Non-Celiac Wheat Sensitivity: A New Clinical Entity
A common response to the suggestion that wheat may be causing digestive or other problems is “I don’t need to worry about wheat because my doctor checked me and I don’t have celiac disease.”
Despite thousands of anecdotal reports of improved digestive health with wheat avoidance, most people, including most physicians, cannot recognize a wheat sensitivity outside of an official diagnosis of celiac disease.
To the mainstream medical establishment, negative celiac tests mean you do not have wheat sensitivity.
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“Our data confirm the existence of non-celiac wheat sensitivity as a distinct clinical condition.”
As William Davis documents thoroughly in
Wheat Belly, celiac disease testing does a very poor job of identifying those of us who are sensitive to wheat. Perhaps one day, clinicians, and mainstream public opinion, will catch up with the research.
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“As a whole group, the [non-celiac wheat sensitivity] group showed a higher frequency of anemia, weight loss, self-reported wheat intolerance, coexistent atopy, and food allergy in infancy than the IBS controls.”
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Read the complete article
here.
Also read
this and
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Here is part of another eye opening article about wheat titled
The Problems with Modern Wheat
It’s less nutritious.
In 1843, agronomists at Rothamstead Research Station in Hertfordshire, England began what would become one of the longest-running continuous agronomic experiments in the world: the
Broadbalk Winter Wheat Experiment. For the last two centuries, generations of scientists involved in the experiment have grown multiple wheat cultivars on adjacent plots of land and applied different farming techniques and fertilizers to study the effect on yield, nutritional content, and viability of the crop. They’ve rotated crops in and out, switched up fertilizers, and tracked the change in mineral content of both soil and wheat grain. It’s a stunning example of a well-designed, seemingly never ending (
it continues to this day, as far as I can tell) experiment.
Between 1843 and the mid 1960s, the mineral content, including zinc, magnesium, iron, and copper, of harvested wheat grain in the experiment stayed constant. But after that point, zinc, magnesium, iron, and copper concentrations began to decrease – a shift that “
coincided with the introduction of semi-dwarf, high-yielding cultivars” into the Broadbalk experiment. Another
study found that the “ancient” wheats – emmer, spelt, and einkorn – had higher concentrations of selenium, an extremely important mineral, than modern wheats. Further compounding the mineral issue is the fact that
phytic acid content remains unaffected in dwarf wheat. Thus, the phytate:mineral ratio is higher, which will make the already reduced levels of minerals in dwarf wheat even more unavailable to its consumers.
Increased yield leading to dilution of mineral density is one possible explanation for the reduction in wheat mineral content, but
modern wheat has shorter root systems than ancient wheat, and longer roots allow greater extraction of minerals from the soil. Some people have proposed soil mineral depletion as the cause of reduced nutrient content of food, but – at least in the Broadbalk experiment – soil mineral content actually increased over time.
It’s more damaging to celiacs and gluten-sensitives.
One of the primary proteins in wheat, gluten provides the “viscoelastic properties” that allow wheat to be turned into bread, dough, pasta, and all sorts of processed foods. Gluten provides the chewiness of good bread, the bite of al dente pasta. Bakers, cooks, and foodies prize it – but some people fear it, and rightfully so. I wrote all about
gluten sensitivity and celiac disease a few weeks back, but the basic gist is that for many people, consuming gluten
inflames the body, perforates the gut, and opens them up to a whole host of health maladies.
So what’s the deal with modern wheat? Well,
celiac disease is on the rise, and
some researchers have suggested that this is caused by the prevalence of certain gluten proteins that predominate in the new varieties of wheat. Namely, a gluten peptide known as glia-α9, which is nearly absent in older wheats but prevalent in modern wheats, is the most reactive “CD (celiac disease) epitope.” In other words, a majority of people with celiac disease react negatively to glia-α9. It’s a common trigger, and older wheat doesn’t have as much of it.
Meanwhile, einkorn, an ancient variety of wheat,
has been shown to cause less intestinal toxicity in patients with celiac. Einkorn and other related ancient strains of wheat still contain
gluten, of course, but they do not appear to be as damaging to people sensitive to or completely intolerant of gluten and its related protein subfractions.
It’s prepared differently.
Consider how bread is made today:
With refined, old (often rancid) white flour instead of freshly ground wheat.
Using quick rise commercial yeast instead of slowly fermenting with proven sourdough cultures.
On an industrial scale instead of in the home.
Meanwhile, for the vast majority of our wheat-eating history, humans have been grinding whole wheat berries up fresh and fermenting them before baking and eating the stuff. Dr. Weston Price famously found several traditional cultures who thrived on wheat, but they weren’t eating refined white flour treated with quick-rising yeast. They were stone-grinding fresh wheat. They were
fermenting it. They were doing all the things a person has got to do if they want to make wheat a staple of their diet and maximize the nutrition in the process. Later,
Price conducted experiments in which he reversed dental decay and
remineralized cavity-ridden teeth in refined white flour-eating people using wholesome, varied diets that included some freshly ground wheat. Fermentation effectively “pre-digests” the proteins in wheat, as
I mentioned previously. If you have the right organisms, you can even
break down wheat gluten to the point that celiacs can eat it without suffering symptoms.
That’s not to suggest you should go eat wheat. It’s simply to suggest that if you do, fresh, whole, ancient wheat prepared the old way is definitely healthier.
So, there you go: a few good lines of solid evidence showing why modern wheat – which is the only kind of wheat
most people are ever going to encounter in the real world – should be avoided. Does that help? If you’re interested in more, check out
Dr. Davis (of
Wheat Belly fame), who’s made it something of his mission to rail against what he
calls a “perfect, chronic poison.”
Read more
here.
