Due to increased rates of allergies in the last decade, gluten has become an important health issue in our lives. Gluten-free foods and products are of vital importance to people with celiac disease, gluten allergies, or gluten sensitivity, as well as to those people concerned with health and weight loss who avoid gluten-based products. Indeed, avoiding gluten is increasingly a lifestyle choice: according to an article in JAMA Internal Medicine, “roughly 2.7 million Americans avoid gluten in their diets—yet only 1.76 million actually have celiac disease.”Celiac disease is a genetic, autoimmune disease that affects approximately one percent of the population. There is no cure, and there are no medications that ease intestinal symptoms, so it is imperative that celiac patients avoid gluten.
This includes wheat and wheat products (kamut, semolina, durum, spelt, faro, and einkorn), but also rye, barley, and oats. Because health, diet, and skincare are closely related, there has been an explosion in beauty and cosmetic products that are labeled “gluten-free.” While food is a logical choice for such a claim, what does it mean when it comes to skincare? And what about BIOEFFECT products, which are made in barley: is BIOEFFECT gluten-free?
While the gluten molecule is too large to penetrate the skin, a tiny amount of ingested gluten can cause a reaction in celiac patients, whose gluten sensitivity varies dramatically. It is easy to ingest trace amounts of the products we put on our skin, such as lipstick, moisturizer, sunblock, primer, powder, and cream. Trace elements of these products can also contaminate food if we don’t wash our hands after applying them.BIOEFFECT prides itself on pure, effective skincare made by science. As BIOEFFECT’s EGF is grown in barley, we measure the potential traces of gluten in all our products as a part of our quality control, using the most sensitive methods available. According to Skv EU standards, a product can be called “gluten-free” if the gluten content is below 20 parts per million (ppm). And in 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concurred, announcing that products may be labeled “gluten-free” if they have a gluten limit of less than 20 ppm. This was important milestone for the US, as up until then, there had been no established standard.
At BIOEFFECT, we conducted testing on all our products using the most sensitive method available, the ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) protocol. Per our biochemical analysis, the gluten concentration in all BIOEFFECT products is between 5,000 – 50,000 times below the 20 ppm EU standards. In fact, our EGF Serum is 13,000 times below 20 ppm.
Whether you have celiac disease, gluten allergies, gluten sensitivity, or simply prefer to avoid gluten in general, BIOEFFECT skincare is scientifically proven to be gluten-free. Use it in good health!
