What the planner is counting

The targets

General adult reference intakes. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, endurance training and adolescence all move these, sometimes a lot.

The four that carry the weight

Fiber, calcium, iron and protein sit at the top of the scoring function. When the planner has to choose between a lunch that closes the iron gap and one that closes the vitamin D gap, iron wins. Everything below those four is a tiebreaker.

Fiber

This is the one people lose without noticing. Wholemeal bread, wheat pasta and bran cereal are where most Western fiber comes from, and going gluten free removes all three at once. White rice and commercial GF bread do not replace them. What does: lentils, beans, chickpeas, and the intact gluten-free grains rather than the flours made from them.

If you were recently diagnosed, ramp up slowly. A gut that has been inflamed for years does not enjoy going from 12 g to 40 g of fiber in a week.

Calcium

Low bone density is common enough at celiac diagnosis that many guidelines recommend a DEXA scan, because years of poor absorption happen before anyone works out what is wrong. Dairy handles this easily. Without dairy, the workable sources are calcium-set tofu, fortified plant milks, tahini, almonds and low-oxalate greens.

Spinach is the trap. It looks like a calcium powerhouse on paper and the oxalates bind most of it up before you can absorb any. Broccoli, kale and bok choy are the greens that actually deliver.

Iron

Two problems stacked. Plant iron is non-heme iron, which absorbs at a fraction of the rate meat iron does, and enriched wheat flour was quietly supplying a lot of the rest. The US requires added iron in anything sold as enriched flour. Gluten-free flour has no such requirement.

The planner defaults to 18 mg, the figure for menstruating adults, and offers 8 mg as the alternative. Some vegetarian guidance suggests aiming as high as 1.8 times the standard number to account for absorption. That would put the target above 30 mg, which is difficult to hit from food alone, so the tool does not pretend otherwise.

Protein

Easier than the internet suggests, as long as legumes, tofu, eggs or dairy show up more than once a day. Gluten-free grains are the weak link, since rice and corn contribute very little. Quinoa, amaranth and buckwheat are the exceptions worth keeping in the cupboard.

The other six

Vitamin B12

Nothing reliably plant-based supplies it. Eggs and dairy do, fortified foods do, supplements do. Nori, spirulina and tempeh do not, whatever the packaging implies. They contain B12 analogues the body cannot use, and there is some evidence the analogues interfere with the real thing. A blood test is cheap and settles the question.

Zinc

Pumpkin seeds, cashews, chickpeas, oats. Phytates in whole grains and legumes reduce absorption, and soaking or sprouting reduces the phytates, which is most of why traditional cuisines soak their beans.

Folate

The other thing missing from unenriched gluten-free flour. Lentils and edamame cover a day between them without much effort, so this one tends to sort itself out once the legumes are in place.

Vitamin C

Tracked mostly for what it does to iron rather than for its own sake. Take it with a plant-iron meal and absorption goes up several times over. This is why the tofu scramble has a red pepper in it and why the lentil soup gets two lemons.

Omega-3 (ALA)

Without fish, the plant route is alpha-linolenic acid from flax, chia, hemp and walnuts. Conversion to EPA and DHA is inefficient, so an algae-based supplement is the usual recommendation. Thirty grams of chia carries around three days of ALA on its own.

Vitamin D

Realistically a supplement in winter above about 40 degrees latitude. The one food trick that works: leave mushrooms gill-side up in sunlight for half an hour before cooking. Their ergosterol converts to vitamin D2, and the jump is large enough to matter.

What competes with what

• Vitamin C boosts non-heme iron absorption substantially. Pair them deliberately.
• Calcium blocks iron. A big dairy meal is a poor place to put your iron for the day.
• Tea and coffee contain polyphenols that cut iron absorption sharply. An hour either side of the meal solves it.
• Phytates in legumes and whole grains reduce iron and zinc uptake. Soaking, sprouting and fermenting reduce phytates.

Where gluten hides

The recipes flag their own risk points, but the repeat offenders across all of them are stock cubes and bouillon, soy sauce, malt vinegar, asafoetida, curry paste, baking powder with a wheat starch filler, and oats that were not milled on a dedicated line. Soy sauce is the one that catches people years in, because it is brewed with wheat and nothing about it suggests bread.

Two honest limitations

First, the numbers. Every per-serving figure here is a rounded estimate from standard composition tables. Real food varies by variety, soil, season and how long you cooked it. Treat the percentages as a sense of direction.

Second, absorption is not intake. The planner counts what is on the plate. What crosses your intestinal wall depends on the state of that wall, which for celiac disease is the entire problem, and it is not something a website can see. Blood work can. If you are newly diagnosed, ferritin, B12, folate and vitamin D are the usual panel, and the answers there should outrank anything on this page.