In a post in 2012 I discussed the Keurig as being a threat to your gluten free sanity in the office space, and offered up some suggestions of things to have in an “Office Eating Safety Kit.” Back then my office’s water cooler had a hot water tap so making my own tea was an easy thing. Just bring the teabags and add the water! But, when I left that job and started where I am not that hot water tap didn’t exist on the water cooler; what now?

I put off my teas for the fall, but this cold crazy winter finally got to me a few weeks ago. I got fed up without my tea, but I also got lazy. I emptied the most recently used K-CUP (thanks for not cleaning up after yourselves colleagues) from the Keurig, put a tea bag in a cup and got to filling that cup with hot water from that little machine. A little hot water can’t hurt right? The Keurig HAS to be clean! Right?… But something started to happen, my brain got a bit foggier on those days and I became more irritable and restless at work. With the stress of my life these past few months I thought nothing of it until after I came back from my vacation this past week having experienced a major being ‘glutened’ experience for the first time in awhile, and thus with a new commitment to be more cautious about what I put into my gut. I started to check my little habits, and one morning did a test trial of the Keurig to see how CLEAN it really was by making a cup of hot water before the tea bag was in. The result was disappointing: murky brown water with floating particles. YUCK. Who knows how many flavor packets were mixed in that water, or if any of them contained gluten.

See, the problem with Keurig’s is that some of their products contain trace amounts of gluten, and my office happen to have one of those flavors. That damn hot water was glutenous. It was a real reminder of the reality of my Celiac Disease. I felt down, I felt that I had let my guard down and influenced my health in a negative manner simply because I had been lazy. But we all have those moments, and that’s how we learn to navigate this unusual gluten filled world. Everything is a lesson if you are open enough to pay attention, and your health is a good enough reason to be conscious of your actions and learn from them.