Welcome, I’m Dani!
whole-food gluten-free recipes | free-from nonsense
Long before becoming a gluten-free food blogger, Iβve been riding the gluten-free, lactose-free train for about a decade, so Iβve got the early routine down to an art: squinting at labels like theyβre ancient scrolls, hunting for edible stand-ins, reinventing old favorites, and occasionally turning my kitchen into a science lab.
I also learned that some supposedly βsimpleβ foods come with ingredient lists long enough to qualify as light reading material.
Once I had the basics nailed down, a far more interesting question started nagging me: after all those substitutions, what exactly was my diet turning into?
That thought changed the way I looked at gluten-free eating. I wanted variety, real meals, heaps of whole foods, and plenty of room for bread, pasta, cake, convenience snacks, and all the edible joys that make life worth chewing. I became nosy about what made it into the shopping basket, what disappeared from the menu, and how a clever swap could stop the weekly shop from taking up permanent residence in the free-from aisle.
Food Got a Lot More Interesting
Food wasnβt always my favorite subject. But these days, my kitchen is proudly gluten-free, lactose-free, and waves politely at refined sugar from a safe distance.
Whole foods get plenty of attention, alongside fiber-rich ingredients, good sources of protein, healthy fats, homemade ferments, and anything so minimally processed it could probably still find its way back to the farm.
That curiosity is now my permanent supermarket plus-one. I can pop in for one or two things on my mind and reappear twenty minutes later having auditioned four loaves of bread, cross-examined three ingredient lists, and generated several brand-new questions nobody asked me to answer. This probably explains quite a lot about how DeGlutenista came to exist.
How I Became a Gluten-Free Food Blogger and Nutritionist
For years, I cooked, read, experimented, and chased one food question after another like a culinary detective with too much coffee. Eventually, curiosity staged a coup, and after decades away from classrooms, I went back to university to study Human Nutrition.
Returning to education later in life was a wild ride of lectures, deadlines, statistics, research papers, an alarming number of browser tabs, and the occasional whose bright idea was this? moment. Spoiler: mine. I graduated with First-Class Honors in Human Nutrition at the University of Chester, having somehow turned years of kitchen curiosity into something considerably more scientific.
Then the Free-From Aisle Became My Dissertation
For my final research project, I compared 109 matched pairs of packaged foods sold in UK supermarkets, looking at nutrition, processing, fortification, ingredients, and cost. The dissertation earned 80%, which made the many hours spent staring at spreadsheets feel considerably easier to forgive.
The findings gave me even more questions. Differences in protein, fortification, processing, ingredients, and price showed how much can change when a familiar food is reformulated. Some results fascinated me, while some of the prices made me wonder whether gluten-free bread was quietly paying off a secret mortgage.
That research now shapes many of the questions I explore through DeGlutenista. I want nutrition science to earn its place outside journals and spreadsheets, whether youβre choosing breakfast, comparing two supermarket products, planning dinner, or wondering whether your usual swap is the only option on the shelf.
About That Mid Age Crisis or My Crazy Career Pivot
After 33 years in the beauty industry, imagine armed with hairspray, small talk, and the occasional fringe fiasco, I pulled a plot twist worthy of daytime TV: I switched to nutrition in my 50s. But, after years of working one-on-one with people, Iβve learned that everyone arrives with a little personal luggage (well, sometimes not that little), packed with quirks, worries, wild expectations, frustrations, and the occasional plot twist worthy of a sitcom.
And that is the priceless part. I carried those skills into nutrition, because food is personal, and knowing what someoneβs daily circus really looks like matters just as much as knowing the science.
But! Curiosity Has a Habit of Opening More Doors
Studying nutrition gave me answers, then promptly handed me another hundred questions. Gluten-free eating led me deeper into digestion, the gut microbiome, metabolic health, the food matrix, and the many everyday factors that influence how the body works.
I tend to think of health a little like a barrel: every stave matters, and concentrating on one while ignoring the others can only take you so far. Food is a huge part of the picture, yet sleep, stress, movement, digestion, metabolism, and the rest of daily life all belong to the same conversation.
My curiosity naturally grew into that wider view, which is why I created DaniSana β a separate home for exploring those connections while DeGlutenista stays gloriously obsessed with gluten-free food and nutrition.
Articles + recipess
A Little Map
New here and wondering where to start?
And Other Interesting Facts About Me:
Away from research papers and suspiciously long ingredient lists, Iβm happiest cooking, reading, traveling, or checking on whatever is currently bubbling away in a fermentation jar. Fermented foods have become one of my particular obsessions, so yogurt, sauerkraut, kombucha, or another experiment usually takes up more kitchen space than planned.
Above all, I want gluten-free living to have room for curiosity, variety, color, flavor, convenience, and plenty of joy. Food should give us something to talk about, something to learn from, and β more often than not β something worth shamelessly going back for seconds of.
If DeGlutenista makes you grin somewhere along the way, thatβs the cherry on top of the (gluten-free) cake.
