Quinoa

Quinoa is a nutritious grain-like food, and an excellent addition to the gluten-free diet.

Unlike a true grain, quinoa is not from the grass family. Quinoa is a chenopod, and is more closely related to beets, spinach and tumbleweeds.

Quinoa is most often eaten as a whole cooked seed, flakes, or quinoa flour used in gluten-free baking.

Quinoa greens are also eatable and nutritious, but are generally not commercially available.

Quinoa originated in the Andes, where it has been a staple for over 6,000 years. It grows well at altitudes up to 4,000 meters, and will grow at low altitudes as well.

Quinoa Allergies

Quinoa is generally well tolerated. A negative reaction to quinoa is the rare, so try quinoa with confidence!

There are exceptions. Read the comments below to see examples of problems people have had with quinoa.

Many if not most of these problems are probably caused by improper preparation of the quinoa. See cooking quinoa to learn the right way to make quinoa and avoid these problems. If you haven’t been preparing your quinoa correctly, then you may develop a sensitivity to it. Try cutting it out of your diet for a few weeks or months, then bring it back in, but be sure to wash it properly.

Keep in mind that people with a reaction to quinoa are likely to find this site and leave a comment, so if you have not tried quinoa before, do not let the tiny likelihood of a reaction put you off from trying it.

If you do have a reaction, then pay attention to it, and remove quinoa from your diet.

Amaranth is a good alternative if you can not tolerate quinoa.

Sandy points out that “…[quinoa] is high in phenylalanine (amino acid), and this is taken from a recent NYT article about sweeteners–turns out that amino acid is also in aspartame.  ‘. . . about 1 in 25,000 in the United States — have a genetic condition that prevents them from metabolizing one of the amino acids, phenylalanine, and those people are warned away from aspartame.’”

The above may explain the large number of people leaving comments on this article about how they cannot eat quinoa.

Liz has left a comment suggesting that liquid bentonite clay detox supplement ( about four tablespoons) and Zyrtec (one, the other or both) may help alleviate symptoms.  If you decide to try this, please leave a comment and share if this helped you or not.

Another interesting theory was posted by Katherine Kohl. Read her post about Quinoa Sickness and Mycotoxin.

NOTE: If you leave a comment explaining that you have a reaction to quinoa, please indicate if the quinoa is organic or not.  I’d really like to find out why so many people have a problem with it.  There are already 178 comments on this post so keep this in mind when reading comments in the context of this comment.

How to Cook Quinoa

Quinoa must be properly rinsed before cooking. This is very important. For complete details on why this is important, and how to cook quinoa, see cooking quinoa.

Quinoa Nutrition

Quinoa is the only plant food with a complete complement of proteins, making the quality of protein similar to meat. Other plant sources of protein must be combined to get a full complement.

Internal Links

• Cooking quinoa

External Links

• Wikipedia on Quinoa
• World’s Healthiest Foods on Quinoa

Tagged as: Food Allergy, Gluten Free Diet, Quinoa