The simple answer is yes. Oats are indeed good and even recommended for those with coeliac disease, though not when just starting on a gluten free regime. Oats ought really to be included for nutritional purposes once disease symptoms have abated, the diet is properly managed and intestinal inflammation and damage have been rectified. The goodness of oats, even for sufferers of coeliac disease, has been confirmed in clinical studies. See links in the left sidebar “What’s CSG been reading” for more details and the links to articles found here and here.
The protein in oats is avenin not gluten and avenin, though similar, is different to gluten. If you have coeliac disease and are avoiding gluten that does not mean avenin will cause a problem. If you have coeliac disease and are not avoiding gluten or have recently started a gluten free diet, then your immune system is much more likely to react to something similar – like avenin. If in doubt get tested for coeliac disease. However just because you are reacting to gluten does not mean you will react to avenin. It really depends on the state of alarm within your immune system.
You may be reacting to gluten because you have become sensitised to it. This is different to coeliac disease which is an auto-immune disorder. You may become sensitised to gluten bcause you have bowel dysbiosis, such as candida. If you have candida you may also have out of control multiple sensitivities due to something called leaky gut. Candida in the digestive system causes leaky gut because it irritates and inflames the gut tisues, as well as infesting and damaging them with fungal tissue growth.
If you have leaky gut, due to uncontrolled candida, you could very easily become sensitised to oats, especially if you are already sensitised to gluten, eggs or cow’s milk dairy. You may even become sensitised to a wide range of foods and environmental chemicals. Typically these foods and chemicals are ones you habitually include in your diet or use in the home or on your person. If you find you are becoming more sensitive to foods and chemicals as the years go by there are a number of reasons why this may happen. However immune hypersensitisation due to systemic candida infection is one of the commonest.
I recommend you do a food tolerance test to make sure you are okay with oats before including them unregulated into your diet.
As the study’s found, including pure oats in the gluten-free diet is a good idea because it adds taste and nutritional variety to what can be a very bland diet where carbohydrates are primarily starches. Oats are a useful choice to increase nutritional food and fibre into a gluten free diet.
Oats have a number of health benefits. Since they are a valuable source of soluble fibre, they are beneficial in maintaining healthy bowel function, as well as reducing high blood levels of circulating fats. Fats bind to and are excreted attached to the fibre. Oats are also a relatively slow release carbohydrate, so are useful for regulating blood sugar levels for those with diabetes. The glycaemic index of oats is 59.
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