Is Gluten-Free making you fat? | How To Cook That Ann Reardon | Debunking gluten-free myths

Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and today we are looking at gluten. Gluten free diets are becoming more and more popular nowadays. So many celebrities are promoting them. "So right this second we're doing gluten free dairy free which is so hard." There are plenty of gluten free YouTube videos too with what I eat in a day gluten free gluten free dairy free gluten free vegan or a mixture all of those things in there and you guys have asked me in the comments about gluten and gluten free diets so many times. So is it serious or is it just a fad? The current market for gluten free foods are sitting at 4 billion dollars a year and that is set to increase to 6.5 billion by 2025! The crazy thing is that even though gluten-free foods are skyrocketing, the demand for wheat is also increasing which is very interesting and I'll explain how that works later on in the video. Firstly what even is gluten? I don't know I don't know I don't know no one knows. 🤣As soon as I know I'm sure you guys will be the first to know like I promise like it will be everywhere! Gluten is actually the protein part of the wheat grain it's also found in rye and barley and it's not really found in any other grains so it's unique to the wheat rye and barley the word gluten actually means glue and it helps to bind together doughs and give them that stretchy feel. There are lots of gluten-free flours available on the market now you'll be able to find them quite easily in most supermarkets and if we have a look on the back here you can see this one is made mainly from starches so maize and tapioca starch then flours rice and maize flour rice bran and thickener four one five. Thickener four one five is xanthum gum and that's used very often in gluten-free flours to try and mimic the gluten effect. Now if I was to make a bread dough out of normal flour and then make the exact same recipe out of this gluten-free flour you'll be able to easily see the difference. The one made from the normal flour is really stretchy you can just pull it it's quite elastic and that's the gluten in it that is allowing it to stretch. By comparison the exact same bread recipe but with the gluten-free flour in it just pulls apart it's not stretchy because it doesn't have any gluten in it. It does have the xanthum gum in it so it has a little bit of stretch to it but it's just not the same. If you take the normal bread dough you can actually wash it under water and wash away all the starch because the gluten is not soluble in water it's not going to dissolve. So if you just keep washing that dough under water after about 10 minutes you end up with all these little bits of gluten and if you keep washing away the starch eventually you're left with a ball of gluten or the stretchy wheat protein. Now if I do the same thing with the gluten-free flour and run that under running water and just keep washing it and washing it there is no gluten in it so you end up just washing everything away until you have just an empty sieve. Now we can take the ball of gluten and I can now show you what gluten does ... if I put that in the microwave there's still a little bit of water in here from washing it so that's going to create steam and the gluten see how that's stretching and making bubbles. This is what it does in the bread too as the steam comes and the yeast creates gas the gluten stretches and creates bubbles and gives it that texture that you get in the bread ... that airy holey structure to it now a strange that looks this ball of pure gluten is the main ingredient in a vegan meat replacer that is very popular in Asian countries particularly in China and in Japan. There is a product brand called I think it's Seitan (tell me if I've pronounced that incorrectly I'm sure I probably have) it has all different flavors and varieties of vegan meat replacer that's made using this wheat gluten. If you want to try making your own all you need to do is make the ball of gluten. Chuck 🇦🇺that in the blender with some beans and some barbecue sauce and then you can add whatever other flavoring you want like some powdered onions and powdered garlic whatever you want in there. Make it into whatever shape you want it to be then steam that for 20 minutes. Now it expands as it cooks so it'll be bigger after that and then once it cools you can use it just like normal meat. Slice it, stir-fry it or crumb coat it ... now I do realize that eggs are not vegan so don't roast me 🥚 you can use whatever vegan egg replacers you like here and then you can fry it up. It feels softer to cut through the normal meat does and it looks like chicken the Seiton has a brown color added to it obviously to make it look more meat colored. It's a little bit softer and tiny bit watery in your mouth compared to meat but it's actually not bad I thought it was going to be horrible but it's actually edible is actually pretty good. Now this is why the wheat sales have continued to rise even though gluten-free has been on the rise because the demand for vegan meat replacers has been taking off around the world and gluten because it is quite chewy it gives more of that texture that meat has when compared to something like tofu or just using beans on their own it gives more of a meat texture so that has just taken off and increased the demand for wheat. Anyway I digress back to our bread if I have the two dough's one made with gluten-free flour and one made with normal flour the exact same recipe and then I bake those in the oven you can see that the one made with the normal flour has risen right up. Now they both have yeast in it and yeast has made bubbles of air in there but the gluten has been able to stretch and hold the shape of those bubbles and as it's baked it kind of sets and then you end up with those bubbles staying all the way through the bread. Whereas the gluten free flower just wasn't able to replicate that. So using the exact same recipe you end up with a completely different end product so you have to make quite a lot of alterations in gluten-free cooking in order to end up with a similar end product. I'll put a few tips on the how to cook that website for different baking things and things you can do in order to change the recipe to make it a little bit better if you're making gluten-free recipes. So because of the increased demand for gluten-free food there is so much more available now but it is still heaps more expensive so for example to buy gluten-free bread cost me three times the price of buying normal bread for the same amount of bread 💵Wow. the other products I got were all the least double if not one and a half times as expensive so the bread was the most difference in price but I thought what would do is do some taste testing so I've got Dave in because you know who loves to taste things. Hmmm, love the taste. The honest reviewer! And I've got a little sign it says gluten-free Dave and gluten-free Ann so that we can taste and then put it next to the one we think is gluten-free so I've got a few different things to taste so let's start with the bread to start with this one ... all right okay okay so bread mmm definitely bready 🍞 In this one we're gonna go this one is gluten free because I like that one better and I'm assuming the GF one won't be as good. that one's a little fluffier it is it's a lot more fluffy a bit more chewy in the texture. So we're going for this one as gluten free let me check if we're right right. Gluten Free. One point for you one point for me. Yeah! Alright next I got one of your favorites yeah some crackers maybe let's taste this one first... hmm Those ones are good? Just thinking it through. These ones obviously lacking the food coloring of the other ones but let's give them a taste. They're actually not bad the texture's not bad it doesn't have anywhere near the flavor punch of those ones mm-hmm this one has a far more flavoring added to it but the texture of those. They're alright. pretty nice they're definitely the gluten free ones. I'm going to gluten free as well with those ones let me talk not too bad I think we can tell by looking at them gluten-free 1 point each... easy to tell so far moving on let's have a taste I'm gonna break this one. Wow oh wow crunchy bit dry mm-hmm definitely come a little bit of strength to it that one. it tastes like it has the feeling like I've just put flour in my mouth mmm it's that dryness with the extra. That's not quite what I was expecting. It's still alright. This one melt in your mouth not gluten-free. gluten-free wait I haven't decided yet. You can choose. It's really hard to replicate the exact qualities of gluten in wheat in a recipe with no gluten. I'm assuming we're right but let's check ... 3 for 3 so far. This is the best taste test I've done in years! Definitely months ... too many debunking videos! Oreos. That's similar to the last one when you first bite into it it's good it's got the crunch and then you get that floury aftertaste. That's like a cheap cookie I know it's probably three times the price but that's like one of those cheap cookies you get now they've ripped off the real thing. Not so nice. We should try the real thing though yeah we've already decided but just in case. These are called Weet-bix and there are very well known Aussie breakie 🇦🇺 Aussie kids are weet-bix kids. I like them crunchy with the milk just poured on do you like them crunchy or soggy? I quite like them soggy. well I'm gonna have to eat fast so they can taste each one. Alright I'll try this one here yeah it looks a little bit composty this one. It looks healthy. That one tastes like Weet-Bix Wow! That tastes like hay... if I was a cow I'd definitely be getting into that. Let's double check, does that say gluten-free? It does. GF Dave says this is gluten-free.. We've got all of these right. There's one more to go. Oh this is my favorite mm-hmm pretty excited right now. mm-hmm I like it, try this one. One time I was in Malaysia and I got some twisties and I didn't check the flavor and it was cuttlefish flavored twisties which was horrendous but I was really hungry so I ate them. I think they're gluten-free cos they're a little bit cuttlefishy. They don't taste of cuttlefish. I think you're a real fan of Twisties. Oh I'm a connoisseur I should be their ambassador ... twisties watch this video do me a solid. Whereas I could take or leave twisties so both of them taste perfectly fine to me but I can tell. Well I'll take them then. But I can tell they've got a stronger flavor to them a bit like the crackers did so I'd say these are the gluten-free but I'm gonna stick with my real twisties. So as you can see we could easily tell the difference between all of those foods we've both got all of them right, which ones are GF and which ones weren't. So taste wise and texture wise it takes a lot of work to try and replicate a recipe that has gluten in it and make it gluten-free but perhaps because it doesn't taste as good maybe that's why a 65% of Americans think that gluten-free products are healthy. So if it tastes bad it must be good for you. That's the logic ok and 30% of Americans currently trying a gluten-free diet. To lose weight. Yes because they think it's healthy ... eating gluten-free will help them lose weight. As you saw before though with the bread you can't just swap gluten-free flour for normal flour you have to actually modify the recipe to get an end result that looks this close to the original one so let's just have a look at a few of the products and see what difference nutritionally changing the recipe makes to the end product. If we start the twisties they're not good for you anyway sorry Dave but a packet of normal twisties has four teaspoons of fat in it and a packet of gluten-free twisties has six teaspoons of fat in it. So it's got a lot more and the reason for that is gluten-free products tend to taste very dry in your mouth. A way that manufacturers overcome that dryness is they add more fat so you'd think you'd add more moisture but fat actually gives that moist mouth feel so if you think about eating a really fatty steak it tastes a lot more moist than a totally lean steak that tends to taste quite dry ... it's the fact that gives you that moistness in your mouth. Probably more important is something like bread that people might eat more regularly. The gluten-free bread is higher in fat and has less fibre and less vitamins and less minerals in it than the normal bread does. The cereal which normally has virtually no fat in it and a good amount of fibre, when compared to the gluten-free one it has two teaspoons of fat in every serve and only half the fibre of the normal Weet Bix. Studies across all gluten-free foods have found that is pretty much the case most gluten-free foods are higher in calories higher in fat lower in fiber and lower in vitamins especially B vitamins than their non gluten-free counterparts and there was one study done that showed that people who are consuming a gluten-free diet therefore tended to have higher calories and actually gain weight than people who were not on a gluten-free diet. So should anyone be on a gluten-free diet? Well there's one group of people who definitely have to be on a gluten-free diet and that's people with celiac disease. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder where your body sees gluten as foreign so if you eat gluten it sends out an immune response to attack the gluten and unfortunately while it's doing that it also does damage to the gut. Our gut is pretty amazing if you take just the small intestines and spread them out into one long tube rather than all curled up it's actually seven meters long and about three centimeters in diameter but it has the absorptive area to absorb nutrients into the body of about the size of a tennis court. Now if you're good at maths you'll have gone hang on a minute that doesn't add up ... if you take a cylinder that's 7 meters long and three and a half centimeters in diameter and you flatten that out then you've got a rectangle seven meters long by the circumference of the circle which is 2 Pi R which turns out to be nine point four centimeters ... put that into meters 🧮 and then you times the length by the width and it has a surface area of only zero point six five eight meters squared so how is that even possible? they're completely different numbers one is way bigger than the other. Well the inside of the intestine is not smooth instead it's ridged - like a ridged pipe all the way along it has these ridges and folds and that increases the surface area somewhat but the really tricky thing that increases it amazingly is it has these little things called villi or little bits that come up about a millimeter they're only small all over the surface of the whole small intestine ... a bit like a shag carpet or who looks a bit like this with all these different villi sticking up. Now in someone who has celiac disease when the immune response happens and it damages the gut it damages all those villi and they get flattened down. So now the surface area for absorbing nutrients is greatly greatly decreased back down to that small little area so they often tend to be malnourished because they can't absorb the nutrients that they need. So before diagnosis people with celiac disease can often have vitamin deficiencies and be underweight and I'm wondering if that's where the confusion has come in although it doesn't really make sense because once you're diagnosed and you stop eating gluten and the gut repairs then you can start absorbing nutrients and then they tend to put on weight which is a good thing if they're underweight and malnourished they need to put on some weight and absorb some good nutrients. Now you'd think the increase in the amount of gluten-free products is a dream come true for people with celiac disease and in certain circumstances it is but there's a downside to it ... for people with celiac disease even eating a tiny amount of gluten so something as small as this crumb of normal bread which I'm struggling to get on my finger ... something as small as that can cause the allergic reaction which can damage their gut! So they have to avoid it and they have to make sure they don't have any cross-contamination. I've got a friend in Sydney who has celiac disease and she like most people with celiac has little heatproof bags to put her bread in in the toaster so she doesn't get any of anyone else's bread crumbs on her bread so there's no cross-contamination there. I know my friend also says she has trouble now when she goes out to cafes and restaurants because there are so many people who were ordering gluten-free to lose weight that chefs aren't being super careful about that cross-contamination, whereas if you go back 15 years the only people ordering gluten free were people with celiac disease so they took it very seriously and made sure a bit like someone with a peanut allergy you'd make sure they don't get even a trace in there and that's how careful people with the celiac disease need to be. The other group of people who need to avoid gluten is people with gluten sensitivity. Now gluten sensitivity is not celiac disease it is different. They don't have that immune response they don't have all the villi disappearing they still have normal gut absorption but they do get some gastrointestinal symptoms if they eat gluten and they can range from things like stomach cramps, diarrhea, bloating some people say they get foggy head as well. you wouldn't get just that though if you didn't have the gastrointestinal symptoms when eating gluten. Now this one's a bit harder to diagnose with celiac disease there's a blood test and then they'll do an endoscopy so they put a camera down your throat down your esophagus, through your stomach into your small intestine and they'll have a look there with that camera and see the villi they are very small so they'll often also take a biopsy which looks pretty brutal but that is taking a little sample and then they can look at that under the microscope and see if those villi are there or if they're flattened out. Now of course if someone hasn't eaten gluten their gut will have repaired so that test is only helpful if you've been eating gluten for at least the two weeks before the test if someone tells you that you need that test make sure you're not eating gluten-free before it. So if you think you might have celiac disease go see your doctor and they can certainly test you for that. Now if you think you may have gluten sensitivity then try a gluten-free diet for a couple of weeks then try a challenge day and add gluten in. Only do that if you had two weeks symptom free if you're still getting the symptoms that wasn't the cause of them. So if you had two weeks symptom free do a challenge day add it back in and see if you get that response again then you may be gluten sensitive and that may be the problem. The reason why I say it may be is because when they've done studies with people who say they're gluten sensitive and they do a double-blind challenge which means the person giving you the tablet doesn't know what's in it and you don't know what's in it, half them a placebo half of them are actually gluten, of the people who are given gluten and this is people who said they're sensitive to gluten only a third of them actually had a reaction. The rest of them didn't have a reaction at all so that can mean ... one you could say well it was just a placebo effect they eat gluten and they feel bad but those symptoms are pretty bad symptoms so I would say that's unlikely it's probably more likely that they're actually reacting to something else in the wheat. So if you look at the fodmap diet wheat barley rye are all under the fructan section so they could be having a reaction to that. They could be having a reaction to various other things in the wheat other than the gluten and it would be good to be able to pinpoint that but to be honest if you are just avoiding gluten and having none of those unpleasant symptoms and it's working for you and with a challenge you're getting them back then you should be okay to keep going on that. Other than that if you don't have gluten sensitivity and you don't have celiac disease you don't need to be on a gluten-free diet and in fact it's not going to be healthier for you it may make you gain weight. I hope you've learnt something new today I'd like to say thank you to my patrons for all of your support every single month I really appreciate it 💕 it encourages me to keep making videos for you and it supports me to be able to buy expensive gluten-free products and ingredients and all of those sort of things. I would also like to say thank you to all my subscribers if you're not one of them you can join them by clicking subscribe and then clicking on the 🔔 and clicking all notifications so YouTube actually lets you know when I upload a new video. BLOOPERS. That makes nutritionally... nutritionally and 30% of Americans are currently currently let's try that again I have to change the recipe completely blah blah ... it is just very unique as far Do you want me to do it? as you something that gluten. Gluten is good for your glutes and as Germans say gluten Morgan! Last time or this we're gonna nail this. If we don't get this we're not doing it. Not doing it at all. Cancelling the whole video?! wow wow wow. click here to watch some debunking videos, here to watch some recipes, make a great week and I'll see on Friday 💝

Channel: How To Cook That

Views: 1,597,055

Keywords: howtocookthat, how to cook that, ann reardon, HOW TO COOK THAT ANN REARDON, How To Cook That Ann Reardon 🍰🍫🍨🍭, gluten free, what is gluten, gluten free diets, vegan meat replacer, seitan, celiac disease, coeliac disease, what is celiac disease, gluten sensitivity, should I eat gluten free?, gluten free foods, are gluten free foods good for you?, gluten free documentary

Id: f_01RFp8Sbg

Length: 23min 59sec (1439 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020