Fred Minnick surveys the controversy over labeling spirits “gluten-free,” a trend that “contradicts long-standing advisories from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that all distilled spirits are gluten-free unless it is added after distillation”:
Blue Ice vodka’s American Potato Vodka became the first spirit to receive gluten-free labeling in May 2013. Company officials said CD [celiac disease] sufferers frequently requested gluten content information. “With the celiac and gluten-free products becoming more accessible, why not go through the process of proving we were gluten-free to [the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)]? We could use it as one aspect of our marketing program,” says Thomas Gibson, the chief operating officer for 21st Century Spirits, Blue Ice’s parent company. With this labeling, Gibson says American Potato Vodka consumers can be 100-percent certain it’s gluten free.
But that guarantee is not necessary, says [food allergy researcher Steve] Taylor, one of the country’s leading gluten testers. Taylor calls gluten-free vodka a “silly thing. … All vodka is gluten-free unless there is some flavored vodka out there where someone adds a gluten-containing ingredient. I know that many celiac sufferers are extra-cautious. That is their privilege. But their [vodka] concerns are usually not science-based.”
“Gluten-free” products are becoming big business:
The new labeling has created a marketing frenzy that may become a $6.2-billion gluten-free product industry by 2018, according to a 2013 report from research firm MarketsandMarkets. Some say the risk of cross-contamination warrants such broad labeling; others claim the FDA just made gluten-free living much more complicated.
Previous Dish on gluten and wheat allergies here, here, and here.
The Dish 