Wheat Gluten Nutritional Information

Wheat Gluten is largely a filler protein product and therefore does not have a lot of nutritional value in and of itself. However, it is an additive or supplement to your food so most people are not looking to get nutritional value from pure wheat gluten. Uses for wheat gluten are very parallel with that of tofu. It takes on the flavor of the ingredients it is mixed with and is largely present for contribution to general health and increased protein values or to add the visco-elastic properties that gluten provides.

The most common usage for wheat gluten is at a commercial level where it is mixed as a filler into various different foods - from flours and breads, to bakery items, to chewing gum and ketchup and even plastic utensils. It is sold as well for direct use at home, but this not very common. You can buy it in powder form, the most common of which is Vital Wheat Gluten, or you can look to purchase it from Asian health food supply stores in its raw form.

Nutritionally speaking, wheat gluten is primarily a protein. You could think of it as a powdered soy protein. Now, not many people love to just drink powdered soy protein, but it is used to add protein to various foods and beverages. The same type of principal applies with wheat gluten. The data provided here is from the product labeling of the Vital Wheat Gluten powdered product that you are most likely to obtain online or at a local health store. If you are consuming raw gluten then these numbers may not be the same, but should serve as a general guideline for the basic nutritional values.

The Vital Wheat Gluten product is distributed as flour, so these values are for a 100g serving of wheat gluten. For each 100g, there are 370 calories, 17 calories from fat, total fat of 1.9g, 0.3g saturated fat, 0.8g polyunsaturated fat, 0.2g monosaturated fat, 0mg of cholesterol, 29mg of sodium, 100mg of potassium, 13.8g total carbohydrates, 0.6g dietary fiber, 0g sugars and a whopping 75.2g of protein! As you can see from these numbers, it is very dense in protein content and that is one of the main reasons that it is used so heavily as a filler product. Each 100g serving of wheat gluten also contains 14% of the recommended daily allowance of calcium, 29% iron and 0% vitamins A and C.

So, as you can see for the nutritional data above, wheat gluten is primarily just a protein. This makes sense when you think of how it is produced and "separated" from the starch of the wheat. This separation process essentially strips it of most of its nutritional value and isolates the "gluten" from the wheat. The end result being, from a natural standpoint, a nearly pure protein only product with the inherent visco-elastic properties that make it ideal as a commercial food additive and filler.

Nutritional information: Source