Not All Gluten Free Foods Are Really Without Gluten
When researching for a gluten free diet, there are a few things you need to be aware of. Firstly, how much these will affect you will be determined by how severely you need to rid yourself of this ingredient. For example, if you are on a diet and are trying to remove gluten from your diet, then it's not necessary to remove things like oats- something that experts are not sure is safe for sufferers of the celiac disease but if your just trying to remove it from your diet for health reasons then oats are ok.
If you are a sufferer or celiac disease then oats may be something you want to skip, even though it is technically a gluten free foods source. The problem comes in when you realize that gluten is almost always contaminating oats due to the process and cross contamination during processing. Many of the mills will "dust" over the conveyor belts with gluten as a counter measure for grains sticking to the belt. Although the oats don't actually contain gluten, some can get in during the processing phase. This is not a whole lot of gluten but it's enough to raise some eyebrows and for sufferers of celiac it can be a very painful mistake if you end up with a box of oats that was "contaminated" with more gluten than just a little bit.
Gluten is a widely used ingredient in foods, lip balms, lip stick, and many other retail products many of us have been using or consuming all our lives. celiac suffers must have gluten free foods because the disease makes it impossible to process it and it causes some drastic reactions in the body for sufferers of celiac.
Luckily there are gluten free restaurants, and menu items on many of the restaurants that do use gluten (or have this ingredient in the ingredients in the foods they prepare i.e. it came that way) to give those who need to remove it from their diet. Your not going to be stuck eating at home, but be careful that there is no cross contamination on your plate with foods that contain gluten.
Not all foods contain gluten and there are actually quite a few that don't. Getting enough information behind you before going on a gluten free diet is important. There is not much to consider other than making sure foods that potentially could have gluten in it by cross contamination are avoided. You can't always depend on the actual ingredients list. Foods containing gluten indirectly by way of the way other ingredients are processed are still gluten foods- just be careful!