Is oat bran gluten free?

Only if the pack says so, and here is why

Munchable reads oat bran as oat, and holds oat at a caution rather than an avoid, because oats do not contain gluten but are grown, milled and carried alongside wheat, so uncontaminated oats are a separate supply chain, and a pack that has paid for it says so. Where the pack itself claims gluten free, Munchable reads that claim and clears it.

On a real product, the reason Munchable shows reads: Contains oat bran, which is made from a gluten grain unless the pack says gluten free

What Munchable checks for Coeliac disease

• Wheat and every name for it: semolina, couscous, bulgur, durum, spelt, kamut, einkorn, emmer, farro, seitan
• Barley and rye, including malt, malt extract, malt flavouring and malt vinegar
• Wheat starch, wheat protein and wheat bran, which the taxonomy files away from the grain
• Bread, breadcrumbs, rusk, panko, pasta, noodles, dough, pastry, biscuits, cake, wafers, pretzels and beer
• Oats, oat milk and muesli as a caution, cleared by a gluten-free claim
• The words that name a form rather than a grain: tortilla, soba, brewer’s yeast
• The pack’s own gluten-free claim, attributed to the manufacturer
• The printed "Contains" and "may contain" lines, read independently of the ingredients
• Rice, maize, buckwheat, quinoa, millet, sorghum, teff and polenta left alone, along with the wheat glucose syrups that EU law exempts

The full reasoning, and the evidence behind it, is in the Coeliac disease guide. For every word at once, there is the hidden gluten word list.

Oat bran and the other patterns Munchable checks

• Is oat bran OK with gastroparesis?

Other ingredients Munchable reads for Coeliac disease

• Ale
• Baguette
• Barley
• Barley flour
• Barley malt extract
• Barley malt vinegar
• Beer
• Biscuit
• Bread
• Breadcrumbs
• Bretzel
• Brewer's yeast

The catch with reading labels yourself

Knowing that oat bran is a problem is the easy part. Finding it is the hard part: it hides behind wordings that do not look like it, it matters more near the top of the list than the bottom, and a product you have bought for years quietly reformulates. That is the job Munchable does in the aisle, in about a second, from the barcode.