August 28, 2025 • 13 mins
If you’ve ever been sure you got glutened – only to find out it was something else – you’re not alone. I’ve been there too.
Sometimes we do everything right, avoid all the gluten, and still end up with symptoms that feel just as bad. Today, I’m breaking down some of the most common non-gluten triggers that can mimic a gluten reaction.
I’ll share how I spotted my own hidden triggers, what you can do to track yours, and how to start feeling better faster. And at the end, I’ve got a bonus tip – the unexpected trigger I only discovered last year that changed my day-to-day life.
Come join us in our free Facebook Community, The Gluten Free Engineer.
It’s a space where you can connect with others living gluten-free, ask questions, swap tips and recipes, and get support from people who truly get it. Whether you’re newly diagnosed or a seasoned gluten-free pro, you’ll feel right at home.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Carrie Saunders (00:00):
Quick reminder before we get started on this
episode this podcast is based onmy personal experiences and
isn't medical advice.
If you've ever been sure you'vegotten gluten, only to find
something else, it's somethingthat's happened to me before too
.
Sometimes we do everythingright, avoid all the gluten and
still end up with symptoms thatfeel just as bad.
(00:20):
Today, I'm breaking down someof the most common non-gluten
triggers that can mimic a glutenreaction.
I'll share how I spotted my ownhidden triggers and what you
can do to track yours, and howto start feeling better faster.
And at the end, I've got abonus tip for you the unexpected
trigger I only discovered thislast year that has changed my
day-to-day life.
(00:41):
Welcome to the Gluten-FreeEngineer Podcast.
I'm your host, keri Saunders.
In 2011, I was diagnosed withceliac disease, a moment that
changed everything, but I wasdetermined not to let it hold me
back.
With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer
the gluten-free lifestyle,breaking down recipes, safety
(01:01):
tips, travel hacks andeverything in between to rebuild
a life I love.
Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance or simply
choose to live gluten-free, thispodcast is for you.
Join me each week as wesimplify the gluten-free
lifestyle, make it fun and provethat you don't have to miss out
on anything.
Welcome back to the show.
Today we're talking about otherpotential stomach issue trigger
(01:25):
foods besides gluten, and I knowthat I have found across all
the years that I would sometimesblame me getting gluten on
stomach issues when they wasn't.
I would later found out itwasn't necessarily gluten that
was a trigger, because sometimesyou can be so careful but the
symptoms don't necessarily goaway and it can be something
(01:48):
else that we're actuallysensitive to, and once we've
removed gluten, it's a loteasier to figure out that we
still don't feel good.
We're listening to our bodiesmore when we've removed gluten
for health reasons and it'sreally easy to blame gluten, but
sometimes it's something else.
I've come across so many otherfoods I've alluded to on this
podcast that I can't eat besidesgluten too, and identifying
(02:13):
these can reduce your stress andimprove your health and improve
your overall life.
I mean, yes, there are a good10 or so items that I don't eat
regularly or at all in my life,but boy I do, do I feel so much
better and so it's so totallyworth it.
Now, one of the triggers can becross-reactive foods, and this
(02:37):
is kind of common across peoplewith celiac and gluten
intolerance.
Some foods can trigger asimilar immune response, and
examples of that can be dairyoats, even if they're
gluten-free, corn, and evenbrown rice.
They can mimic.
They have some proteins in themand some of those not quite all
(02:58):
of them that can mimic thegladden protein that is in a
gluten, and so some people crossreact to those and I have found
for me personally, I do nottolerate oats.
I can from a digestivestandpoint, but I can't from a
brain fog, and it actuallyflares out my allergies to eat
(03:22):
oats.
Corn, on the other hand, causesme the opposite distress that
you might like consider glutento do.
It causes me constipation andslow bowel movements.
It just causes my system tojust kind of stop and it
obviously can get veryuncomfortable if that happens
(03:42):
too much.
So corn can actually do that tome, particularly the green
version of corn.
Now, honestly, just a few weeksago I tried the vegetable
version, so corn on the cob andwhile it didn't cause me any
digestive problems, that versionof corn caused me to get tired,
it caused me to get stuffy inthe nose, it caused my throat to
(04:04):
kind of feel tight and itchy.
So you might want to experimentwith trying to eliminate any of
those three.
Dairy, oats and corn are verytypical to not tolerate.
Well, when you have problemswith gluten, and in general many
people can't tolerate them andthey don't even realize it.
So what you can do is you cantake a period of time where you
(04:28):
know it's going to be easy toremove any of these foods that I
am talking about today, thatyou think you might have some
problems with it too.
Remove them for at minimum twoweeks really three or four would
be more ideal and thenintroduce it and have it be the
only new food that you introduce, and then it should be pretty
obvious whether you're atoleranter or not.
(04:49):
Now there's some other foodintolerances that I ran into.
The biggest one is soy.
Probably several years agothree or four maybe more now my
husband was having some severepain issues and we couldn't
figure out what it was.
So I helped him do a foodelimination diet and when we
(05:09):
started, adding foods back in,soy was a big issue for him.
It causes major brain fog, itcauses his pain to, you know,
increase, and so when we weredoing this experiment and
introducing him back into thesoy, I got a bag of edamame.
Frozen edamame beans they wereplain, absolutely no sauce.
(05:31):
Frozen edamame beans they wereplain, absolutely no sauce, just
literally edamame beans in it.
We microwaved them just so thatwe weren't introducing anything
else and then we had him eat afew spoonfuls.
He completely fogged out on me.
He was staring across the room.
It was really kind of wild tosee how fast he reacted to it.
So I thought to myself well,why not?
(05:52):
I see what I do.
Because I wasn't eating soyeither, because I was supporting
him in his food elimination.
So I had a spoonful or two ofsoy, the edamame beans.
I didn't feel bad at first, butlet me tell you, the next
morning I woke up with so muchdigestive distress.
It explained the reason thatsometimes, when I would eat
(06:14):
Chinese and I was prettyconfident the restaurant was
being careful with cross contactwith gluten it was actually the
soy that was bothering me.
Sometimes it was a hit or misstoo.
It didn't always bother me whenI eat Chinese.
Another thing that could causeit could be eggs, nuts and
nightshades.
(06:34):
I have recently found out that,while I don't have any typical
reactions to nuts that you wouldtypically think of, nuts are
causing peanuts in particular,not necessarily pistachios.
Those kinds of nuts are okay,but peanuts in particular were
causing me to have allergyflare-ups too, and I have a dust
(06:56):
mite allergy.
It's not super severe but itwas enough that it was causing
me to go to the allergist.
But I found removing nutspeanuts in particular and brown
rice, makes that go away and assoon as I have a little bit of
that it comes back up.
Also, nightshades and redpeppers, eggplants, tomatoes all
(07:19):
of those are in the nightshadefamily.
Sometimes those are a high foodintolerance for people and some
of these symptoms can mimicgluten reactions.
And I'm going to hint a littlebit to my bonus at the end of
this is one of the nightshadesis causing me some severe gluten
reactions and I'm going to hinta little bit to my bonus at the
end of this is one of thenightshades was causing me some
severe gluten reactions.
So I would encourage you to dothe food elimination on any of
these if you feel like you needto work with your doctor if you
(07:42):
feel like that's necessary toand figure out what works for
you.
Now, trigger number three issomething that you might not
think of but we do talk aboutsometimes on the podcast is
non-food items.
So non-food items can becontaminated with gluten and
with other things you're notcompatible with.
So lip balm, chapstick,supplements, medications,
(08:06):
play-doh If you don't know thathas wheat in it you need to get.
We find the off-brand Play-Dohdoesn't have wheat in it and
there's surprising places thatgluten can sneak into your
system without even eating it.
It could be lotion, it could bea shampoo.
Anything you're putting on yourskin can get into your
digestive system, depending uponhow you do your day.
(08:27):
Many times you know we'll washour hands and then we'll put
lotion on because they're dry.
Well then, if we go get a bagof chips or like some cookies or
something and we're using yourhands to eat them and we think,
oh, our hands are clean becauseI just washed them, well, you
put that lotion on your handsand you can get small amounts of
gluten that way if your lotionhas gluten in it.
(08:49):
Also, another trigger can bestress and lack of sleep.
I know that if I don't sleepwell for two to three nights in
a row, a lot of my glutensymptoms can come back.
And what my youngest childactually has is, if he doesn't
sleep right, his digestivesystems come back and it can
feel really bad and it can feellike you've been gluten and
sleep deprivation also makes anysymptoms hit harder if you do
(09:13):
get gluten and make it harderfor you to recover.
And then there also can be justgeneral health issues like a
leaky gut.
A histamine intolerance canalso mimic celiac disease
already, and when your gut isalready sensitive, more foods
can cause issues than you think.
So healing our gut is reallyimportant.
(09:34):
We actually have a podcastepisode on that too and how to
help heal our gut.
So when we've been diagnosedwith celiac or a gluten
intolerance, we need to focus onhealing our gut so that some of
these triggers aren't quite sobad to us.
So then here's my bonus tip theunexpected trigger I discovered
this past year.
I found out that tomatoes, eventhough they're naturally
(09:55):
gluten-free.
So then here's my bonus tip theunexpected trigger I discovered
this past year.
I found out that tomatoes, eventhough they're naturally
gluten-free, were causing medigestive distress, allergy-like
symptoms and headaches.
I had been blaming, sometimesgetting cross-contact or not
really trying to quite figure itout.
I know this is gluten-free, Icooked it myself, I absolutely
know what everything is in hereand I didn't understand why my
(10:16):
spaghetti sauce was causing medigestive problems.
I was blaming it on the spices,but it actually was tomatoes.
Once I got the tomatoes out, mysymptoms improved dramatically
and I always knew they couldn'teat raw tomatoes.
That was just something I cannever do, but I always felt like
the cooked tomato version wasbroken down enough I could
(10:36):
tolerate it, but it eventuallybecame that I couldn't tolerate
anymore.
It was a reminder that sometimesit's not gluten at all.
It could be something else thatis causing our system to be
upset.
We could have eliminated gluten, healed our gut and then our
gut's telling us hey, I don'tlike this either.
It was masked by when you wereeating gluten.
(10:58):
So it's not the taking outgluten causes the other things
to bother you.
It just helps you be able tofigure out what those other
things are, because you'vehealed, because you've taken out
your core trigger and nowyou're finding oh, I have these
other triggers too I didn'treally know about.
So make sure you're payingattention to patterns so that
(11:19):
you can uncover other foods thatyour body doesn't tolerate.
Well, many of these foods Italked about are foods that are
in the top eight allergens, orthey're just people that, or
they're just people that thereare foods, excuse me, that
several, lots of people can'ttolerate.
Lots of people go on a nonightshade type of food diet
(11:40):
because it just bothers them.
That's just how the plantdefends itself.
It kind of makes you feel bad.
So hopefully this episode helpsyou open your eyes that it
couldn't.
It could be not just onlygluten, it could be some other
things, and even though it mightseem inconvenient at first,
just remember how much better itmakes you feel.
That's how I can not eatketchup with my fries anymore.
(12:02):
I'm like it's not even wortheating ketchup on my fries
anymore.
I will just enjoy my frieswithout ketchup and be happier,
healthier and just plain feelbetter.
Thank you for listening to thisepisode of the Gluten-Free
Engineer.
If you found value in thisstory, please share it with
someone who might needencouragement on their own
(12:22):
gluten-free journey.
For more tips, recipes,resources and even links to my
YouTube channel, head on over totheglutenfreeengineercom.
It's your one-stop hub to makegluten-free living simple, fun
and full of flavor, and don'tforget to subscribe so you never
miss out on an episode.
And we will see you next week.
(12:43):
The Gluten-Free Engineerpodcast is for informational and
entertainment purposes only.
I share my personal experiencesand stories about living with
celiac disease and navigating agluten-free lifestyle.
This podcast does not providemedical advice.
Always consult with a qualifiedhealthcare professional for
medical questions, concerns oradvice specific to your health.
Quick reminder before we get started on this
episode this podcast is based onmy personal experiences and
isn't medical advice.
If you've ever been sure you'vegotten gluten, only to find
something else, it's somethingthat's happened to me before too
.
Sometimes we do everythingright, avoid all the gluten and
still end up with symptoms thatfeel just as bad.
(00:20):
Today, I'm breaking down someof the most common non-gluten
triggers that can mimic a glutenreaction.
I'll share how I spotted my ownhidden triggers and what you
can do to track yours, and howto start feeling better faster.
And at the end, I've got abonus tip for you the unexpected
trigger I only discovered thislast year that has changed my
day-to-day life.
(00:41):
Welcome to the Gluten-FreeEngineer Podcast.
I'm your host, keri Saunders.
In 2011, I was diagnosed withceliac disease, a moment that
changed everything, but I wasdetermined not to let it hold me
back.
With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer
the gluten-free lifestyle,breaking down recipes, safety
(01:01):
tips, travel hacks andeverything in between to rebuild
a life I love.
Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance or simply
choose to live gluten-free, thispodcast is for you.
Join me each week as wesimplify the gluten-free
lifestyle, make it fun and provethat you don't have to miss out
on anything.
Welcome back to the show.
Today we're talking about otherpotential stomach issue trigger
(01:25):
foods besides gluten, and I knowthat I have found across all
the years that I would sometimesblame me getting gluten on
stomach issues when they wasn't.
I would later found out itwasn't necessarily gluten that
was a trigger, because sometimesyou can be so careful but the
symptoms don't necessarily goaway and it can be something
(01:48):
else that we're actuallysensitive to, and once we've
removed gluten, it's a loteasier to figure out that we
still don't feel good.
We're listening to our bodiesmore when we've removed gluten
for health reasons and it'sreally easy to blame gluten, but
sometimes it's something else.
I've come across so many otherfoods I've alluded to on this
podcast that I can't eat besidesgluten too, and identifying
(02:13):
these can reduce your stress andimprove your health and improve
your overall life.
I mean, yes, there are a good10 or so items that I don't eat
regularly or at all in my life,but boy I do, do I feel so much
better and so it's so totallyworth it.
Now, one of the triggers can becross-reactive foods, and this
(02:37):
is kind of common across peoplewith celiac and gluten
intolerance.
Some foods can trigger asimilar immune response, and
examples of that can be dairyoats, even if they're
gluten-free, corn, and evenbrown rice.
They can mimic.
They have some proteins in themand some of those not quite all
(02:58):
of them that can mimic thegladden protein that is in a
gluten, and so some people crossreact to those and I have found
for me personally, I do nottolerate oats.
I can from a digestivestandpoint, but I can't from a
brain fog, and it actuallyflares out my allergies to eat
(03:22):
oats.
Corn, on the other hand, causesme the opposite distress that
you might like consider glutento do.
It causes me constipation andslow bowel movements.
It just causes my system tojust kind of stop and it
obviously can get veryuncomfortable if that happens
(03:42):
too much.
So corn can actually do that tome, particularly the green
version of corn.
Now, honestly, just a few weeksago I tried the vegetable
version, so corn on the cob andwhile it didn't cause me any
digestive problems, that versionof corn caused me to get tired,
it caused me to get stuffy inthe nose, it caused my throat to
(04:04):
kind of feel tight and itchy.
So you might want to experimentwith trying to eliminate any of
those three.
Dairy, oats and corn are verytypical to not tolerate.
Well, when you have problemswith gluten, and in general many
people can't tolerate them andthey don't even realize it.
So what you can do is you cantake a period of time where you
(04:28):
know it's going to be easy toremove any of these foods that I
am talking about today, thatyou think you might have some
problems with it too.
Remove them for at minimum twoweeks really three or four would
be more ideal and thenintroduce it and have it be the
only new food that you introduce, and then it should be pretty
obvious whether you're atoleranter or not.
(04:49):
Now there's some other foodintolerances that I ran into.
The biggest one is soy.
Probably several years agothree or four maybe more now my
husband was having some severepain issues and we couldn't
figure out what it was.
So I helped him do a foodelimination diet and when we
(05:09):
started, adding foods back in,soy was a big issue for him.
It causes major brain fog, itcauses his pain to, you know,
increase, and so when we weredoing this experiment and
introducing him back into thesoy, I got a bag of edamame.
Frozen edamame beans they wereplain, absolutely no sauce.
(05:31):
Frozen edamame beans they wereplain, absolutely no sauce, just
literally edamame beans in it.
We microwaved them just so thatwe weren't introducing anything
else and then we had him eat afew spoonfuls.
He completely fogged out on me.
He was staring across the room.
It was really kind of wild tosee how fast he reacted to it.
So I thought to myself well,why not?
(05:52):
I see what I do.
Because I wasn't eating soyeither, because I was supporting
him in his food elimination.
So I had a spoonful or two ofsoy, the edamame beans.
I didn't feel bad at first, butlet me tell you, the next
morning I woke up with so muchdigestive distress.
It explained the reason thatsometimes, when I would eat
(06:14):
Chinese and I was prettyconfident the restaurant was
being careful with cross contactwith gluten it was actually the
soy that was bothering me.
Sometimes it was a hit or misstoo.
It didn't always bother me whenI eat Chinese.
Another thing that could causeit could be eggs, nuts and
nightshades.
(06:34):
I have recently found out that,while I don't have any typical
reactions to nuts that you wouldtypically think of, nuts are
causing peanuts in particular,not necessarily pistachios.
Those kinds of nuts are okay,but peanuts in particular were
causing me to have allergyflare-ups too, and I have a dust
(06:56):
mite allergy.
It's not super severe but itwas enough that it was causing
me to go to the allergist.
But I found removing nutspeanuts in particular and brown
rice, makes that go away and assoon as I have a little bit of
that it comes back up.
Also, nightshades and redpeppers, eggplants, tomatoes all
(07:19):
of those are in the nightshadefamily.
Sometimes those are a high foodintolerance for people and some
of these symptoms can mimicgluten reactions.
And I'm going to hint a littlebit to my bonus at the end of
this is one of the nightshadesis causing me some severe gluten
reactions and I'm going to hinta little bit to my bonus at the
end of this is one of thenightshades was causing me some
severe gluten reactions.
So I would encourage you to dothe food elimination on any of
these if you feel like you needto work with your doctor if you
(07:42):
feel like that's necessary toand figure out what works for
you.
Now, trigger number three issomething that you might not
think of but we do talk aboutsometimes on the podcast is
non-food items.
So non-food items can becontaminated with gluten and
with other things you're notcompatible with.
So lip balm, chapstick,supplements, medications,
(08:06):
play-doh If you don't know thathas wheat in it you need to get.
We find the off-brand Play-Dohdoesn't have wheat in it and
there's surprising places thatgluten can sneak into your
system without even eating it.
It could be lotion, it could bea shampoo.
Anything you're putting on yourskin can get into your
digestive system, depending uponhow you do your day.
(08:27):
Many times you know we'll washour hands and then we'll put
lotion on because they're dry.
Well then, if we go get a bagof chips or like some cookies or
something and we're using yourhands to eat them and we think,
oh, our hands are clean becauseI just washed them, well, you
put that lotion on your handsand you can get small amounts of
gluten that way if your lotionhas gluten in it.
(08:49):
Also, another trigger can bestress and lack of sleep.
I know that if I don't sleepwell for two to three nights in
a row, a lot of my glutensymptoms can come back.
And what my youngest childactually has is, if he doesn't
sleep right, his digestivesystems come back and it can
feel really bad and it can feellike you've been gluten and
sleep deprivation also makes anysymptoms hit harder if you do
(09:13):
get gluten and make it harderfor you to recover.
And then there also can be justgeneral health issues like a
leaky gut.
A histamine intolerance canalso mimic celiac disease
already, and when your gut isalready sensitive, more foods
can cause issues than you think.
So healing our gut is reallyimportant.
(09:34):
We actually have a podcastepisode on that too and how to
help heal our gut.
So when we've been diagnosedwith celiac or a gluten
intolerance, we need to focus onhealing our gut so that some of
these triggers aren't quite sobad to us.
So then here's my bonus tip theunexpected trigger I discovered
this past year.
I found out that tomatoes, eventhough they're naturally
(09:55):
gluten-free.
So then here's my bonus tip theunexpected trigger I discovered
this past year.
I found out that tomatoes, eventhough they're naturally
gluten-free, were causing medigestive distress, allergy-like
symptoms and headaches.
I had been blaming, sometimesgetting cross-contact or not
really trying to quite figure itout.
I know this is gluten-free, Icooked it myself, I absolutely
know what everything is in hereand I didn't understand why my
(10:16):
spaghetti sauce was causing medigestive problems.
I was blaming it on the spices,but it actually was tomatoes.
Once I got the tomatoes out, mysymptoms improved dramatically
and I always knew they couldn'teat raw tomatoes.
That was just something I cannever do, but I always felt like
the cooked tomato version wasbroken down enough I could
(10:36):
tolerate it, but it eventuallybecame that I couldn't tolerate
anymore.
It was a reminder that sometimesit's not gluten at all.
It could be something else thatis causing our system to be
upset.
We could have eliminated gluten, healed our gut and then our
gut's telling us hey, I don'tlike this either.
It was masked by when you wereeating gluten.
(10:58):
So it's not the taking outgluten causes the other things
to bother you.
It just helps you be able tofigure out what those other
things are, because you'vehealed, because you've taken out
your core trigger and nowyou're finding oh, I have these
other triggers too I didn'treally know about.
So make sure you're payingattention to patterns so that
(11:19):
you can uncover other foods thatyour body doesn't tolerate.
Well, many of these foods Italked about are foods that are
in the top eight allergens, orthey're just people that, or
they're just people that thereare foods, excuse me, that
several, lots of people can'ttolerate.
Lots of people go on a nonightshade type of food diet
(11:40):
because it just bothers them.
That's just how the plantdefends itself.
It kind of makes you feel bad.
So hopefully this episode helpsyou open your eyes that it
couldn't.
It could be not just onlygluten, it could be some other
things, and even though it mightseem inconvenient at first,
just remember how much better itmakes you feel.
That's how I can not eatketchup with my fries anymore.
(12:02):
I'm like it's not even wortheating ketchup on my fries
anymore.
I will just enjoy my frieswithout ketchup and be happier,
healthier and just plain feelbetter.
Thank you for listening to thisepisode of the Gluten-Free
Engineer.
If you found value in thisstory, please share it with
someone who might needencouragement on their own
(12:22):
gluten-free journey.
For more tips, recipes,resources and even links to my
YouTube channel, head on over totheglutenfreeengineercom.
It's your one-stop hub to makegluten-free living simple, fun
and full of flavor, and don'tforget to subscribe so you never
miss out on an episode.
And we will see you next week.
(12:43):
The Gluten-Free Engineerpodcast is for informational and
entertainment purposes only.
I share my personal experiencesand stories about living with
celiac disease and navigating agluten-free lifestyle.
This podcast does not providemedical advice.
Always consult with a qualifiedhealthcare professional for
medical questions, concerns oradvice specific to your health.
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