How Much Gluten Is Safe For Someone with Celiac Disease?

If you’re wondering how much gluten it m takes to cause a reaction in someone with celiac disease, you’re at the right place. Because I’m rounding up some of the best research on how much gluten is safe for someone with celiac disease, plus explaining how this gluten threshold relates to the 20 ppm cutoff for gluten free products in the US.

This post should not be considered medical advice. This post’s purpose is to raise awareness of how little gluten can be dangerous for someone with celiac, and not encouraging anyone to eat gluten with celiac. All research and sources are linked below.

There have been various studies where researchers tried to determine an exact threshold for eating gluten with celiac daily without triggering intestinal damage. 50mg caused a lot of issues; some with celiac even reacted to 10mg. But in the most referred to study I’ve found, 10mg was the point where most people didn’t have issues. And this is for eating the entire DAY! So crumbs can add up quick.

Amazing crumb vs quarter visual reference included below is from Gluten Free Watch Dog.

Here’s where 20 ppm comes in: 20 ppm was calculated to make sure people could eat a lot of gluten free products and still not hit the 10 mg threshold. So you would have to eat 17 pieces of gluten free bread with 20 ppm gluten, for example, to hit 10mg. Or if you ate a variety of products all with 20 ppm gluten, you would have to eat 1.1 pounds of product in one day! But it would only take a pen-tip-sized crumb of whole wheat bread with thousands of ppm of gluten to hit 10mg. 

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