Ep. 272: Gluten Confusion: Behind the Label

Our guest, Steven Gendel, PhD, brings more than 30 years of experience in food safety science, regulation, and policy. From a manufacturer’s perspective, we’ll unpack the real-world differences between gluten and wheat, how food processing works, and the role processing aids can play. Together, we’ll explore what all of this means for managing allergies and making safer, more confident choices when shopping.

Resources to keep you in the know:

• Gendel Food Safety, LLC
• Steven Gendel - LinkedIn
• FAACT's Global Food Industry & Research Summit: October 25-27

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Thanks for listening! FAACT invites you to discover more exciting food allergy resources at FoodAllergyAwareness.org!

Transcript

Caroline: Welcome to FAACT's Roundtable, a podcast dedicated to navigating life with food allergies across the lifespan. Presented in a welcoming format with interviews and open discussions,

each episode will explore a specific topic, leaving you with the facts to know or use.

Information presented via this podcast is educational and not intended to provide individual medical advice.

Please consult with your personal board-certified allergist or healthcare providers for advice specific to your situation.

Hi everyone, I'm Caroline Moassessi and I am your host for the FAACT Roundtable Podcast. I am a food allergy parent and advocate and the founder of the Grateful Foodie Blog.

And I am FAACT's Vice President of Community Relations.

Before we start today's show, I just want to take a moment to thank the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology for their kind sponsorship and for their support throughout the years.

Today we sit down with Steve Gendel, who brings more than 30 years of experience in food safety, science, regulation and policy from a manufacturer's perspective. We'll unpack the real world differences between gluten and wheat, how food processing works, and the role processing aids can play.

Together, we'll explore what all of this means for managing allergies and making safer, more confident choices when shopping.

Welcome back, Steve to FAACT's Roundtable Podcast. We are so happy you are here because you know how to take that science and manufacturing and FDA and all that good information and you just know how to explain it so that we can understand it.

So I am super so happy you're here with us today.

Steve: Well, Carolyn, I'm glad to be here. I always enjoy these conversations with you and I'm glad that whatever I'm saying has some value to people.

Caroline: It definitely does. And thank you. Before we get started, tell us a little about yourself, your background, and how you found your way into the foodology community.

Steve: Well, so the relevant part of my background is that I spent 25 years at FDA working in various kinds of food safety issues.

And when I started at fda, that was the time when the agency was working on developing its policies on genetically modified foods,

and one of the big issues that they had to deal with was about the potential allergenicity of proteins that had not been part of the food supply before being transferred into food plants.

And in looking at it, I realized that was not an easy question to answer.

So I worked on trying to develop some bioinformatics approaches to solving that.

And from there it sort of developed into more interest in how you measure allergens and detect them,

how they behaved in processing.

And then it sort of kept going into other issues until at one point towards the end, I wound up as the agency's first food allergen coordinator and really got a chance to see how they worked in the allergen world, in enforcement, in methods development, in regulation, writing,

in policy development, all aspects of food allergen safety.

So after spending the time at fda, I decided it was time to retire from the federal government,

which I did several years ago. And I did it voluntarily and have been working since then as a advisor and as a consultant for companies,

organizations, the community,

to try and make sure that everybody is getting the right message and doing everything they can to protect people who are vulnerable consumers.

Caroline: Well, we're glad you picked us, and we're glad you're here. Let's start our conversation by first understanding what the difference is between gluten and wheat.

Steve: So I think the best place to start with that is to understand that wheat is a plant.

And in the food world, what you're talking about is the whole grain from the wheat plant.

So that grain contains a lot of different kinds of proteins.

And there are some people who develop allergies against wheat.

And in fact, that led to wheat becoming one of the major food allergens when Congress passed the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act.

But it is something which involves the whole wheat plant.

Gluten is a terminology that describes a particular type of protein which occurs in wheat,

and it also occurs in rye and barley.

And that protein causes. Some people develop a sensitivity to that protein that develops into celiac disease.

But the pathway for developing celiac disease is different from the one that it's involved in developing food allergy.

So they both involve wheat and proteins in wheat, but they're different conditions.

Caroline: And thank you for sharing that clarity, because it's so often intermixed and intermeshed, and people don't realize the difference, and it's not nuanced. I mean, those are two very big differences.

So now, how do gluten and wheat differ during the actual manufacturing process?

Steve: So they both start with the wheat grain,

and from there they can go different routes. The grain is turned into some sort of ground powder,

and in some ways it can be used whole as wheat flour.

In others, you can extract it or remove a lot of the protein and make something like wheat starch.

Or you can purify the gluten fraction and have product which has got a lot of gluten in it but less of the other proteins.

So there's a variety of different ways that it can be processed. And that's one of the reasons why it's so used so widely, is this is a very versatile ingredient to use in different foods.

Caroline: Now, just going just a little deeper. And to answer some curiosity here,

we know that wheat's very kind of fluffy and it gets airborne. And so how does that impact the manufacturing process?

Steve: It impacts the manufacturing environment a lot.

And you're right, it's powdery substance, it spreads easily.

I'm sure everybody who's done any baking at home knows how easy it is to get the wheat flour dust all over the kitchen when you're cooking.

The same thing holds true when you're in a manufacturing facility.

Just imagine what it's like if you're instead of measuring out a cup of flour to put in your mixer bowl that you are measuring out 50 pound bag of wheat flour to dump in a 200 gallon mixer.

So there's going to be wheat flour or powder spreading in the plant.

But manufacturers know that and they know that they need to control that as best that they can. They need to be able to clean up afterwards and make sure it doesn't get anywhere that it's not supposed to be.

And it's important both from the food safety aspects, but also from worker safety. You know,

breathing that flour a lot all day is bad for people's lungs.

And so in order to protect their products and protect their equipment, getting all that flour into the,

the inner workings of the equipment is not good for the equipment. And getting it to spread on different food products is not good for the consumer.

Caroline: And actually, just a quick sidebar here, you had mentioned food safety just for terminology's sake and just for our listeners,

because this is a little new for us in a way to dive this deep and look behind the curtain at manufacturing. What does food safety mean to a manufacturer?

Steve: So food safety means that the food is what it's supposed to be,

that it doesn't contain any substances that will cause harm to the consumers,

and that it's labeled correctly for consumers.

And it's actually a very complicated concept to.

Because it involves protecting against microbial contamination,

it involves protecting against chemical contamination,

it involves protecting against physical contamination.

And say it also involves making sure that there's the right information on the label.

Caroline: Thank you. I really wanted our listeners to get a little bit of an idea and appreciate that so much goes into manufacturing. It's not like at home where we just make a recipe.

But you are thinking about H Vac systems and what people are wearing in this space and how things are stored and managed and moved around. And it's just, it's so complicated.

So now for listeners who may not be familiar with the term,

what exactly are processing aids and what do Consumers need to know about them. My son used to be allergic to lemon. And a long time ago, we're talking 25 years ago, a very kind CEO called me up after I had called the company to ask about lemon.

And he called me up to explain how manufacturing works and how his company specifically uses lemon because they were using it as a processing aid to help with fruit. And he was just very kind because he knew I was a young mom with a little toddler trying to figure out his allergies.

And this gentleman spent a long time with me and absolutely changed everything we did. It was so eye opening.

So can you please explain processing aids and what they mean to us and what we need to know?

Steve: So in the world of fda,

pretty much everything that goes into being a food is considered an ingredient.

They're also considered additives.

So they are all treated as additive.

But there are some of them which are part of the final food product because they play a role in that final food product.

They might be there for taste, they might be there for smell,

might be there for nutrition. And those are the things that you're going to find listed on the normal ingredient list on the package.

But in the process of making the food,

manufacturers often need to use other substances to help them get the food produced and to make it easy to manipulate.

Those things don't have a purpose or an activity in the final product.

So those are not listed as ingredients because they're not part of the,

as you would say, the recipe that describes what the product is, but they're necessary for the processing.

I think a good example instead of your lemon one is to think about if you're a baker and you're making a million muffins each day and you have them in some sort of muffin tin type assembly line and you want to be able to remove them easily without having them stick or fall apart.

So you use a spray on release agent, just like you would do at home if you were building putting something into a pan in your kitchen. So that release agent plays an important role in being able to make the product,

but it has no use or activity. It doesn't contribute anything to the final product after it's out. So that's a processing aid,

also known as an indirect additive in legal parlance.

Caroline: So eye opening because you're right. You can't label and say it's part of the recipe because it's not right, but you do need to use it. And so this is just so important for us to know.

And so what are your thoughts about listeners who call manufacturers, do you think it's necessary? Do you think it's helpful?

Especially if your allergy is outside of the nine or even if it's within the nine.

Steve: So I think there is absolutely no reason not to call a manufacturer if you're uncertain about what the label says.

Sometimes you can find that information on their websites. It's worth looking because they will often put more information on the website than they do on the package.

But if you have any doubts, call them.

And from what I hear from others in the community is that the responses you get and the degree of willingness to be cooperative will vary from company to company.

Usually the big companies have systems in place to make sure the people answering the phone have the right information or know where to send you,

but it's definitely not uniform.

So my suggestion is absolutely, if you want to, if you want to find out information, please go ahead and call and you can use the response that you get and the helpfulness of that response as certainly a gauge to understand just how concerned that manufacturer is with people with food allergies.

And if you're getting a lot of pushback or having a problem,

maybe sends you a message about whether you want

Caroline: to eat their products,

that's very good advice. That is the rule in our household that if we call a manufacturer, especially if it's for an item outside of the top nine or something, we just might suspect we see the allergen and other products within that company.

If we just don't feel confident in that response, we just call it a day, we move on. There are thousands of wonderful, yummy, tasty foods in this world and we just move on.

So now for patients and caregivers and everyday shoppers, what should people keep in mind when buying products to support a gluten free or wheat free diet?

How can they use all of this great information you just shared with us to pull it all together and to feel more confident at the grocery store?

Steve: So I think the place to start is to understand whether you are shopping for somebody who is celiac and gluten sensitive or somebody who has a food allergy.

As you know, the FDA issued regulations that defined the maximum amount of gluten that could be present in a food and still have the label on it that says gluten free.

But that regulation was specifically designed to help celiac patients and to make sure that we were below the level that would cause them a problem.

People with food allergies need to look for the presence of a wheat label and to pay attention to that. And it's important to recognize that because these are different conditions and there's different degrees of sensitivity and different kinds of reactions that occur,

then you need to be sure you're thinking about the correct way,

the correct problem when you're doing the shopping.

Caroline: Thank you. Sage advice again.

So our time together has come to an end.

Before we say goodbye today, is there anything else you want listeners to hear from you?

Steve: Yeah, I think that it's understanding what you're looking for and what you're reading on labels is really important.

Most of the food industry does a really good job of trying to make sure that their foods are not gonna cause problem for either allergic patients or those with gluten sensitivity.

But it's. In the end, it's gonna have to depend upon the individual consumers and their families to make informed choices on their food choice and their eating. And good luck with it.

Caroline: That's wonderful. Thank you. And thank you so much for being with us today. We know you're so busy and we just appreciate you.

And we do look forward to having you back on the podcast because I feel like we've got someone on the inside now who's really giving us some good information and helping us understand manufacturing and all this kind of information helps us make better choices and stay safe.

So thank you so much for your time.

Steve: Well, thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed our conversation and I really trying hard to be useful to help the people who need that help.

Caroline: Well, I think you're hitting it just fine. So thank you.

Before we say goodbye today, we just want to thank the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology one more time for their kind support of FAACT's roundtable podcast.

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