Video: Testing Foods for Gluten Part 2
This is the second in a series of videos on testing food for gluten. Please watch the first video before viewing https://www.glutenfreewatchdog.org/news/video-testing-foods-gluten/ Please continue to ask questions about testing either in the comments section or via email. Note: I have been asked to provide a transcript for all of the videos. These videos are “off the top of my head.” A transcript is not available for this video. Update: A wonderful subscriber to GFWD who happens to do transcription professionally volunteered to transcribe this video. Thank you to Corbin’s mom! For the time being the transcription is included in the comments section.
Comments (7)
Excellent!
Thank you Tricia!
My pleasure, Ann!
Thank you, Tricia, for being so conscientious and diligent. Truly our GF Watchdog! An excellent reminder that all testing is not equal. Note: the manufacturer’s test result’s for this product, currently posted on their website, date back to June 2010 (more than 6 years ago).
Thanks for your kind comments, Bonnie. Honored to do this work.
Hello Tricia,
Organic Coconut Sugar from Indonesia, what is your knowledge or experience with this for being gluten free? I use the Gluten Tox Pro kits for testing and I get results all over the board and would like your thoughts please. I sent out blind samples to a lab and their results came back the same as mine but the supplier is stating their homogenized retain sample is negative <20ppm.
Thank you,
Yvette
Yvette, do you get mixed results testing the same “homogeneous” sample? Are you taking samples from multiple places in the bag of sugar? Or are the mixed results coming from different bags? For the testing done by the lab–what assay are they using? Are the mixed results from the same or different bags of product?
A wonderful GFWD subscriber (aka Corbin’s mom) volunteered to transcribe this video. Please know that I speak differently than I write (and I am resisting the urge to “rewrite” this transcript). Please use this transcript in conjunction with the video.
Video transcript: Testing Foods for Gluten Part 2
Hi, everyone. This is Tricia Thompson from GlutenFreeWatchdog.
This is the second video on testing foods for gluten. If you have not watched the first video, I recommend that you do that now and then come back and watch this second video. This video is all about extraction solutions and making sure that you choose the right one. The importance of this was really brought home to me last week because of a food that we were testing at the lab. As I mentioned in the first video, I scrutinize the ingredients list to help me decide whether or not I need to request the Sandwich R5 ELISA, the Competitive R5 ELISA, or both. And which specific extraction solution I need to request. The cocktail is always run with the Sandwich, but sometimes depending upon on the composition of the food, a skim milk additive is added to the cocktail solution. And similarly, with the Competitive R5 ELISA again depending upon the composition of the food, sometimes fish gelatin is added to the ethanol.
So when I looked at the ingredients list of the herbal coffee beverage, which isn’t really a coffee there’s no coffee in it, nothing jumped out at me as requiring milk additive to be added to the cocktail solution. So when I got the results, both of the extractions that were done using a cocktail were below 5 parts per million. Now as I’ve mentioned before, Bia Diagnostics also runs concurrently with the samples that GlutenFree Watchdog submits, an extraction solution that contains fish gelatin. This is done when we use the Sandwich R5 ELISA. One of the extractions using fish gelatin was high. And this raised a red flag for a number of reasons. One being just being because one of the four was high and it wasn’t just 6 or 7 parts per million, it was substantially above the lower limit of quantification, which is 5 parts per million. But the other red flag is that this herbal beverage actually contains barley as its second ingredient. This particular manufacture promotes this product as being free of gluten protein when the product is steeped. So this is why we we’re testing it both in dry form and in steeped form, just to see what the gluten content truly was in this product.
So I knew based on the ingredients that it did not make any sense that this product would test below 5 parts per million. And so I had the lab retest using the Sandwich R5 ELISA, the cocktail extraction solution and this time mixed with the skim milk additive. And this time the results came back above 20 parts per million. So this really shows the importance of making sure – this is actually a message to manufacturers. When you are having your food tested for gluten at a lab, or if you’re testing it on your own, you really need to know what’s in your food product and know whether you need to add anything else to that extraction solution. But more importantly, when you’re sending out to a lab, you need to let them know the ingredients in your food product. A lot of times, samples are sent to labs blinded. Meaning the lab does not know what is in that food product. So again, it’s really important that the lab knows what ingredients are in that food product so that they can help you decided which specific assay and which specific extraction solution should be used on your products.
I hope this is helpful. I know this testing information is confusing, but all of you in the GlutenFree Watchdog community, you know more than most people about testing because you follow this site, you’re members of GlutenFree Watchdog and we talk about testing all the time. So please feel free to send me your questions. My aim is to really, really educate consumers. Because this will help you ask better and more informed questions of manufacturers. And this will then lead manufactures to hopefully do a better job when they are testing foods for gluten. Thank you very much.