Oat Flour Pancakes: Gluten Free Gluttony

Personally, we love this recipe just for the taste of it! However, it is very adaptable for people with special dietary requirements, such as gluten free and casein/ lactose free (see note about oats below). What’s more, this recipe is super yummy with no sugar.

The carbohydrates are balanced with protein from the eggs and good fats from either extra virgin coconut oil or butter/ghee (preferably from organic pastured cows). You can even combine the two!

Won’t fat make me fat or give me a heart attack?

NO! Unrefined, undamaged, high-quality fats are an essential nutrient for balancing hormones, brain function and healthy tissue building and repair. These undamaged fats, unlike refined and hydrogenated vegetable oils that cause inflammation, will not cause inflammation that leads to heart disease. These fats help balance hormones and do not contribute to the metabolic disorders that make you gain weight. In fact, these nourishing fats help you feel full and build lean muscle tissue. Assuming you don’t dump a bunch of sweet syrup on them, accompanying the carbohydrates in these pancakes with nourishing fats will help you have a more balanced insulin response. So, you can eat just one (or two) because they won’t set off cravings that make you overeat!

Speaking of sweets…

While you can top these with fresh or cooked fruit or a little real maple syrup or raw honey, it would be more balanced to top them with pastured ghee or butter flavored with vanilla and sweetened with a little pure stevia, real maple syrup or raw, local honey. We also like a little dash of high mineral salt to balance flavor. It is more balanced for your blood sugar, endocrine system and immune system, thus, helping you be healthier, happier and better looking for longer. Who doesn’t want that?

Concentrated sweeteners, such as granulated sugars and syrups, do the exact opposite. They contribute to a blood sugar roller coaster and result in chronic high insulin levels, which are, in turn, linked to appetite control problems (especially sugar cravings) and, worse yet, metabolic syndrome: weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. There is increasingly undeniable evidence that sugar also damages the liver and the brain, leading to fatty liver, cirrhosis, depression, anxiety, memory problems, ADD, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease and degenerative neuro-muscular disease. It increases inflammation and exacerbates chronic pain. What is so sweet about that?

Are you sure you tolerate gluten?

This is a big topic to be addressed in more detail in another post, but it’s important enough that we want to address it by sharing an excerpt here.

When we talk about gluten sensitivity (non-celiac, also different from an “allergy”) versus gluten tolerance, there is a term you need to know called oral tolerance, and this refers to the amount of time you tolerate gluten in your lifetime before you start having an immunological reaction to it that can tear down heart tissue, damage the brain and nervous system, harm glands like your thyroid as well as cause gut and autoimmune problems. In each of these cases, the end result can be life altering and even life threatening diseases, not to mention weight gain, cognitive issues, fatigue, chronic pain, digestive disorders and weight gain, to name a few.

Oral tolerance is different for everyone and can end anywhere from late in life to in the womb. The timing depends on a combination of factors, including genetics, antibiotic use, diet, strains of gluten eaten (heritage versus modern hybridized), how often gluten grains are eaten that have not been sprouted and fermented, environmental toxins and microbiome-gut-brain health, which ties directly to immune system health. Most people have no idea if they are gluten sensitive because it only causes obvious gut symptoms in a fraction of people with an issue, since it targets tissues we can’t obviously feel like the thyroid, heart and brain.

Furthermore, every time you eat gluten, no matter who you are, it compromises your gut lining for several hours to a day, then you recover if you have better tolerance, but not so much if you don’t, and keep in mind that you lose said oral tolerance over time as you damage your body tissues over and over and over again. As you lose oral tolerance over time (assuming you weren’t born without it already), it can take a month for your body to recover from the damage caused by eating just a little gluten only one time. This means, if you aren’t 100% off of gluten for months, you are not “gluten free” and cannot accurately experience the benefits of a gluten free diet.

So many clients say, “I don’t eat much gluten, but I don’t really notice an improvement.” Then, when they get off of it altogether for months, they notice huge changes in their health, especially if they remove other immunologically compromising foods like cow dairy, peanuts, cane sugar and beet sugar (assuming they were already off processed foods).

Thinking you don’t have a gluten problem because you don’t have obvious symptoms is like assuming you don’t have an STD because it’s not obvious. To know for sure, get tested. For reliable testing, check out Cyrex Labs Assay 3 (gluten sensitivity screen) and Assay 7x (neurological auto immune reactivity screen). You can almost bet that if you have had antibiotics and any form of chronic fatigue, inflammation, pain or other illness, you also have a gluten problem (and likely other food sensitivities).

If you’re clear, have some foods with gluten, but to extend your tolerance over more years, try only eating gluten occasionally, just heritage strains, sprouted and fermented. We don’t have rumens like our hooved grass eating animal friends, so the hard as nails (to digest) proteins in gluten are not friendly on the human gut. However, sadly, once you’ve lost oral tolerance, eating heritage varieties like Einkorn sourdough wheat probably won’t fly, because your immune system will still be holding a grudge against gluten and your digestive apparatus won’t have what it takes, leading to more health issues than a bite of gluten is worth. However, do not despair, there are plenty of alternatives to make pasta and baked goods, like using gluten free oats in these yummy pancakes! You can also check out our other baked goods and dessert recipes, all of which are gluten free.

A note about oats for our gluten free folks…

There is a little confusion out there whether oats are gluten free. While oats as they grow have no gluten, most store-bought oats are processed in factories with other grains and, therefore, are cross contaminated (traces of gluten may be present). We order organic gluten free oats online and grind them to flour in a blender. While high-speed blenders are nice, the regular kind will work too if you don’t add too many oats at once and process it in batches.

If these are so good for me, why not just eat a whole pile of them for breakfast?

While, as pancakes go, these are tops, they are still mostly carbohydrates, so we recommend eating only one 1/3 cup batter sized pancake or at most two 1⁄4 cup batter sized pancakes. We also recommend combining them in a meal with a significant serving of protein, such as organic eggs and/or another meat like paleo turkey bacon or sausage (read ingredients). You will also want to include non-starchy veggies, such as spinach, kale, zucchini, mushrooms, squash, salad, etc. We like to pick at least one green and one yellow, orange or red veggie with every meal. Frittatas, scrambles and omelets are great ways to enjoy protein and veggies for breakfast.