NFCA (National Foundation for Celiac Awareness) has some awesome events planned for Celiac Awareness Month, starting today.

Logo from NFCA site

Today they're hosting a State of the Union: A LIVE Chat with Experts on Gluten-Related Disorders.  This is an hour long broadcast, streamed online, that will be featuring some of the top experts in Celiac Disease (I hope I don't miss it!).  It takes place at 2pm ET/11am PT and you can register by clicking on the link above!

For the rest of the month they have two ongoing events:

• First, a gluten-free pantry raid.  You can enter this event by donating $20 to their organization during May 1-31, 2012.  The grand prize is worth $2,500 and includes a gluten-free shopping spree!!!
• Second, they have a blogger campaign going on all month featuring 16 top bloggers in the gluten-free world.  Prepare to glean some wisdom and great insight from these posts.

I'm so excited to enjoy all that "our" month has to offer!

Here's an interesting training course designed for restaurants to properly equip themselves to serve the gluten free customer.  Neat, huh? :)


The program is known as GREAT, which stands for Gluten-Free Resource Education Awareness Training, and it covers everything from ingredients and safety to...drumroll please...CROSS CONTAMINATION!  I love it!  


Cross contamination is the main antagonist against adherence to the gluten-free diet and something that I am constantly asking restaurants about.  It only takes a bread crumb to ruin my week, so this is up utmost importance. 

That being said, here's a quote from the program's website, "GREAT Kitchens is a web-based, self-managed continuing education program for chefs, dietitians and other food service professionals.


This 90-minute course teaches the essentials of gluten-free safety from fridge to fork."  I'm not sure if there's other programs out there and I've never taken this one, but it looks like it could be a good investment for restaurants.  I'm much more comfortable eating places that have been properly trained on gluten intolerance/sensitivity. 

For more information on this training see the link below.

Restaurant Gluten Free Training