Gluten-Free: the best apps for celiacs

It’s estimated that one percent of the world’s population suffers from celiac disease. However, many of those affected don’t even know that they have this disease that presents itself with painful symptoms and can be confused with other illnesses. The only treatment that exists for celiac disease is a gluten-free diet. It’s so important for people with the illness to have complete information about the food they’re going to eat, a variety of menus, and places where they can safely go out to eat. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best Android apps for celiacs.

Living life with celiac disease

What types of food contain gluten? Celiac disease is an autoimmune and permanent intolerance to gluten, a protein found in barley, wheat, and rye. It’s even more common among people who have a genetic predisposition to the disease, or in other words, have a close family member who are also celiac. It’s a desease that causes damage to the small intestine and alters the absorption of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients found in food.

As we’ve said, the only treatment is a gluten-free diet. For many, this isn’t easy, but there are plenty of apps that aim to make life a bit easier when going out to eat or when you want to try out new recipes. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best apps for celiacs to use from the comfort and convenience of a smartphone.

Free apps for celiacs

Happy Cow

One of the best apps you can find to help with gluten intolerance is Happy Cow, a great search engine for gluten-free restaurants and food. It also works for people who follow a vegan or vegetarian diet. It offers an interactive map and is easy to use. Once you download the app and enter your location, you’ll have to go to the search bar and select from the options provided, restaurants, supermarkets, or stores that offer gluten-free products.

The app lets you select the max distance you want to go to find gluten-free products and also lets you filter by types of food. The icons show you directly on the map where these restaurants, cafes, bars, or pastry shops are located. Plus, you can access the complete menu and decide if you like the option or not.

Happy Cow is present in over 180 countries , making it a huge help if you’re not in your city and you don’t want any unpleasant surprises when it comes to eating out. You’ll know beforehand what restaurants serve gluten-free options and will be able to plan your trip much better, without any fear of suffering any dangerous symptoms. [Download]

Singlu10

This is a very useful tool for anyone who has to follow a strict gluten-free diet. Like Happy Cow, it also lets you search and locate almost 4,000 establishments (restaurants, hotels, grocery stores) where you’ll find gluten-free menus, desserts, specialized products, etc. That said, the app has a much smaller search radius, with most results being located in Spain. Luckily, the app is starting to include some establishments in other countries.

However, it has another feature that’s useful in any country: Singlu10 offers a classification of food products according to their gluten content, so you can check and find out quickly, at a glance, if the product you want to eat contains gluten or not. There are all sorts of products from multinational brands included in this app.

This is a must-have tool for grocery shopping, since you can use this app to avoid unpleasant surprises when you arrive home and start cooking. To make it even more useful, it includes a bar code scanner so you can quickly access information about the specific product and without having to search for it in the database. Plus, it gives you the option to save the scanned foods in favorites if you buy them regularly or you don’t want to lose track of them. The app is updated regularly thanks to the cooperation of the producers, which alert of any changes that may affect a person following a gluten-free diet. [Download]

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My Food Intolerance List

This app isn’t only for celiacs, but it’s a great option for finding out what foods you can and can’t eat if you have a food allergy or intolerance. It’s a huge help for anyone who’s recently been diagnosed and is in need of a guide to find out what foods they can and cannot eat. Or if there’s food that you’ve never tried before and you want to find out if it’ll bother you. If you suffer from in intolerance to lactose, fructose, histamine, gluten, sorbitol, or salicylic acid, with My Food Intolerance List, you won’t have any problems maintaining a diet free of allergens and knowing what you can and can’t eat.

When you open the app, you can select your intolerances (in this case, it would be gluten if we’re talking about celiacs), and calculate your compatibility with each food. In other words, if you search for a type of food, it’ll tell you how recommended it is that you consume it considering your intolerance. The warnings are shown in colors and range from green (high tolerance) to yellow, orange, and red (you should not consume it). It also lets you set your own degrees of intolerance in specific cases, if you disagree with the app’s results. For example, if a type of food is tolerable for most people, but it’s not for you. This way you’ll always remember.

With this app, it’s easy to browse through the different categories and search among thousands of foods of all sorts. It’s one of the best apps for celiacs since it’ll tell you at all times what you can eat, in addition to providing nutritional information about the ingredient in question. Like many similar apps, you can save the foods you’ve searched for to remember if this or another food will work with your diet. You just have to consult My Food Intolerance List to find out if the ingredient is apt for celiacs or for any other intolerance. [Download]

Find me gluten free

Here’s one of the best apps for celiacs if you want to find restaurants with gluten-free menu options. This useful tool will help you maintain your diet even when eating out, in a different city, or when out with friends. You just have to search for a specific location and you’ll see on the map all the places that offer gluten-free alternatives to go out for lunch or dinner. You’ll find all sorts of restaurants, fast food places, bars, cafes, or supermarkets where you’ll be able to eat or shop without a problem. And this app is available in many different cities.

It offers a wide variety of options to choose from and it’s possible to select the top ranked restaurants with custom parameters: ones that are 100% gluten-free, the closest, or ones that have been rated as the best option for celiacs according to experts and app’s other users. Users can post reviews and photos of the dishes like in TripAdvisor, making the community essential for discovering the best places to go. [Download]

The Gluten Free Scanner

As the name indicates, this app is a scanner that will warn you if the food you want to eat is suitable for a gluten-free diet or if not, to avoid it so you don’t experience any of the negative symptoms related to the disease. It’s a very basic app, without any complications. It’s a simple barcode scanner for checking on any product quickly and easily. It offers an extensive database full of different food.

To use this app you have two options: write the name of the food in the search engine or scan the bar code from the app to instantly tell you if the food fits in with a gluten-free diet or not. [Download]

Tasty

Tasty is one of the best cooking apps that exists for Android. And best of all, it offers tons of cooking ideas with all sorts of gluten-free recipes. You can use this app on a daily basis to find thousands of recipes, but it’s also useful if someone in your family is celiac and you need to cook for them. To search for all sorts of recipes, you just have to mark “Gluten-Free” in the search bar and it’ll automatically filter all the options available.

This is one of the top cooking apps out there and it offers step-by-step videos, along with a written explanation, a list of ingredients, and even short clips from the videos to illustrate the instructions. There are all sorts of recipes for celiacs including desserts, appetizers, and main dishes. You can also filter according to different parameters: by difficulty level, type of food (breakfast, lunch dinner, etc.) or by country of origen (Mexican, Italian, Greek, etc.). Using the filters in Tasty, you’ll find all the results according to exactly what you’re looking for at all times and you won’t waste time browsing among all endless options the app offers. Plus, you can mark the ones you like best as favorites to go back to them at any times in “My recipes” so you always have them on hand when you’re ready to get cooking. [Download]