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My young daughter as well as being a diabetic also has Celiac disease which is an intolerance to Gluten.
Gluten is found in wheat, rye and barley. As you can imagine those ingredients are hidden in many of todays foods and of course eating out is a nightmare due to risks of contamination.
I know i am biased, but i think it would be amazing if someone could produce an app for the SCIO that detects if gluten is present. I am sure that the detection other intolerances such as nuts or dairy would also have health beneficial uses for the device.
Thanks for listen
Kev
Hi kev
I am a developer on Scio. I would love to develop an app for allergen detection especially for gluten.
But as you may know Scio can miss an ingredient that is less than 1% concentration.
Talking about allergy, This could become a real problem for the user if traces are present but not detected.
The best we could do is to tell The user when gluten is detected for sure. And if anything is not detected we could only say that Scio don’t know.
would this still be helpful ?
I think it is clear that SCiO may be able to help with INTOLERANCE issues where the substances are present in reasonably large quantities, and missed traces are not life threatening.
SCiO must not be used for allergens or toxins where mg/Kg amounts could kill.
The first step would be to scan known foods with and without gluten to check the possibilities out. The samples may have to be sorted into classes if the noise from a myriad of possible ingredients drowns the gluten signature. (Breads / Cakes / Sweet sauces / Savoury Sauces etc for whatever foods gluten may lurk in)Absolutely agree,
For my daughter and many others its an intolerance. If she ate say a pizza which is very high in gluten, she is going to have an upset stomach.
Many people with intolerance issues are not life threatening. Just that if the concentration of something is high enough, they will be on the toilet or come out in a rash.
In my daughters case. The issue is simply if the food producer at the restaurant has made a mistake and has put say regular pasta instead of gluten free pasta. She going to have a stomach ache. The detection I am stating will be in large volume and the worse case scenario. Is hey the food outlet got it wrong, the scanner missed it, hey never mind 😉 Best case it picks up on the error.
So keep away from life threatening disorders, but hey if we can work as a safety net to stop people going a bit red or having stomach cramps, brill.
Kev
@rbonnasse I think your approach would be of immense value to the Coeliac community, people with Itritable Bowel Syndrome, and general intolerances.
There is a huge need (and potential market) for gluten-detecting technology.
I I hope you decide to pursue this field, and I wish you luck with the development!
I look forward to seeing the results one day.
Cheers
Mick
We have gluten intolerance at my house too. Has anyone done anything with this? I would LOVE to use my SCiO for detecting gluten. My kids’ grandma thinks gluten intolerance is a figment of my imagination and she routinely tries to pass off regular Dunkin donuts in an old box she saved from one time a long time ago when she actually bought gluten free ones. It isn’t life threatening, it just makes us feel bad.
Hi,
First, please note that while SCiO may potentially be able to recognize the presence of gluten in food, it will only be able to do so in concentrations which are above SCiO’s sensitivity range of 0.1% and greater, as SCiO’s detection threshold varies by material, and is typically 0.1%-1%.
As gluten can appear in much lower concentrations while still presenting a danger to those who are intolerant or allergic to it, SCiO cannot be used as an absolute detection method.
Some of the SCiO applications are being developed by Consumer Physics while some are developed by 3rd party partners or developers. DietSensor is an application developed by one of our developers and may be helpful for you.
For additional information you may visit http://www.dietsensor.com or contact DietSensor at info@dietsensor.com
Ayelet,
The Consumer Physics Team
We’re currently working on this area. We’ve just come back from Australia where we have acquired a sample claiming to be 100% Gluten flour (even though it is only 89% Protean).
Initial tests show that we are able to estimate the overall level of protean in a variety of wheat flours. Flours claiming to be gluten free are, of course, not made from wheat. We’re going to try adding them into the collection and see if we can build a model to distinguish. Any scientific input on this most welcome.
So as far as we can tell gluten is actually a complex of two groups of proteins.
The two groups are called gliadins and glutenins. Each group contains lots of different proteins which all have a similar structure.
These make up around 80% of the storage proteins found in the flour. Storage proteins are used by the plant to store things like iron and amino acids.
When in the flour they create a network by linking together – the two proteins together are what is called gluten.When manufacturers extract gluten they run dough under water which removes most of the starch and other material in the cells. The mixture is then dried to give a flour like substance. This however only gives around 75% gluten (protein). The majority of what is left is starch (a carbohydrate), but there are also lipids (fats) and some other proteins will still be present. So how to explain our ‘100% gluten’ packaging which lists the contents as 78% protein?
If we can figure out what percentage gluten rather than protein in any given product (examples of zero are easy) I think we might be able to produce a model.
Has anyone got any insight as to how to determine the gluten% ?
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