You hear it all the time..."I'm Gluten Intolerant", or "Allergic to Gluten". We've witnessed a literal CONSUMER SHITSTORM in the last 15 years...The "Gluten-free" craze has washed across the United States like a freakin tidal wave. Gluten Free diets, Gluten free Beer...companies slathering their products with "Gluten Free" regardless of whether they ever contained gluten in the first place.
The utter force of the movement sometimes seemed a bit ridiculous
I've had my suspicions over the years. I can't tell you how many people I've known that have purported to have gluten sensitivies. My usual response was something like...(yeah, if I eat awful crappy bread from the store, I feel like shit too) But I've been baking my own bread for the last 12 years, I don't eat much store bread. Several of my closer friends realized that bread wouldn't make them feel bad, sometimes we'd chalk it up to the slow rise fermented nature of sourdough..which probably doesn't hurt.
Lets see..how did the gluten free craze start? I am now entirely 150% convinced now that it was actually largely started by people have been realizing that eating wheat sometimes makes them awful. This was probably joined by thousands of greedy marketing execs and food companies positioning themselves to take advantage of the changing tides of consumer desires.
I heard some people talking about wheat sensitivities in the late 90's, but they were pretty few and far between. By 2005, it was becoming more noticeable, but by 2012-2014, the "gluten free diet" was fully lodged in our cultural consciousness...and you saw stories from friends, family, co-workers that seemed to back it up. Only there was some weird things that didn't quite add up. We've been eating wheat for thousands of years...why weren't people suffering then? Even 50 years ago, 30, even 10 years ago...was the general state of the human health just so poor, that people didn't know any better...and they lived out there years in quiet stoic agony? Did we not notice it? Why is it starting NOW??? also...
Why is it that wheat only SOMETIMES affects people poorly?
Some people could clearly eat wheat prepared at home, but even a single dinner roll at an italian restaurant would send them into fits of agony? Other people reported that they were fine when they were travelling, pasta in italy? No problem. It has been tempting for some of us to call these folks crazy (I know I have at times)...but the truth is actually kind of fucked up. You might want to sit down for this.
The answer finally came up in a conversation with someone familiar with the wheat growing process. I've researched it more for myself, and the truth is, actually pretty horrible.
When a seed bearing plant is dying, in the throws of their last hours, they will rapidly pump as much energy into their seeds as possible.
It's a last ditch effort to help their next generation.
Turns out, in the mid 80's some industrial wheat growers figured this out...by spraying a deadly load of toxic glyphosate on their crops a week or so prior to harvest, not only could they dry their crop on demand, but in their panic the plants would grow the size of the seeds by ~10%.
Over the next 20 years this slowly became routine procedure for most conventional wheat growers in the US. Once some of them started increasing yields by such high numbers, it became difficult for others to compete without doing the same thing.
Monsanto(and the FDA) will tell you that Glyphosate is non toxic to humans. Lets get a second opinion.
Just because Roundup doesn’t kill you immediately doesn’t make it nontoxic. In fact, the active ingredient in Roundup lethally disrupts the all important shikimate pathway found in beneficial gut microbes which is responsible for synthesis of critical amino acids.
Friendly gut bacteria, also called probiotics, play a critical role in human health. Gut bacteria aid digestion, prevent permeability of the gastointestinal tract (which discourages the development of autoimmune disease), synthesize vitamins and provide the foundation for robust immunity. In essence: Roundup significantly disrupts the functioning of beneficial bacteria in the gut and contributes to permeability of the intestinal wall and consequent expression of autoimmune disease symptoms.
In synergy with disruption of the biosynthesis of important amino acids via the shikimate pathway, glyphosate inhibits the cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes produced by the gut microbiome. CYP enzymes are critical to human biology because they detoxify the multitude of foreign chemical compounds, xenobiotics, that we are exposed to in our modern environment today.
As a result, humans exposed to glyphosate through use of Roundup in their community or through ingestion of its residues on industrialized food products become even more vulnerable to the damaging effects of other chemicals and environmental toxins they encounter!
from the healthy economist
Obviously, a lot of 'false' Celiac's gets reported, who people are in fact just responding to the glyphosate. But here's an overlay of the number of reported cases of Celiac's and the yearly amounts of glyphosate spray on wheat in the US.
What’s worse is that the negative impact of glyphosate exposure is slow and insidious over months and years as inflammation gradually gains a foothold in the cellular systems of the body. Consequences of this systemic inflammation are most of the diseases and conditions associated with the Western Lifestyle:
- Gastrointestinal disorders
- Obesity
- Diabetes
- Heart Disease
- Depression
- Autism
- Infertility
- Cancer
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Alzheimer’s disease
a montana wheat field not far from my home
So...essentially, conventional wheat farmers have adopted a practice of 'desiccating' their crop prior to harvest with a lethal dose of poison, and full adoption of this practice precedented MILLIONS of americans noticing ill affects from wheat, not to mention the insane and unexplainable rise of ALL KINDS of inflammation. And nobody is talking it about it? In fact, as a society, we still make fun of people who avoid eating gluten(with articles like this...Celiac's the trendy disease for rich white people ) , meanwhile Monsanto(who makes glyphosate) will spend over $120 million dollars on lobbying the federal government in the next decade, and that's just whats on the public record.
How much did they pay to get their Vice President appointed as the Deputy Commissioner of the FDA?
Excuse me, but THAT THERE IS SOME BULLSHIT! What kind of fuckhead does that to our country? I was surprised...his name is Barack Obama. I voted for his ass. Makes me FURIOUS! I think there is nothing more important than all of us understanding where our food comes from.
At any rate, wheat that has been certified Organic, (shouldn't) have been processed with glyphosate. I also am a huge fan of slow rise fermented sourdough bread.! All the bread my family eats is baked at home with 100% montana grown organic wheat and spelt. There's no commercial monoculture bakers yeast, just the good to earth sloppy sourdough culture, the big mixing pot of natural (and wild yeasts) of all varieties. Yes!! These yeasts are actually ascomycete mushrooms!!! If you haven't already, go read my post ascomycetes!!!
Who knows what else is going on in our Industrial Food System, but do your research, don't believe anything anyone tells you (especially me)...and LISTEN TO YOUR BODY!!!! I want to give a BIG FUCKING THANKYOU to all you Gluten Sensitive people out there who have had the bravery and integrity to LISTEN to your bodies in the face of your society mocking and deriding you for it. YOU ARE STRONG, BEAUTIFUL, and we need you. We're going to need you more than ever.
"People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food"
-Wendell Fucking Barry