Check out this can of kippers:
Pretty simple, eh? You'd expect it to contain kippers, salt and water. Maybe a preservative, or a firming agent, or something, but not much else.
Certainly not wheat.
And yet, when I happened to check the ingredients - unfortunately after I'd already eaten a few cans of the stuff - wheat appeared not once but twice. A host of other unexpected delights also put in an appearance, including maltodextrin, sugar, and yeast extract.
This is irritating. I avoid gluten, not because I have celiac disease but because, having done a lot of reading on the subject, I suspect it's implicated in other autoimmune conditions (and very probably a host of other diseases). I'm currently excluding gluten very strictly as an experiment, and now, because I've eaten these wheaty kippers, I'm back to square one.
Now, I'm not blaming the manufacturer as such. They are perfectly at liberty to include barmy ingredients; it's my responsibility to check the list. My point is a) you really can't be too careful about checking ingredients, even on products you'd never suspect; and b) why the hell would anyone put a load of flour, sugar and marmite - things with no discernible similarity to to smoked herring - onto a smoked herring, and expect it to do anything other than make it taste less like a smoked herring? The other brand I regularly buy doesn't, and guess what? The kippers taste better! More like kippers!
Message: check the label. Better yet, don't eat anything that has a label, but when you do, check it.
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