For visitors with coeliac disease

Welcome to Poland. It is a picturesque and interesting country. To start with, we have good news for people with coeliac disease and others, who are on gluten-free diet, who would like to visit our country. Being on this kind of diet you can survive in Poland for sure! We are a living example! The second news is worse, there are no comforts which are common in Western Europe. So what's the present situation in Poland?

Healthy food including gluten-free and lactose-free products can be bought in healthy food shops. Actually in all major cities there are at least a few of them (we are going to publish their addresses on our website soon). Usually you can put an order in for some items you need. The range of products depends how efficient the shopkeeper of such a shop is. But there are a few kinds of bread, pasta, sweets and flour usually available. Rice bread can be bought in supermarkets and regular shops. You can also order gluten-free food by telephone or the internet directly to your place. Then you have a wider choice of products including gluten-free pizza and items from Western Europe. If you plan to visit us just for a couple of days and stay somewhere out of town, the best solution is to take some provisions of bread and other products you need daily. If you come to stay longer and you stay at Polish family, they can order some food for you (you can find useful addresses and telephones on our contact page) and appropriately modify your home meals (a good idea would be also reading our info here). When staying in hotel it is also worth trying, while booking rooms, to ask hotel staff to order some gluten-free products for you. If you would like to use hotel dining room you may talk to the chief describing your diet and decide what sort of meals are safe for you. In the frame below we are placing a short text in Polish which informs that you are on a diet and the main points of using it.

Jestem na diecie bezglutenowej. Nie mogę spożywać produktów zawierających pszenicę, żyto, jęczmień i owies oraz wszelkich wyrobów z ich dodatkiem, szczególnie mąki, skrobi i bułki tartej. Mogę jeść: kukurydzę, ryż, ziemniaki, soję, proso, grykę i wszelkie ich przetwory. Również wszystkie warzywa i owoce, mleko, ser biały, jajka, świeże mięso i wysokogatunkowe wędliny. Glutenu nie zawierają również masło, margaryny, oleje, oliwa z oliwek.

Problems can start when you decide to go to restaurant or bar for a meal. In Warsaw there is only one place with a gluten-free menu. The address is: Warsaw Al. KEN 36A, lok. 1 (Ursynow Gallery) In all the rest you have to consider carefully (together with a waiter) what you can eat safely. Soups are risky because flour is often added to them. Fortunately there is a bigger choice as far as the main course is concerned. You can always choose boiled potatoes (after all Poland is a country where potatoes are the basic ingredients in dishes) or rice. As far as meat is concerned you can choose a roasted chicken (without the skin because you never know what it was sprinkled with), grilled meat (after checking what the added spice was) or a piece of meat (without sauce). Salads that go with the dishes are usually safe. Shopping for food is also a large problem. We do not have any booklets informing which common products of big companies don't contain gluten. On the other hand many of these products are imported from other European countries. In Poland food producers have recently been obliged to inform on the labels of their products if it contains gluten but only big and famous companies can be really trusted. If there is a caption in Polish: "zawiera gluten" or "może zawierać śladowe ilości glutenu" or on a list of ingredients: "mąka pszenna", "mąka żytnia", "skrobia" it means this product contains gluten. However when there is nothing mentioned it does not mean that the product is gluten-free. As you can see there is a lot to be done to make gluten-free people's lives easier. It is one of the reasons our Polish Coeliac Society was created. We are non-profit organization and we follow an example of similar organizations in Europe. You can find more about us below. If you have any questions please write to us and we will try to help you.

 

 

POLISH COELIAC SOCIETY

You can donate to us:
Bank PKO BP SA
36 1020 1169 0000 8502 0105 5615
BIC (SWIFT): BPKOPLPW, IBAN: PL

We are a non-profit organization founded in October 2006 to bring comprehensive help to persons who suffer from coeliac disease, to their families and to everyone being, for various reasons, on a glutenfree diet. Our mission is to spread knowledge about the coeliac disease in our society, deepen it among the sick people and their families, to cooperate with medical environments, and above all to unite those who suffer from the disease around the main goal which is improving the quality of their life in the "gluten world". There is much work to do, but we believe that with some help from well-wishing people we will succeed to gradually reach our main goals, which are:

• to propagate knowledge of the disease in the Polish society by various informational actions in media (to raise social awarness and detectability of the disease and to increase empathy with coeliacs)
• to emphasize problems connected with costs of the diet (and lack of any refund system in Poland such as those existing in many countries)
• to inform about problems of sick adults ( in Poland coeliac disease is still perceived as a problem of small children only, something which you can "grow out" of)
• to make food producers aware of the need of full and honest information about all product ingredients (first of all basic allergens)
• to provide wide help for newly diagnosed persons and their families - legal, psychological, diet advising, etc., and also to create a place where anyone could find full information about coeliac disease and gluten intolerance
• wide cooperation with medical circles (also to "remind" doctors about coeliac disease)
• to provide reliable an up-to-date information about the disease
• to integrate and unite all interested persons to fight our common problems