The Community of Madrid Association of Celiacs and Gluten-Sensitives is a private, non-profit entity that currently has 9,000 members. It was founded more than 30 years ago  under the name of the Spanish Celiacs Association  and was declared to be of  Public Interest by the Ministry of the Interior in 1997.

The Association works towards the social acceptance of celiacs and improving their quality of life.  

To fulfil this objective, the Association offers many services, among which the sinGLU10 app (App Store / Google Play), stands out, the most complete application to eliminate gluten. sinGLU10 enables a list of more than 23,000 food products to be consulted, see, recommend and evaluate specific establishments for celiacs  —restaurants, shops, hotels and bakeries—,gluten-free recipes, obtain exclusive discounts or use a scanning tool to check whether a product contains gluten or not.  

sinGLU and the www.celiacosmadrid.org website provide information on:

• Around 4,000 restaurants
• More than 500 hotels
• 85 bakeries
• More than 300 shops
• More than 23,000 products

Furthermore, the Association created a Collaboration Agreement in 2009 for establishments that wish to serve gluten-free menus with absolute safety, which has been signed by more than 175 establishments in the Community of Madrid.

Consult all of the services that the Association offers its members  and all of the activities in its calendar of events.  Some of the most important ones are mentioned below:

• National Congress of Patients with Celiac Disease
• Run sinGLU10 Race
• Gluten-Free Day at School
• Celiac Festival

For further information, phone: 917 130 147.

What is gluten and what diseases does it cause?

Gluten is a complex protein found in grains of wheat, barley, and rye, as well as in more ancient varieties of spelt wheat and kamut or Khorasan wheat and in wheat-rye and wheat-barley hybrid grains. The storage proteins in oats can also be toxic to a small percentage of people with coeliac disease.

One reason why gluten can cause disease is the inability of humans to fully digest it, which can cause an inflammatory, allergic, or adverse autoimmune reaction.

Among the diseases that can be caused by gluten due to adverse reactions of the immune system are allergic reactions to gluten/wheat; autoimmune reactions: Coeliac disease (CD), Dermatitis Herpetiformis (DH) and Gluten Ataxia; and a non-allergic, non-autoimmune inflammatory reaction that causes Non-Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity (NCGS).