The team at Custom Choice Cereal is overwhelmed by the flood of daily news on celiac disease, new research findings, information about new drugs under development, and the wealth of tips and tricks for living a gluten-free life. It is part of our mission to filter this information to some degree and pass on the bits and pieces that we find particularly interesting and or helpful.

As you can probably tell from the title of this post we want to share a couple of our findings in no particular order.

• The Philadelphia 76ers will host their 3rd Celiac Awareness Night on March 26th.  Their opponent that night will be the Atlanta Hawks.  We say “Thank you!” for helping to raise awareness for celiac disease!  A special discount for the game is available on the 76ers website with the code “CELIAC”
• Researchers from Columbia University’s Celiac Disease Center studied the Body Mass Index (BMI) of 369 patients proven have celiac disease from 1981 until 2007.  “Classical” femal celiacs were all revealed as predictors for low BMI.  Once on a gluten-free diet, over 50% of the overweight and obese patients lost weight, and of the group who initially had a low BMI, 42.4% attained a normal weight
• Triumph Dining’s Essential Gluten-Free Grocery Shopping Guide is now available as an iPhone application

These are just a couple of items we came across, please feel free to share your findings by commenting on this post!

Erin Elberson writes the blog gluten free fitness, focusing on “eating well to be well” and “nutrition, fitness, and fun with a celiac spin”. When Custom Choice Cereal came across her blog we immediately said to ourselves that we have to try anything to be featured on it.

In addition to writing a stellar review of our custom gluten-free cereal, Erin mentioned that we are an “advocate for awareness of celiac disease and the gluten-free lifestyle”. She is also the first blogger EVER to mention our Quest for The Hoff, something that is very dear to my heart (Germans loooove David Hasselhoff in case you did not know this). Erin thought this to be “absolutely hysterical and made me almost fall of my chair and spit my coffee onto my keyboard. I love the humor. Points for that!”

Thank you Erin, we definitely like to look at the humorous side of life and appreciate your encouraging words! But honestly, how cool would it be if we could really personally hand a bag of our customized gluten-free cereal to The Hoff??

Custom Choice Cereal had a day packed with meetings yesterday. While we usually rather spend time talking with our customers (about new gluten-free ingredients) and cerealizing your gluten-free creations, it is helpful to learn other’s people perspectives on our business. And trust us, it is too early to reveal, but we have some tricks up our sleeves…

Most of you have probably heard of professional road racing cyclist Lance Armstrong who won the Tour de France seven consecutive years from 1999 to 2005 after an amazing story of successfully battling cancer. Most of you probably also know that he subsequently founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation to fight cancer. He also started LIVESTRONG.COM as the “the definitive daily health, fitness and lifestyle destination”.

LIVESTRONG.COM actually has a very informative section on celiac disease that is worth browsing through. While we feel that some of the background information on celiac disease is better presented for example by the Celiac Sprue Association, we really like the many articles on celiac disease that are listed there. Check it out and let us know what you think!

We said it before and we say it again – besides providing a variety of tasty gluten-free cereal with exactly the ingredients you like to you, everyone at Custom Choice Cereal is really passionate about sports and especially College sports. Of course UNC is our favorite, and last night saw the game of the biggest rivalry in College sports: UNC played Duke at the Dean Dome, and as we said at least in the Triangle area it is one of the few sporting events that is more important than the Super Bowl.

There were a couple of impressive runs from both teams, and it was a close game until the last 10 minutes. Unfortunately the outcome was not as we had hoped because the Blue Devils took home a win by 10 points (64:54). Though UNC’s free throw shooting and rebounding were (again) not very encouraging (Duke on the other hand had 23 offensive rebounds!), we still thought that this was probably the most impressive performance thus far in the 2009/2010 season. Our defensive game improved significantly, and maybe they can still make it to the tournament…

Those of you who have been following Custom Choice Cereal know that there are two things that we are passionate about: providing delicious, customizable gluten-free cereal as a great alternative to the gluten-free “cardboard options” that are out there – and Carolina. As a matter of fact, one of the criteria in designing our logo was that it had to have Carolina Blue in it .

As every Tar Heel knows today is the biggest day of the academic year since our basketball team is playing the “school down the road” aka the Duke Blue Devils in the Dean Dome tonight.

Anything is possible in the ACC, and certainly when it comes to our Tar Heels playing Duke, the biggest rivalry in College sports. Given this year’s Conference records (Duke 7-2, UNC 2-6) we are ready for the worst, but as they say – hope dies last…

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS FOR WINNING THE SUPER BOWL XLIV!!

Custom Choice Cereal is excited for New Orleans having won the Super Bowl 2010 against the Indianapolis Colts (and against all odds)! Peyton Manning’s precision passes and a 96-yard touchdown drive that actually tied Super Bowl record could not stop the Saints. After a come back in Q2 they began the second half with a very successful onside kick, followed later by a two-point conversion ruled good after review for the 7-point lead, and a crucial interception in the final quarter that resulted in the final score of 31-17.

We realize that this blog post is not about one of our usual topics such as celiac disease, gluten-free food, or customized gluten-free cereal. Being huge sports fans there are other things going on in life, and the Super Bowl definitely is one of them! We would very much like to be at that party in New Orleans tonight, celebrating the first Super Bowl victory in franchise history…

Custom Choice Cereal would like to the time to reflect on the first full week of the year 2010. Three “events” particularly stand out to us.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram published an article reviewing “The top 10 recent trends in food“. Trends mentioned in this retrospective include local food, childhood obesity, food safety, and as number 6 our favorite: gluten-free food! As mentioned in our reflection on the IN list by the Washington Post, let’s hope this is not only a fad but continues because celiac disease is a fact and certainly won’t go away.

Second is last night’s exciting BCS Championship game we were able to witness between Alabama and Texas! We have to say that we did feel sorry for Texas QB Colt McCoy having to watch most of the game from the sideline after injuring his shoulder less than 5 minutes into the game. But Alabama was the better team, and the 37-21 victory was well deserved. Sorry to all you Longhorn fans out there…

Finally, due to the Holidays we owe you an update of our gluten-free cereal names of the week. Here are our top 5 of the New Year:

5. Mi Cereal (interesting)
4. Nuuuuts! (guess what was in that mix…)
3. Best Cereal (that’s right!)
2. CinnaApriPump (combining the ingredients to a new word)
1. And the winner Hazy CranPear ‘Nola

Thanks again for being creative. We enjoy reading your cereal names!

For a change this will not be a blog about our delicious customizable gluten-free cereal. Instead it will be about one of my other great passions: UNC basketball! As some of you might know, this passion was the reason to include Carolina Blue as a color in Custom Choice Cereal’s logo

Last night saw the re-match of the 2009 NCAA National Championship game against Michigan State which Carolina won 89:72 to claim its 6th National Title. UNC had the home advantage, and the fans clearly supported their team frantically! Judging from his expression during the game Roy Williams would probably disagree with me. However, I was truly impressed by UNC’s young team and very happy to see another Tar Heel win with a final score of 89:82. It seems 89 is UNC’s number in this match-up.