Please Help and Sign This Petition for Gluten Free Labelling!

I know this seems strange - making my way back into the blogosphere by asking for signatures on a petition which is near and dear to me.

I know I've been extremely quiet during the last year - hardly a word out of me or a visit to all my blogging friends.

Instead, I have the nerve to jump right back into the world of blogging without even a wave or 'hello!' or a show and tell!

Nope.

What I'm doing is asking you to sign the petition for Gluten-Free labeling on the White House Website.

In 1992 I was diagnosed as a celiac. It was the summer I had lost 50 pounds without even trying. The summer where the doctor told my mother that my chances for dying from this disease were good.
I was fading away - quickly - with nothing ahead of me but incredible pain and the view of my bathroom.

That doctor saved my life that day and got me started on a gluten-free diet which is what I will always be on until I die.

Now, twenty years later, I am still struggling with making sure my diet is totally gluten-free and I can't always do that because of the lack of a labeling law that forces food manufactures to honestly declare what is in their product and put it on their labels.

Sounds simple doesn't it? But it isn't. There are many ways that manufacturers can get around this by 'omitting' certain factors and turning their heads and crossing their fingers behind their backs.
Paul Seelig received an 11 year prison sentence after he was caught selling regular bread as 'gluten-free'. And I was one of many who stood on a chair a cheered!

Being a Celiac doesn't just mean that if I eat gluten then I'm just going to have a really sore tummy, incredible stomach cramps, and diarrhea. Like any disease the effects and symptoms are endless with more being discovered all the time
.
So when I read my Celiac.com newsletter this morning and discovered that there is a petition for 'Gluten-Free' labeling on the White House Website, I jumped on it.

But I'm just one person with one vote and at present this petition needs 15,310 votes to reach the 25,000 petitions it needs by November 1, 2012.

So please help. It only takes one minute. That's one minute that could keep so many people from unknowingly ingesting what to them is poison.

Thank you.

 

Petition for Gluten-Free Labeling on White House Website

• By Gryphon Myers
• Published 10/8/2012
• Gluten-Free Food Ingredient Labeling Regulations
• Rating:

Gryphon Myers

Gryphon Myers recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in interdisciplinary studies, research emphasis in art, society and technology.  He is a lifelong vegetarian, an organic, local and GMO-free food enthusiast and a high fructose corn syrup abstainer.  He currently lives in Northern California.
View all articles by Gryphon Myers

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Celiac.com 10/08/2012 - Since 2004 when Congress passed the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, sufferers of celiac disease have awaited some sort of finalized action from the FDA to set a rule for gluten-free labeling. The FDA proposed a gluten-free food labeling rule in 2007 and since then, there have been multiple open comment periods for it, but as of yet, there has been no finalized action to control gluten-free labeling in food products. In an effort to expedite this process, “Jennifer I” of Sebastopol, CA started a petition on the White House's official website.
Part of the concern driving this petition stems from the fact that for many, the gluten-free diet is one of necessity, not of choice. 'Gluten-free' has become something of a new marketing buzzword, as the diet's popularity has grown dramatically in recent years. This makes labeling more important than ever: companies seeking to cash in on a growing market may be tempted to cut corners and label products as gluten-free, when in fact they are not.
Supposedly, the FDA will be finalizing their rule sometime this year. Whether or not they stick to that time frame, this petition is a quick and easy way of putting more pressure on the federal government to finalize a gluten-free labeling rule.
Source:

• https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/finalize-standards-gluten-free-labeling/SsmdZh3C?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl