It was the single, and then double, most painful experience of my life.
And I’ve been in more than one motorcycle accident.
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Wheat is one of the 4 traditional ingredients for fermentation of soy sauce. It isn’t filler but ingredient that affects the flavor.
Carbohydrates contained in wheat are the components that give soy sauce its fine aroma; wheat also adds sweetness to the soy sauce. Wheat is roasted at high temperatures, and then crushed by rollers to facilitate fermentation. (Link below)
That said, Tamari is usually made without wheat and is very similar to soy sauce. To the point where bottles are often labeled “Tamari Soy Sauce” and many people cannot tell. Anyone sensitive to gluten must be careful to make sure the Tamari they buy is properly labeled as gluten free, since there can be traces or cross contamination if the Tamari is manufactured in the same facility as soy sauce
We don’t use soy sauce for home cooking anymore, just Tamari. The person who does the most cooking, my partner, prefers the flavor and lower salt of his preferred brand 
comes in handy when we need to cook for people who cannot have gluten
Making Soy Sauce | Kikkoman Soy Sauce Museum - Kikkoman Corporation.
@Dogbutler if you can find some fellow locals also avoiding gluten, that would be good. They might know about the safety and willingness to accommodate at local restaurants and cafes. There may even be a local reddit group or something online. If you do eat out, make sure to tell the server you are gluten intolerant. Even if you choose something labeled on the menu as gluten free. Kitchens should take extra care prepping your meal to avoid possible cross contamination. Same deal if you are eating at a friend’s home. They should know before they prep the meal. When we cook for our celiac friends or my MIL, we are very careful and serve an entirely gluten-free meal to avoid any issues.
I second (fifth? I’ve lost track) the idea you should pursue a diagnosis. If only to find out how much of a concern cross contamination is.
Also, rice can be your friend.
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Woah, maybe eight years ago, not counting kebabs, which are now off the menu.
I will pursue this. Thanks to you and everyone upthread.
I feckin love rice. (Good job, really).
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If you bake (or know anyone who likes to bake and give stuff away) there is a great alternative for muffins, pie crusts, cookies, and so on (but not for anything yeast-based because those need gluten to rise).
My wife uses this all the time, because she gives away a lot of baked desserts to neighbors, some of whom are gluten sensitive. I cannot for the life of me tell the difference, and I’m a corner-sewer of cookies. I’m not familiar with all the details; for some reason, a sugar and spice cookie doesn’t work. It does take some experimentation.
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Ah!
Cynicism/ignorance on my part.
Same!
To put it another way, it’s not a bread flour (as we found out for last year’s science project experiment). As someone mentioned above, xanthan gum can help, but (so far) we haven’t made a good bread.
I think anything chewy like parathas, pita, or flour tortillas just really needs gluten. We found an excellent frozen pita a while back, but it was really expensive, & the place what sold it no longer carries it. (I have seen GF pita sticks[?] or chips[?], I think Cedar brand.)
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It’s a common thought and understandable that people think the the wheat is there to stretch the product. After all, companies do that all the time. I was surprised it was traditional and had a flavor impact when I found out. Which was because we’d bought some gluten-free soy sauce to cook for my MIL, and it tasted weird. We ended up buying Tamari instead next time and haven’t gone back.
It feels like gluten is in everything. I didn’t realize it until we were regularly hosting a small person with a new diagnosis as celiac and trying to make sure we didn’t poison her when she asked for random food we had in the kitchen. She’s gotten much better at telling us things she can have, so now it’s a matter of confirmation. It was her mom who clued me in about the French fries/chips thing.
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I stopped eating wheat in 1993. My arthritis and migraines went away.
When I went back to eating wheat regularly, it all came back.
I had stayed away from all wheat (kamut, emmer, spelt, einkorn, farro, rye, durum, bulgur, pretty much every kind of wheaty thing there is) for about 6 months to zero out whatever I had in my body. This included “malt” vinegar and flavoring, like the mix used in my favorite German pickles.
As I was already a vegetarian who reads labels pretty much all the time, and I have a narrow scope of restaurants I can eat at, etc., this required just a bit more rigor and commitment. As others in this thread have noted, rice (well-rinsed) is a fine choice and many Asian cultures don’t have much to do with wheat (at least, originally) so I can sometimes eat out at, say, a Japanese restaurant if I bring my own tamari.
Much of the standard American diet and most Northern Europe cultures have a lot of wheat in a lot of foods and drinks. If you are the kind of person to miss bread to the point where life is not worth living without that, either learn to make your own gluten-free bread, or pay extra for a frozen store-bought sliced loaf of gluten-free bread. When I quit wheat in the '90s, I had little choice but to DIY such things because there were few options. Thank goodness times change and the markets responded.
Ezekiel “sprouted wheat” bread had initially seemed promising, and at the beginning of my self-experimentation, I did eat some to see if my body noticed. Alas, it was a trigger for my migraines and joint aches. Some folks will say that sprouted wheat eliminates the gluten issues. I have no idea, but it did not work out for me.
Gluten hangs out in corn, in oats, in barley… various cereal grains that you might have to test on yourself to find out which triggers are the ones that set your body on red alert.
I suspect I am “wheat-sensitive” and not do not have a specific, “easy” to diagnose case like coeliac (celiac) disease. As an infrequently insured U.S.ian, even in the best of times, I have not gotten a formal Dx.
I stopped using xanthan gum (an engineered substance, derived from edible sources) because I found I can taste it, even in minute quantities. I use ground flax seed (which has its own flavor but I am ok with it). The gluten-free flour mixes that use xanthan gum are well-distributed, convenient, and useful place to start.
I make all my own flour blends now, and I like the level of control and flavor I get out of my blends, which contain garbanzo flour (chana besan if you are near an Indian grocery), sorghum flour, rice flour, teff, buckwheat flour, and some ground nuts like hazelnut, almond(meal), as well as starches like tapioca flour and potato flour. Each of these has things it is good at, and limits. I found, for instance, that quinoa flour is not the ideal use of quinoa. The flour has somewhat bitter aftertaste that makes it only suitable for banana breads or chocolate brownies, for example.
Your learning curve, if you are a cook, could be a fresh adventure.
If you have had a lifetime of wheat consumption, it’s going to be a process, trimming away your wheat-based daily menu items, and these days it’s easier (relatively) finding commercially made substitutes for bread, cookies, noodles, etc.
Avoid: Schar (it all tastes like cardboard to me)
Recommending:
Noodles: Brown rice (flour) noodles
and chickpea flour noodles (several brands out there, all perform about the same)…
work well for Italian pasta dishes.
I found a line of ramen by Lotus Foods that is excellent and tasty:
I don’t really eat bread any more. When I really miss bread, I make buckwheat pancakes.
I am able to eat corn tortillas, periodically. And corn bread. I try hard to make sure I am eating organic corn foods because in the U.S., the GMO-corn carries a significant load of glyphosates with it. This was the primary mission of the genetic modification: to make the corn tolerant of the extra applications of that pesticide.
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Echoing the “get it formally figured out” chorus here. My partner has had stomach issues her whole life and made the mistake of removing whole subsets of foods because she felt better, removing many of the foods she loved and craved, when it turned out after a proper, controlled elimination diet, it was just one delicious nut causing her issues - almonds.
As you can imagine since almond is in everything, she had cut out huge swaths of her diet because she thought those foods were the problem, not the fact that they contained almonds.
A bit more investigation (and risk of stomach upset!) allowed us to learn that almond extract is just fine! So now, she can still enjoy almond flavoured stuff, just not stuff that contains the actual nut. And where she had cut out a massive chunk of foods from her diet, it turns out the actual solution was to remove only one ingredient, one that, while ubiquitous, almost everything made with it has an almond-free version she can still enjoy.
It took a lot of disciplined eating under supervision to actually identify almond as the culprit, but it also resolved literally decades of pain for her.
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Huh. I am allergic to almonds, but never really thought there was that much of it about. Perhaps I’ve just gotten used to avoiding it without much thought.
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Well to be more specific, it’s in most types of desserts, granola/cereals, and it just so happens my partner is a huge fan of both 
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That was a mine of information, thank you.
If it helps alleviate arthritis also, that’s a bonus. I broke both my hands back in the early 90’s and suffer constant niggling pain to this day (though that may or may not be RSI - I used to use a keyboard and mouse for a living - not the case anymore).
I so rarely eat dessert and can’t remember the last time I ate cereal but I do enjoy raw almonds - I’ll have to experiment.
Thanks for all the help, everybody.
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Disclosure: IANAD.
Ideally, you’d work with your healthcare team, your own doctor, trained professionals, labs, experts… all can save time and agony.
Even if one doesn’t have insurance, it is possible to find one’s way.
It’s just harder and less certain. (Welcome to the disaster that is the U.S. healthcare insurance “system.” @Dogbutler I can see you are in the UK and I sincerely hope your system works better than ours!)
Your healthcare provider will be able to explain this proess more fully.
Since I was my own insurance-less guinea pig, the tl;dr= was to remove all my suspected potential food allergens, achieve a non-inflammation homeostasis, keep a daily log of everything I ate and drank.
After the lengthy zeroing out of the allergen counter in my body, I added one single suspected food in a specific, concentrated way for 3 days in a row, and logged the results. One suspect at a time. My journal was a simple spiral-bound ruled notebook, and I took it everywhere with me. This was well before the age of smartphones.
Definitely.
Inflammation is at the core of so many human maladies.
Once you have solid understanding of your own list of allergy triggers, your life is going be better. Getting on the other side of this will feel good.
There are plenty of lists of known common food allergens. Ken pointed out a food–in fact, a derivative of a food–in the nut family. The most common ones: dairy, nuts, soy, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. Likely you have googled this already. (I have a family member who almost died when she suddenly found out she was allergic to shellfish. Yikes!) But people can be allergic to all kinds of stuff.
That’s where professionals and labwork are essential, if you have a more complex (i.e. less obvious) range of allergens.
Much of my work-life has been very physically demanding. Given how hard I have been on my body over the years, I am pretty surprised I am still mostly pain-free. Excluding wheat from my intake has been a big part of this, and I don’t think it is my confirmation bias.
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I’ve downloaded that PDF. Thanks for that.
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At this point I’m so comfortable in my life. I know that ruling out a specific disease could bring some mental something or other and possibly simplify things for me if I do end up landing in an er. It would definitely be bringing me a lot more stress. So I figure if I see worsening symptoms I will go sooner but otherwise I will wait until I would have gotten the exam anyway. Also from a financial POV I actually believe that my husband needs it sooner. Both of us want to rule out colon cancer of course ultimately.
But it is also true that realistically if I just accepted i have ibs possibly triggered by high amounts of gluten or a heavy-in-bread diet I’d be a lot richer and have been a lot less stressed and have wasted less time being distracted from the cancer i also had in the interim.
People act like you just go in the doc box and get the right thing when you go out. Sometimes they even make mistakes though. This is like a decades long process that in a very real cold-light-of-day observation is often actually not worth it to the person/victim/participant/experimentee/patient.
Example: as a child I had giardiosis for almost a year because my mom forgot to mention we’d gone swimming in a lake at the doctor so he told her it was probably just lactose intolerance and I was told I was being dramatic about it.
I live in a good little groove and eat mostly what I like with some modifications, and maybe I eat in restaurants a little less. Sometimes I overdo it and overstep and it sucks. But these are the consequences we live with for the choices we make, much like a hangover. In the meantime I do observe, I do track, I do record, and I do my best to learn what I can about managing unspecified disorders of the gut and bowel without falling into too much woo or discounting things I simply don’t understand very well like any connection to brain health, trauma, or a deep understanding of inflammatory causes, actual gut microbes, the functioning of the immune system (which mine is definitely systemically busted as I 100% have a very confirmed diagnosis on that one) etc.
There’s also the impact of thyroid and sex-based hormones on all that.
For me I’ve also had some good luck taking a slight “probiotic” approach in that I’ve found that eating enough of certain things practically guarantees I eat better things with less room to spare and also “actively” helps encourage a better flora.
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I haven’t had my own kitchen, so I end up eating a lot of tortilla chips. And rice.
You may be able to use rice and other flour, with guar gum and/or xanthan gum to hold it together, instead of wheat flour. But it doesn’t knead or roll out the same. So you need to minimize those steps.
I suggest being careful about oats, since they’re often contaminated with wheat. Although Cheerios are labelled gluten-free, they aren’t always.
I have to be careful about tea. Most bagged tea has gluten in the bag. So I suggest getting strainers for loose tea. In an emergency, you can dump bagged tear into the straner, as long as the bag doesn’t get wet.
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I have been tinkering with mine since 1999.
I feel like my allergies (inflammation and hayfever) have been much reduced after I started eating more (and making a lot more of my own) fermented foods like kimchi, kombucha, kefir, and krauts.
I hear you.
My mom had IBS for much of her life. Her lifelong intaked include peeled fruits, peeled / de-stringed vegetables, many kinds of white (bleached) flour baked goods, and a lot of meat, as was typical of her generation and her cultural background. (I could not stop her from cooking sauerkraut on high heat, either, so any attempts at introducing those biota into her gut were futile.) She also had a ton of stress in her admittedly quite complicated life.
I’ve lucked out and had some great experiences with clinicians, even ones in small towns, or in unassuming walk-in storefronts.
And some really off-target, waste-of-time moments, especially when dealing with medical professionals who are extremely confident that they are never wrong.
Ugh.
I am sorry to hear of your suffering.
It is a life’s work to one’s [own] best friend, best advocate, smartest crap-detector, most accomplished personal chef. I’ll be working on myself this way until I drop dead.
ETA: clarifier
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