Have Your Rice and Eat It, Too
There’s a lot of confusion out there about what grains are considered to be gluten-free. A question that I commonly get from my patients with celiac disease is, “Can I eat rice?”
I want to clear up this confusion by providing you with a list of safe gluten-free grains.
Whole grain brown rice (preferable to white rice due to higher fiber content, vitamins and minerals)
Wild rice
Quinoa
Buckwheat
Amaranth – this used to be a staple food of the Aztecs!
Millet
Sorghum
Teff
Whole corn
Potato
Tapioca
Arrowroot
Flax
Flours made from nuts, beans and seeds
So yes, feel free to eat rice as part of your gluten-free diet.
Try not to stick with a single grain source as your new wheat substitute. Instead, rotate these new grains into your diet for yummy meals full of nutritional benefit.
Rupa Mukherjee, MD
Rupa Mukherjee, MD attended Dartmouth College, and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed her internal medicine residency and chief residency at Yale University, gastroenterology fellowship at Columbia University Medical Center, and an advanced fellowship in celiac disease at Harvard Medical School.
Rupa is currently an attending physician in the department of gastroenterology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, as well as an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. In addition to seeing patients with a wide variety of GI issues, she also has clinics devoted to patients with celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. She is actively involved in various research studies related to celiac disease and gluten sensitivity, and serves on the executive committee for the Harvard Medical School Celiac Research Program.
In addition to practicing medicine, Rupa is senior medical advisor for a food-based company called Real Food Solutions. She believes strongly in the principle of food as medicine, and helped formulate the Anchor Nutrition Bar TM, an all-natural nutrition bar for the prevention and relief of nausea. She is also working with the team on formulating other all-natural, non-drug food products to manage common GI ailments and is looking into gluten-free formulations.
See all of Rupa's articles.
