high now, that indicates a steep rate of increase, which we believe will not go away." Result: an obesity rate of 64.7 percent in Delaware in 2030, making it the third-most obese state.

States facing the greatest percentage increase in obesity-related medical costs are now in the middle of the pack.

New Jersey faces the largest increase in costs, 34.5 percent, as its obesity rate is projected to climb from 23.7 percent today to 48.6 percent in 2030. Eight other states could see increases of 20 percent and 30 percent, including New Hampshire, Colorado and Alaska.

All is not lost, said Levi. "We have learned that with a concerted effort you can change the culture of a community, including its level of physical activity, eating habits, what foods are offered in schools, and whether families eat together," he said.

In New York City, for instance, obesity in grades K-8 dropped 5.5 percent from the 2006-07 school year to 2010-11, thanks mostly to healthier school lunches, public health experts said.

If BMI were reduced by 5 percent - for an adult of average weight, that means losing 11 pounds (5 kg) - in 2030 the obesity rate would not exceed 60 percent in any state, in contrast to the 13 in the business-as-usual projection.

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Fatty food might cause brain damage, say scientists

Fatty foods may damage the region of the brain responsible for regulating a person’s appetite, which could account for why overweight people often find it difficult to stick to a diet, scientists said.

A study has found that a diet rich in saturated fats leads to the sort of damage to the brain’s hypothalamus that would normally be seen during ischaemic stroke, when the nerves are starved of oxygen.

The hypothalamus is a key region of the brain involved in controlling appetite so the findings suggests that saturated fats may be having a direct affect on the ability of the body to stick to a diet, said Lynda Williams of the Rowett Institute for Nutrition and Health at Aberdeen University.

“The hypothalamus is a small area at the base of the brain containing neurones that control the amount of food we eat and the energy we expend. However, this control breaks down in obesity - the system appears not to work - and we don’t really know why this happens,” Dr Williams said.

“To help answer the question we used a strain of mice that is susceptible to weight gain and put half of them on a high-fat diet and the other half on a normal low-fat diet,” Dr Williams said

“After just three days we saw changes to the proteins [of the hypothalamus] and after one week we saw changes to the genes,” she told the British Science Festival.

“Our experiment reveals a potential mechanism whereby a high-fat diet that is energy dense can damage or injure the hypothalamus. These changes may lead to the break down of the energy-balance centres in the brain, and so encourage weight gain and obesity,” she said.

“I’m almost sure it’s a direct effect of the fats on the brain. One of the first things that happens to the hypothalamus early on in high-fat feeding is that it become insensitive to [appetite hormones], so there is a sort of global loss of control of appetite,” she added.

Although the research was carried out on mice, Dr Williams believes the same processes take place in the human brain. “There is some evidence from the US where they did brain scans on obese people and found some indication of damage in the hypothalamus,” she said.