I've mentioned getting gluten-free foods on prescription a number of times in this diary, and people often ask why I have to get them on prescription and can't just buy them.

This is a good question, and I've wondered it too; you can get a lot of GF stuff in supermarkets, but some products never seem to show up in shops and only seem to be available on prescription. Notably the Juvela products, which are made from wheat with the gluten cunningly removed, and which thereby taste (IMO) rather nicer than the shop-bought alternatives. I've never understood why these have to be prescription-only; it's not as if they contain any legally controlled drugs, for example. And I've often thought I'd prefer to just mail-order the stuff if it were possible, because the inconvenience of getting prescriptions is significant and I'd even tolerate a reasonable price increase to avoid it.

Well, I discovered today that you can buy Juvela products without having to go through the prescription rigmarole. But there's an excellent reason why you shouldn't, and why they don't appear in shops: they're gobsmackingly expensive.

My usual prescription load, for example, is 2kg of flour and 2kg of pasta. For that I pay two normal prescription charges, i.e. £13 or thereabouts, which a quick websearch suggests is about twice what I might expect to pay for the same amount of normal, glutinous flour and pasta. Well, it turns out that I could, if I so wished, order it commercially through a pharmacy – but if I did so, I'd pay a staggering £70.

So that's why nobody talks about that option much. My curiosity is amply satisfied. I had vastly underestimated the gratitude I should be displaying toward the NHS for paying that much of the cost of my staple foods; and that price difference more than justifies continuing to go through the hassle of the prescription mechanism so that they'll continue to do so!