Gluten Free as Fuck in DFW

@denboy
Is candy corn gluten free?

@f00l not sure, maybe @joelmw can shed some light on that.

@f00l usually. It’s mostly sugar. Gluten is only from wheat products I believe.

@RiotDemon Gluten is found in many grains, not just in wheat. Here’s good old Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten

Wheat is the most common mentioned in Celiac disease, but that’s one of those fashionable things that is fairly rare in the general population.

Fortunately, candy corn is completely devoid of anything (except sugar). :-}

@Shrdlu and food coloring

@Shrdlu While I have to agree that candy corn is devoid of any known food value other than carbohydrates, some brands do make it with barley malt, which is decidedly not gluten free. I presume all candy corn to be suspect, because it gives me a good excuse not to have to eat any of it, ever.

@rockblossom

Yeah.
My question was intended as nothing more than a joke line.

But it is also a serious consideration for those who would attend a gluten free expo.
Extracts of various grains are used in all kinds of products, often as an emulsifier or thickener. Or for some other industrial purposes I dont understand.

@f00l Yup. Like the filler material in prescription drugs, which the pharma companies will not disclose in packaging or when called, because the exact formula for the drug (including inert ingredients) is proprietary info. Just one more on the long list of why I hate Big Pharma.

@rockblossom @Kidsandliz @Shrdlu @RiotDemon @denboy @f00l

Sorry for my delay. Yeah, so while candy corn is pretty much just sugar, yes,

1. It’s certainly not out of the question that gluten might be present in any number of incidental ingredients (natural flavorings, stabilizers, filler et al.). And in general, unless a manufacturer clearly labels their products and/or has a clear and consistent policy (i.e., always explicitly identifying gluten where present), just because wheat, barley, rye or triticale or one of their derivatives doesn’t seem to be a necessary constituent, it might still be there.
2. Just as importantly, in the absence of known protocols for maintaining gluten-free production lines or for thoroughly cleaning said production lines (to certifiable, tested levels), I can’t safely assume that gluten won’t be introduced as a cross contaminant. It’s not at all uncommon for manufacturers to produce and/or package otherwise gluten-free items on the same equipment that they use to produce or package thoroughly gluteny items. Moreover, many of the big names outsource production, especially for seasonal or novelty items–and are often unable to attest that their subs maintain the same standards against cross contamination. So, for instance, the last I knew, most regular Reeses products are safe, but their seasonal products are not.

Best case, Multi Mega Corp only produces items that contain no gluten and that are manufactured and packaged in facilities where gluten is never present.

In short,

1. It must be clearly stated that gluten is not an ingredient.
2. It must also be clearly stated that gluten is either never present or is thoroughly removed from the facilities before the gluten-free goodness is created.

Otherwise that shit is verboten.

FDA requirements are still a little squishy. And, well, fuck, who knows how much squishier they’ll be three years from now, under the emerging, “great” like it used to be only “better” plutocracy.

I don’t much care for candy corn, so I have no idea whether Brach’s candy corn is. It’s often a pain in the ass to verify these things, so I’m probably not going to waste my time finding out.

@joelmw

The current language in Hershey’s list of gluten-free items:

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups – All Except Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Unwrapped Minis and Seasonal Shaped Items.

@joelmw

Were you gluten-sensitive as a child?

Wikipedia:

Gluten-related disorders is the umbrella term for all diseases triggered by gluten, which include celiac disease (CD), non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), wheat allergy, gluten ataxia, and dermatitis herpetiformis (DH).[6] Currently, their incidence is increasing in most geographic areas of the world.[26][27][28]

It can be explained possibly by the growing westernization of diet,[26] increasing use of wheat-based foods included in the Mediterranean diet,[29][30] the progressive replacement of rice by wheat in many countries in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa,[26] the development in recent years of new types of wheat with a higher amount of cytotoxic gluten peptides,[31][32] and the higher content of gluten in bread and bakery products, due to the reduction of dough fermentation time.[31][

New grain strains were developed with greatly increased yield - concentrating on wheat, but including other grains - a heavy focus of research supported by international organizations, universities, and NGO’s (supporting the post WWII “Green Revolution”, as anti-communist organizations asked governments feared the effects of world starvation, which seemed possible at the time); and also, heavily, by agribusiness.

These new strains of wheat are supposed to have become overwhelmingly commercially dominant in agriculture during the last three decades of the 1900’s, to the degree that (I have read) it is now difficult to purchase legacy (1950’s) grain or flour in any kind of commercial quality, even for special uses.

So, apart from “dough conditioners”, and other newish factory additives to common wheat/grain products, and apart from increasing use of grain extracts in a variety of industrial processes, we are commonly exposed to varieties of grain products new to our species.

I know that some of the increased awarenesses of gluten/grain sensitivities are due to more sophisticated medical measures. And some to increased social awareness (which can trigger potential over-diagnoses and scares).

But I wonder if some of the apparent increases in human gluten sensitivities are due to the increased human exposure to added grain products in so many processed foods, and to the new wheat and grain strains that dominate production.

@f00l To the best of my knowledge I was not—and certainly not in any way resembling how I am now.

But that’s partly how celiac disease works: those of us born with a predisposition don’t always (or even often) manifest from birth. It’s also not known what triggers. Lots of people think it can be brought on by a major stressor. That seems consistent with my experience. But my gastroenterologist hates that kind of speculation; he just says we don’t know.

That being said, yeah, we’ve fucked with grains and, again, a lot of folks speculate that that accounts for the increased occurrence of celiac disease and other forms of gluten intolerance (it’s not just better diagnoses or awareness; we’re pretty sure celiac disease is more common than it used to be). Some even think that there might be a kind of exposure threshold, past which those of us born with the predisposition are fucked. That would be consistent with the fact that we’ve genetically modified wheat to be more gluteny.

And all of the processing probably doesn’t help either.

There’s a lot we don’t know. But it’s a pretty good guess that we’re not making our food safer or more nutritious.

@snapster please don’t sell meh.

@RiotDemon I, for one, am seriously hoping that it was a reference(missing a time element) to the original bezos breakfast, (that spawned the octopus story), and not a new one.

@earlyre he mentioned on Friday… Unless bezos became the richest man in the world on Friday.

@RiotDemon

Bezos did. According to my Friday news feed.

Jeff Bezos just passed Bill Gates for world’s richest person

By Aaron Smith October 27, 2017: 1:19 PM ET

Jeff Bezos has leapfrogged Bill Gates again for the title of world’s richest billionaire. But they’re both having a pretty good day.
Amazon stock jumped 13.5% on Friday after the company turned in another incredible earnings report – more than a quarter-billion dollars in profit in three months.
Bezos owned nearly 80 million shares in Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) as of August, according to the most recent available data from FactSet. He made more than $10 billion from the one-day stock surge and is now worth well over $90 billion.

At the end of trading on Thursday, Gates occupied the top spot in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $88 billion. Bezos had $83.5 billion, and his big day on Friday was more than enough to close the gap.
But Gates also got a boost as Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) stock rose 7%. Gates owned 103 million shares as of September, according to FactSet. Microsoft stock climbed about $6 a share, so Gates added almost $600 million to his personal wealth.
Bezos briefly dethroned Gates once before, on July 27, when his net worth topped $90 billion because of a temporary surge in Amazon stock.

Amazon has been on a tear this year. It acquired Whole Foods and plans to establish a second headquarters somewhere in North America. More than 200 cities and regions have submitted bids to become the home for HQ2.

–CNNMoney’s Matt Egan contributed to this report.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/27/news/companies/bezos-gates-billionaires/index.html

@f00l ah ok. Phew.

@RiotDemon
Bloomberg Billionaire Index

https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/

@snapster Please tell me there was a Grey Poupon mention.

@funco49

Putin’s rainy day funds are a bit harder to pin down. Nothing like “legally” stolen and laundered money, when you can use the resources of an entire country plus many naive or complicit foreign operatives and organizations.

Measuring it is not a task for Bloomberg or Forbes.

I’ve heard estimates of $200-500B, but I would imagine it’s much guesswork and largely unverifiable, even for the financial trackers at the NSA.