Hey readers! This issue has an unusual pairing: a 3-year research project trying to catch the gut damage your blood test misses, and a wave of household cracker brands finally going gluten-free. One is about why 30% of you still feel off on the diet; the other is about what to toss in your cart this week. Let's start with where to go and what's new.
🔬 Monitoring the damage current tests miss
Our fantastic new research project begins TODAY! Coeliac UK launched a 3-year project this week aimed at developing a new way to monitor low-level gut damage in people with celiac disease.
– Coeliac UK
The hook here is a number worth sitting with: around 30% of people with celiac disease keep having symptoms despite a strict gluten-free diet, and we don't fully know why. The suspected culprit is ongoing inflammation too subtle for current monitoring to catch. The team plans to build "protein scores" from specific patterns (including the cytokine IFN-gamma), correlate biopsy findings with blood markers to enable a non-invasive blood test, and run a randomized, double-blind, six-week low-dose gluten challenge to see whether micro-doses of gluten can trigger that quiet inflammation.
Around 30% of people with coeliac disease experience ongoing symptoms despite following a gluten free diet, yet we don't know why this is the case.
Blood proteins may offer clues to gut health in coeliac disease A separate proteomics study analyzed 264 blood and tissue samples and identified 24 proteins tied to celiac disease, nine of them linked to the extent of intestinal damage.
– Deeptech Digest
This is the kind of groundwork the Coeliac UK project builds on. Protein levels dropped after a year on the diet but some stayed slightly elevated in treated patients, hinting at residual gut inflammation even in careful eaters. The why matters: standard anti-tTG IgA testing gets less useful once you start the diet.
Many people with coeliac disease are very diligent in following the diet, but they still live with uncertainty because the blood tests do not always give clear answers about how the disease is progressing.
That quote, from PhD fellow and physician Jostein Holen Ibsen at the Norwegian Coeliac Disease Research Centre, captures the whole problem these projects are chasing. None of this is clinic-ready yet, but it's the most concrete path we've seen toward answering "am I actually healed?" without another endoscopy.
🩺 Smarter diagnosis in the clinic
Two updates here are directly actionable if you or a patient is navigating diagnosis right now.
The Coeliac Guideline: When a Biopsy Isn't Needed The 2026 British Society of Gastroenterology guideline, published in Gut, lets a defined group of symptomatic adults be diagnosed without a duodenal biopsy.
– Vaudacia
Specifically: a symptomatic adult assessed in secondary care, still eating gluten, with an IgA-tTG titre at least ten times the upper limit of normal, and no red flags. The second shift is about follow-up, which becomes front-loaded into the first two years (reviews at diagnosis, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years), after which stable patients can move to patient-initiated follow-up.
Every patient diagnosed with coeliac disease should now have structured follow-up for up to two years, with attention concentrated on symptom response, dietary adherence, nutritional status and early detection of complications.
One practical takeaway from the guideline: ask for your numeric antibody titres and your total IgA, because IgA deficiency can make standard testing unreliable.
Algorithm to detect IgA deficiency during automated tTG testing Tampere University researchers evaluated whether signal intensity from routine automated tTG-IgA testing can flag patients with low IgA, without ordering a separate serum IgA test.
– Tampere University Research Portal
This solves the exact trap the BSG guideline warns about. Across 11,596 samples using the EliA Celikey IgA assay, response-unit cutoffs of <13.6 and <19.2 identified total IgA deficiency and low serum IgA with an estimated 100% sensitivity and 99.5% or higher specificity. For labs, that's a low-cost way to decide who needs IgG-based diagnostics, so IgA-deficient patients don't slip through a falsely reassuring negative.
🧀 Gluten-free products hitting shelves now
If the science section felt heavy, here's the part you can act on at the store this week. Three mainstream brands are expanding gluten-free options.
Mondelēz launches Ritz Gluten Free crackers Ritz Gluten Free Original launched October 19 and is available now at Walmart and Albertsons, expanding to retailers nationwide in February 2027 (8 oz, $4.49 suggested retail).
– Food Dive
A note that matters for this audience: Food Network's taste test lists the ingredients as cornstarch, yellow corn flour, faba bean protein, tapioca flour, and oat flour. If you're oat-sensitive, check the label before you buy, since not everyone with celiac disease tolerates oats.
Campbell's Announces Gluten-Free Goldfish Goldfish's first-ever Certified Gluten Free cheddar crackers roll out to US retailers nationwide this month, in 5 oz packages at $4.99 suggested retail.
– Food Manufacturing
Made with 100% real cheese and no artificial colors or preservatives, this was called one of the most-requested innovations in the brand's history. SVP Tiphanie Maronta said the team took time to keep the taste, texture, and the fish shape true to the original. Full ingredients aren't disclosed yet, so label-reading still applies. For context, Baking Business notes Campbell's joins Mars here: Cheez-It Original Gluten Free launched in January 2026, is GFCO certified (10 ppm or less), and is made in a certified gluten-free facility.
Better Than Bouillon gluten-free collection Better Than Bouillon now has a dedicated gluten-free collection of 25 bases on its site, under the tagline "All flavor. No gluten."
This one is a genuine reversal. For years the brand said it made no gluten-free claims on any food base, and celiac bloggers treated it as off-limits. The new collection spans Roasted Chicken, Roasted Beef, Seasoned Vegetable, Mushroom, Pho, Birria, Adobo, Sofrito, and more. Two cautions before you stock up: the site doesn't mention third-party certification like GFCO, and not every Better Than Bouillon product is in the collection. Look for the gluten-free claim on each individual jar rather than assuming the whole brand is safe now.
For eating out or traveling, the Find Me Gluten Free site and app remain a handy way to scout restaurants and read other diners' notes on cross-contact. (We're not sponsored by them, just a resource plenty of readers find useful.)
That's the issue: the research pipeline is working on proving how healed your gut actually is, while the snack aisle quietly gets a lot friendlier. Read your labels, ask for your titres, and go enjoy a cracker.