Gluten-Free Products: Do We Need to Update Our Knowledge?

The gluten-free (GF) food market has been growing exponentially in recent years. However, GF products could contribute to imbalanced diets. The main objective of the present work was to perform a temporal nutritional comparison of GF foods over the last nine years. At the same time, the nutritional compositions of 104 GF products currently marketed in Spain were assessed and compared with their gluten-containing counterparts. Diets including GF products and the equivalent diets with homologous products with gluten were compared as well, the subjects being 25 adult celiac patients. A comparison of GF products (GFPs) in 2013 and 2022 showed nutritional differences in the groups of cookies, breakfast cereals, doughs/puff pastries/pizzas, and breads. The pasta group stands out from the rest due to an important decrease in energy, protein, simple carbohydrates, saturated lipids, dietary fiber, and salt. Comparing GF and gluten-containing homologous products in 2022, the major differences were found in protein and salt. Accordingly, GFPs lead to a diet lower in protein and higher in carbohydrates. Despite improvements in the formulation of GF products in recent years, their macronutrient profile maintains marked variation, and they cannot be considered nutritionally equivalent to their gluten-containing counterparts.Grant PID2021-127738OB-I00. funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. The GLUTEN3S research group is supported by a grant (GIU18/78, GIU21/053) from the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, and it is recognized by the Basque Government (IT-1419-19). We acknowledge the grant from the Basque Government as a part of the “Farm to Table Research Plan 2022–2026”