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We have said it before and will say it again: a big part of our mission at Custom Choice Cereal is to raise awareness for celiac disease and gluten intolerance. This requires that we also never stop learning, and you are actually our greatest resource!
We asked you about your road to diagnosis with celiac or gluten intolerance, and 24.2% said that you are self-diagnosed. In another one of our 3-second-polls, 73.3% of you primarily rely on the internet and blogs for gluten-free information. We must admit that we do the same but focus on the pages that we have identified as reliable resources, which we share with you in the right sidebar.
 A recent British study warns about the dangers of self-diagnosis of celiac disease and gluten intolerance. Results of the surveyed parents show that
- <50% correctly identified all gluten-containing foods
- 45% wrongly thought that maize contained gluten
- 98% correctly identified that gluten was in wheat
- only 38% could identify all gluten-containing foods
This can make life for the doctors who are aware of celiac disease much more difficult. Why? Well, a diagnosis cannot be made on a gluten-free diet, and it is literally very painful to be forced back to a gluten-containing diet for a correct diagnosis.
As Dr. Nadeem Afzal of the Southampton General Hospital points out “correct treatment and education about it becomes crucial in getting the child back to 100%”. He also admits though that online searches and self-education “reflect the age in which we live – we should embrace new technology as a useful starting point.”
By the way, you also need an official diagnosis to be able to deduct higher expenses for gluten-free food from your taxes!
Boom! The gluten-free week at Camp Kanata in Wake Forest has finally begun! As you can tell I am pretty excited about this! Chris and I have been hand-mixing gluten-free cereal for the past couple of days since Custom Choice Cereal will support the campers with delicious breakfast concoctions. And here is a little fun for you:
Do you know how many bags of gluten-free cereal are in the picture?
 Comment on this blog entry by July 5th, and the closest guess will get a chance to create his or her own gluten-free breakfast treat!
From my days at summer camp I remember the full schedules. We at Custom Choice Cereal therefore want to make sure that the campers start their days with a tasty gluten-free breakfast that prepares them ideally for their activity-filled days at camp. Campers will be able to crown the cereal they like the best, which we will then add to our list of Favorite Mixes. Stay tuned for this slightly different review of our gluten-free cereal!
Awareness for celiac disease is fortunately on the rise thanks to the combined effort of many many people. We at Custom Choice Cereal want to thank all of you for your hard and dedicated work! At the same time, more and more people realize that they benefit from a gluten-free diet, and we have blogged about a professional cycling team seeing great performance improvements after having cut gluten from their diet.
That’s why we were excited when we saw that tennis player Mike Bryan follows a gluten-free diet. If he and his twin brother Bob win in Wimbledon this year, they will break the current record of 61 all-time ATP doubles titles currently held by “The Woodies” Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde.
We at Custom Choice Cereal are wondering what Mike has for breakfast and think he should try customizing his personal gluten-free cereal some time. In any case, we will pull for Bob and Mike Bryan and hope they can make their dream come true by setting the new record of all-times ATP doubles titles!
 I could devote an entire blog to the Soccer World Cup and its many surprises, the latest of which being current champion Italy not advancing to the next round after its 2:3 loss against Slovakia. A good Italian friend of mine summarized his disappointment by saying “It was the worse team in Italian soccer history, and we deserved to go home. Nothing more than that, we will start rebuilding and will come back…now I will sit down and hope to watch better games.” Well said. Don’t forget that the US are playing Ghana on Saturday at 2:30pm EST…
On to happier things for everyone: your gluten-free cereal creations! You mix them virtually and name them, we at Custom Choice Cereal hand-mix them in our dedicated gluten-free facility so that you can enjoy a worry-free start into your day! As a tribute to your creativity, here are some of the (subjectively) best names you came up with:
5. Cynthia Crunchies (An evergreen among the cereal names)
4. Jungie YumYum (Exactly!)
3. Booberry Blend (Nice word play…)
2. Celiac Man Granola (Guess someone found his perfect breakfast!)
1. And this week’s winner is Andrea’s New Wedding Diet
Chris and I hope you have a great fun- and soccer-filled weekend!
At Custom Choice Cereal, we enable everyone to create tasty cereal mixes with exactly the ingredients they love! Inspired by a friend who is gluten intolerant and struggled finding a variety of tasty gluten-free breakfast foods, we decided to tackle this issue with our exclusively gluten-free cereal concoctions. Many reviews and comments on our facebook page have proven that gluten-free (cereal) does absolutely NOT have to be taste-free!
One thing always amazes us: there are tons of controversies about living gluten-free out there, especially in the context of autism. Families with an autistic family members are in the same boat. However, that doesn’t prevent often times heated discussions and even insults over the argument whether or not a gluten-free (and casein-free) diet can result in improvements of behavior or the leaky gut for their child.
Reading these discussions drives us crazy! WHY FIGHT EACH OTHER?? Seriously! None of us at Custom Choice Cereal are qualified to give medical advice but a healthy dose of common sense makes the decision pretty easy: try a gluten-free diet for at least a month, and if your child’s behavior and well-being improves we think it is (or should be) a no-brainer!
Do you agree? Disagree? Are we missing something?
Today is a great day! Let’s hope it stays that way with the “right” results in the soccer match between Germany and Ghana after the US team showed how it’s done! The Soccer World Cup in South Africa has already brought quite a few surprises – Switzerland upset Spain, Italy only tied against New Zealand, and the whole France disaster…
After the official beginning of summer it is now time to have your child(ren) enjoy summer camp. However, this can be quite a challenge for a kid with celiac disease as daily meals with other campers serve as a constant (and quite annoying) reminder that the gluten-free diet makes them “special”. The good news: there are solutions!
We at Custom Choice Cereal have previously written about how gluten-free summer camps benefit children, namely by providing relief from diet anxiety and improving overall well-being. That’s why I am so excited to have Camp Kanata right around the corner in Wake Forest, NC. They offer a gluten-free week from June 27 to July 3, and Custom Choice Cereal will support this great cause with special Camp Kanata cereal mixes that they can safely enjoy! Since all our cereals are hand-mixed in a dedicated gluten-free facility there is absolutely no risk of cross-contamination.
Stay tuned for feedback from the campers! They will have a chance to vote for their favorite cerealization, and we will add this mix to our list of recommended gluten-free cereal mixes!
A young breastfeeding mother wrote on Custom Choice Cereal’s facebook page about her baby’s allergic reaction to wheat. We learned from her that the food she eats gets passed on to her child, which only makes sense. Since gluten-free can be regarded as the “gold standard” of a wheat-free diet, Tina now follows a gluten-free diet. She created her first gluten-free Custom Choice Cereal mixes and says “they were both delicious”.
Tina’s wall post made us at Custom Choice Cereal wonder about the connection of breastfeeding and celiac disease, and a quick google search revealed some interesting information. Of course the decision to breastfeed or not is up to each individual family. But please keep on reading!
 A 2001 study by German researchers around U. Peters observed 143 children with celiac disease and 137 randomly selected non-celiac children. They found that breastfeeding for 2 or more months has a protective impact and decreased the risk of developing celiac disease by a whopping 63%. The Celiac Sprue Association and Lippincott’s Nursing Center provide more details on this study and other research in the context of breastfeeding and celiac disease.
We at Custom Choice Cereal aren’t doctors and cannot give anyone medical advice. However, our takeaway from these results is that Mother Nature simply knows it best!
The calendar confirms it: summer 2010 has officially begun!
Custom Choice Cereal is committed to make this the best and tastiest gluten-free summer ever, and while we are no weather-gods we can help you have the perfect start into your summer days! Simply create your personal gluten-free cereal with exactly the ingredients you love and receive it conveniently delivered directly to your doorstep.
That’s what Brit did. She is intolerant to gluten and recently discovered that there are a few gluten-free cereals out there. But read for yourself what she writes on her blog about Custom Choice Cereal:
“… a few cereals are gluten free, but they were either too sugary for me or they tasted like, um, nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some sugary cereal, but it has it’s time and place (and that’s not everyday). A few weeks ago, I heard about Custom Choice Cereal and just had to try it. They sent me a few mixes (of my choosing!) and I fell in love.
The process is pretty simple. You choose the base of your cereal and then you add ingredients (all dried fruits and nuts). The end result is gluten free, ridiculously yummy (Matt had no idea they were gluten free until I told him), oh and healthy, too!“
I think it doesn’t get any better than that! Then I saw the pictures she took of her cereal concoctions: they are absolutely amazing and made me immediately want to pour a bowl of gluten-free cereal. Fortunately, I always have quite a few mixes at hand…  Brit raves on about the “awesome pears” and “fantastic apricots” but her conclusion says it best:
“I did try some new things (which I fully encourage, you’ll never know until you try it!). I’m excited about finding a cereal that is positively gluten free and absolutely tasty.“
This is our mission at Custom Choice Cereal, and it makes us proud every time we hear someone telling us that we succeed at it!
Another week has passed, and thanks to you we were again delighted to see many creative names for the gluten-free cereal mixes you created. Since I have been asked to keep these blog entries short I get straight to Custom Choice Cereal’s top 5 names for this week:
5. Cheraple Chomps (Now that’s what we call creativity!)
4. Tropical Monkey Mix (Sometimes I feel like a monkey, too…)
3. GF Yum Yum Mix (Because gluten-free should be yum yum!)
2. Wookie Wonder Food (Love this name!)
1. And the winner THIS IS AMERICA, SON!
I wish all of you a Happy Father’s Day!
Ann writes the blog Healthy Tasty Chow, and the funny story about her is that her husband actually had stomach issues when she became pregnant. After a quick test they soon found out that among other food allergies he is mildly allergic to wheat.
 Custom Choice Cereal’s cereal creations made from all gluten-free ingredients are therefore the perfect treat for him. As we have pointed out before, gluten-free is also wheat-free and thus safe for Ann’s husband. Funny enough, it was Ann who actually sampled our cereal since it provided a much welcomed opportunity to procrastinate a little before cleaning the kitchen
“I pour myself a nice little bowl of my custom cereal. And then another bowl. And now I’m eating it dry out of the bag. Is it that good or am I just hungry? A little of both I think. [...] A friend of mine, Megan, has celiac disease and so I decided to give her half of the bag to try out for herself. She said that she loved the flakes, they held their texture in milk significantly better than other gluten free flake cereals she has tried. Like me, she loved the added ingredients…”
Thanks a lot, Ann, receiving such a great feedback is the best encouragement for us at Custom Choice Cereal. For Ann, the intuitive ordering process was big part of the overall fun in creating her personal gluten-free cereal:
“It’s really cool to make your own cereal and see the Nutrition Facts change with each item that you add/subtract. What was even cooler is that when I received my order in the mail, within the week, my nutrition facts were printed on the back with a complete ingredient list. It had an order number for easy re-ordering as well. I love love love this concept and hope it continues to flourish…”
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Gluten-free Cereal Cerealize your Gluten Freedom! Our blog serves to share all things gluten-free and give you the occasional update on what's happening at Custom Choice Cereal.
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