Heartfelt Thanks and Gluten-Free Tidbits from FNCE

The honor of a lifetime: The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Food and Nutrition Conference 2025 recently wrapped. As some of you know, my main reason for attending the conference this year was to accept an excellence in practice award from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics for entrepreneurship (i.e., the work we do through Gluten Free Watchdog). It is thanks to all of you that this work gets done.

As I said pretty much verbatim at the ceremony, receiving this award truly touches my heart. Thank you to my colleagues and friends who took time out of their busy schedules to nominate me (Amy and Cheryl) and write letters of support (Mel, Margaret, and Adrian) and the Academy for honoring me in this way. Thank you to Thom Grace from Bia Diagnostics for believing in me, my husband Dave for letting me know I didn’t have to make money—just not to lose any, and my son Marcus for all the discussions he listened to about oats, cross contact, and all things gluten-free. And finally, thank you to the Gluten Free Watchdog community—it takes a village to do this work.

Celiac disease session: It was fabulous to see a full house at the celiac disease session From Kitchen to Clinic. Among many other topics, Amelie Therrien, MD addressed early research from Australia that suggests the possibility that the threshold level for gluten-free food should be lower than 20 ppm—possibly below the limit of detection. While foods labeled gluten-free in Australia can’t contain any detectable gluten, this is far stricter than the US, Canada, UK, and EU. Currently, Gluten Free Watchdog reports results to below the limit of quantification—less than 5 parts per million. We have reached out to the lab to ask how difficult it would be to test down to the limit of detection. It could be tricky as the limit of detection can vary based on the composition of food.

During this session, dietary hyper vigilance was also discussed. This is a very tricky area–how do we define being too vigilant? Folks with celiac disease may want guidance on any number of issues—from whether they can continue to use their cast iron skillet after diagnosis to whether allergen advisory statements for wheat on labeled gluten-free foods should be of concern. Speaking with my dietitian hat, advice given should be evidence-based. But this isn’t always possible. We often don’t have research (or well-designed research) to back up what seems to be intuitively reasonable. To all health practitioners, we need more research. BUT if your research involves testing for gluten, please make sure you have someone on your team exceedingly well versed in this type of testing.  

Expo: A couple of tidbits from the expo portion of the conference: The owner of ELISA Technologies and I spoke at length, including about the EZ Gluten test strips used by many consumers. It was a good chat–we even talked about the possibility of doing a webinar on testing at some point. They did hand me a witch broom pen as I left BUT it was all in good fun. In the end, we all make each other better.

AND I was so excited to get this emoji squishy at one of the booths.

Thank you to my husband for accompanying me to FNCE this year. He enjoyed himself so much, he wants to attend next year too!