Oats in the GF diet

The use of oats is one of the gray areas in the gluten-free diet. This is discussed in detail on pages 2 through 7 of this article: The Gluten-Free Diet: an update for health professionals. Table 4 in the article shows all the differing recommendations from different organizations!

While there have been a number of studies concluding that oats can be tolerated by many people with CD, it's also true that recent studies have reported that some varieties of oats are more toxic than others...but that all varieties tested cause some reaction (1, 2).

Hopefully, the information below will help you decide whether or not to use oats, but several things seem clear:

1) Oats should only be used by people who are already doing well on the gluten-free diet.

2) If you decide to have oats, buy only specially-grown oats that are tested for gluten.

3) The oats currently used to make commercial breakfast cereals (such as Quaker Oats and Cheerios) are not specially grown, and not expected to be gluten-free.

4) Some people have been proven to react to oats.

There are two possible problems with consuming oats as part of the Gluten-Free diet.

First, commercially-grown oats, unlilke the specialty oats, are almost invariably contaminated with wheat or barley. Jane DeMarchi from the North American Miller's Association spoke at an FDA meeting on Gluten-Free food labelling in August, 2005, explaining the milling process and why oats obtained from these large mills are expected to be contaminated. You can read the transcript and see the slides of her excellent talk, "Feasibility of Milling Gluten-Free Flours" on the FDA website.

Four different lots of McCann's oats, a brand which was at one time thought to be gluten-free, were tested in 2004 (Thompson). One sample had no detectable gluten (less than 3 ppm), but the remaining three samples showed levels of 12, 23, and 725 ppm gluten. In this same study, Quaker Oats Old-Fashioned samples had levels of 338, 364, 971, and 1807 ppm gluten; Country Choice Old-Fashioned had one sample with no detectable gluten, and three other samples with 131, 210, and 120 ppm gluten.

Oats that have been specially-grown and processed to be gluten-free are available from these companies:

Gifts of Nature
Certified by GFCO to contain less than 10 ppm gluten

GlutenFreeOats
An informative website; well worth reading
Certified by GFCO to contain less than 10 ppm gluten

Cream Hill Estates
Cream Hill submitted a description of their methods for producing GF oats to the FDA.

Only Oats

Note that "commercial" breakfast cereals made from oats (Quaker Oats, Cheerios, etc..) are not made from these specially-grown oats.

The second problem with consuming oats is that some people with CD do react to the gluten in oats. One study indicating this is "The Molecular Basis for Oat Intolerance in Patients with Celiac Disease". (You can also read a news article about this study). People were selected for this study specifically because they believed they had reacted to oats in the past. Some of them were shown to be truly having damage from oats, while others in the study were not.

In addition, six potentially reactive portions of the oat gluten protein were found in "Identification and Analysis of Multivalent, Proteolytically Resistant Peptides from Gluten". T cells reacted to oat gluten in a study by Kilmartin.

CSA has a web page devoted to research on oats.