<p>My girlfriends daughter has Celiac and she goes to U. Michigan with no problem at all.</p>
<p>My child did not have Celiac Disease but had another illness where many foods made her quite ill. She was not very successful with her dining hall situation which was small and not particularly accommodating. She moved off campus her senior year and felt better when she could shop and cook for herself. I think larger dining halls that are serving more people with special needs can probably provide more variety and make better accommodations.</p>
<p>update: Elon University Aramark has added gluten free baked goods (extensive list) to all dining halls…</p>
<p>keep this list coming…</p>
<p>Budweiser makes a gluten-free beer now (it’s called Redhouse). So, your son will be able to party!</p>
<p>My son has celiac disease and will also be going to college next fall. We have been touring schools. So far the worst school that we’ve toured for someone with celiac seems to be the University of Virginia. Even their hot dogs had wheat in them. University of Michigan was fabulous. Every semester they have a list of gluten free foods that they serve in the campus dining halls on their website. It is pages long. We ate in a dining hall when we were there and my son had a hamburger on a gf bun. They also offered gf pizza to us. </p>
<p>Lehigh University was also very accomodating. They had gf pasta and waffles and could tell us what was ok to eat in the dining hall.</p>
<p>Any college that receives federal funding has to provide gf food for a student with celiac disease so I’m sure that our kids will be able to eat something. It’s just a matter of how good it is and how many choices they will have available to them.</p>
<p>^Doesn’t UVA receive federal funding? </p>
<p>Just to let all of you know, my HS junior daughter is starting a blog on the entire celiac experience including her college search process…i will post when we are set to go…any suggestions will be appreciated…in addition, she will be providing free advertising for vendors (doesn’t care about making any advertising money; just doing this to help other kids)…if you have any vendors you would like her to post, please PM me…</p>
<p>That’s great! Where’s she looking?</p>
<p>^^Lenore: all over the country actually; I think that it will be a process of posting what she finds out, but hopefully it can help…she is not on CC but I may forward her some of this thread about certain schools that we won’t get to see…</p>
<p>We have two gf kids (a college freshman at wash u and hs sophmore) and in our college search and summer programs, we’ve got a fair amount of information. The one school that seems to be terrific is uconn. Wash u has really ramped up its efforts, in part because of our prodding…good luck!</p>
<p>My daughter is looking at colleges in the south. Would love to hear about more people and their gluten free friendly schools.</p>
<p>A little off topic, but–my 80 year old mom has just been diagnosed with celiac disease (after about six months of problems and a zillion tests.) I was surprised; I had no idea you could develop it so late in life.</p>
<p>^^garland: it’s not that she developed it later in life; it was always on her gene markers; apparently according to the new research 70% of us have the markers for Celiac disease but only 10% of those people actually get it…and of those people a miniscule amount ever get diagnosed…</p>
<p>She may have had it all her life, but something spurred a reaction so a doctor thought to test for it; if everyone was tested from early on the gene markers could be diagrammed so that if symptoms started, one would know to be tested periodically…</p>
<p>Long story short, all blood relatives should either have gene test (cheek swab) or Celiac test (blood test)…my family refuses; good luck…</p>
<p>ridgetetn: sent you long PM</p>
<p>My son wants to go to the University of Virginia. Does anyone with celiac have any experience there?</p>
<p>Rodney–she may have had it all he life, but she definitely had no symptoms until very recently. So I still wonder what would trigger it and why she had no effects for so long (never ran to any kind of digestion problem till now.)</p>
<p>Garland, I have two children with celiac. One who developed very severe symptoms over the course of a month and the other who did not have any symptoms. We only found it in that child by testing her once we knew her brother had it. Unfortunately the researchers have not figured out what triggers the disease in someone who has the gene. Once they do that they may be on the way to finding a cure. But I am grateful that it is a disease that can be kept under control just by following a diet rather than having to take medications. A great book that will teach you a lot about the disease is “Celiac Disease: A Hidden Epidemic” by Peter Green and Rory Jones. I found it very informative in the beginning.</p>
<p>Thanks, CRL. Another (naive sounding) question–if you don’t have symptoms, what are the dangers? Is controlling diet then to keep symptoms from appearing, or to control effects that are not apparent, or a combination of both?</p>
<p>Garland, I sent you a pm</p>
<p>Garland, when I was diagnosed 18 months ago (and I was nearly asymptomatic), my doctor told me that even though I didn’t have symptoms at the moment, eventually I <em>would</em> get very sick. The villi were flattened and not absorbing nutrients like they should be. So for a person with Celiac, even if asymptomatic, it’s best to go gluten-free right away so that the villi can heal and proper absorption can take place. Just because you can’t see it outwardly doesn’t mean damage isn’t being done internally.</p>
<p>Also, Celiac can be triggered by illness, injury, pregnancy (obviously not the case with your mother!) or stress. For me it was stress.</p>
<p>Thanks, OM. Since it’s genetic, I’ll have it checked out by my doc.</p>
<p>Hi, so maybe someone addressed this and I missed it, but I’m wondering if I’m the only one with this problem. So I just transferred college, because the academics are better and they promised a more gluten free friendly dining hall. It’s true, they are friendlier, but it’s still hard to eat. Only one dining hall consistently has options and are ok about contamination, and they’re only open till early afternoon (2 or 3) on weekdays, no weekends. The dining hall closest to me has options, but it’s much like restaurant options (aka, salad). They’re trying, and I appreciate it, but I can’t live off of this. I am an athlete and a celiac, which means I have to really balance my diet, and I can’t do that here. I tried to get my mealplan revoked, and they won’t because I live on campus, and my parents are getting frustrated that on top of the mondo bucks for mealplan, I’m spending money getting essentials so i can feed myself. Anyone have a similar problem? How did you deal with it? I live on campus and have a kitchenette, any advice on how to get the dining hall to listen and understand?
Much appreciated, I’m very frustrated.</p>