International awareness week for coeliac disease is being held between tomorrow and next Sunday. My daughter was diagnosed with this condition one-and-a-half years ago.

Coeliac disease is an autoimmune condition where the body attacks the villi in the small intestine when gluten is being consumed. The villi are being destroyed and the body cannot absorb the nutrition it needs.

The patient can have many different symptoms: from abdominal pain to diarrhoea, anaemia, osteoporosis and many more. When left untreated, one can even develop a certain intestinal cancer.

The treatment of coeliac disease is to avoid gluten completely. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.

At home this is not really that difficult to handle once you get used to it. You can clean out your kitchen, throw everything out that contains gluten and start cooking and baking gluten-free food.

The problem starts when you want to eat outside your house. Many restaurants claim to serve gluten-free food but when you ask for more details you realise that, unfortunately, many don’t understand how serious this condition is and that one little crumb can make you really ill.

I would like to ask chefs and restaurant managers to get informed about coeliac disease before they offer gluten-free food. Once they decide they want to serve gluten-free food, they need to take all the necessary precautions for the food to be 100 per cent gluten-free and to avoid any kind of cross-contamination.

In December last year a new European food labelling law was introduced that makes life for many people with food allergies easier: everything that is sold – packed or unpacked – has to list the allergens present and gluten is one of them. Unfortunately, however, this requirement is not always implemented.

Imagine every time you are outside and want to eat something, whether it’s popcorn at the cinema, ice cream, chips on the beach or nougat at the village feast. If there was a list of ingredients available, that would help a lot.

Hopefully in the next few decades, a cure will be found for coeliac disease but for the moment it is important for as many people as possible to know about this condition.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.