Are gluten-free products as nutritious as gluten equivalents?

According to researchers from University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Spain, gluten-free (GF) products are not usually nutritionally equivalent to those that contain gluten but this situation continues to evolve as new GF products develop as a result of the growth in demand.

Jonatan Miranda-Gómez is a pharmacist at the UPV/EHU’s Gluten 3S group and has led an extensive nine years of research into GF products.

During this time, the cases of coeliac disease have grown exponentially due to environmental factors and improved diagnoses. As a result there has been an increased number of people eliminating gluten from their diet along with a growing perception that gluten-free products are healthier than gluten-containing ones.

 “The data show that gluten-free products are not healthier,” according to Miranda-Gómez.

Miranda’s research team has been carrying out a nutritional analysis of gluten-free products as part of the Gluten 3S group, which is accredited for granting the ISO standard seal that can guarantee gluten-free products are actually gluten-free.

“In 2014, we published a fairly groundbreaking scientific paper,” Miranda-Gomez said. “In it, we compared 200 gluten-free foods with their gluten-containing equivalents. Nutritionally, they are not on a par with each other.”

Many of the gluten-free products contained more unsaturated lipids (or harmful fats) than gluten-containing ones, they were lower in fibre and their salt and protein content needed to be monitored. But the situation is changing all the time and the results of another study have just been published in the journal Foods.

Evolving situation over a nine-year period

The proportion of coeliac individuals has not changed and remains at approximately 1%. However, the population has increased and gluten sensitivities have also emerged, which means that when this group is also taken into consideration, the problem affects 10% of the population. “The industry has been aware of that,” said Miranda-Gomez. “So it has developed more products, which has allowed the industry itself to do more research and take other components into consideration. To a certain extent, this social and research team momentum has led to an evolution in the industry. And there has been a remarkable improvement.”

Pasta is a case in point. With GF pasta, the wheat ingredient is usually replaced with maize flour, which hasn’t changed in the last nine years. However, previously, the second most important ingredient was rice flour but this has now changed to millet. “This has had a positive effect on nutrition,” Miranda-Gomez said. “To produce pasta, you have to extrude it, and millet allows extrusion to be carried out using fewer lipids.”

In the case of non-solid products, producers use other strategies rather than just replacing the gluten ingredient. For example, with GF beer the gluten is broken down by the addition of enzymes during the clarification process (when suspended particles are separated from the liquid). “But this process has another limitation,” Miranda-Gomez added. “Harmful molecules may go unnoticed during routine analysis. Members of the Coeliac Association sometimes tell us that gluten-free beer disagrees with them.” So a new line of research has been opened to analyse the problems with these beers.

As far as Miranda-Gomez is concerned, the GF topic is clearly a broad one and needs further research into environmental factors.

“We want to find out the environmental impact of gluten-free food. They tend to have a greater impact than the rest, because some ingredients need to be imported from abroad, for example. That impact would need to be reduced. For example, the sourcing of millet needs to be explored,” Miranda-Gomez said.

Image credit: iStock.com/chameleonseye