There seems to be an epidemic of gluten intolerance these days and wheat is the main source of gluten so it gets the blame for most of the issues, but have you ever considered that maybe it's not the wheat that's causing the problems?
One factor that has changed in the last 30 years is the way wheat is being grown, and the main change has been the broad scale use of herbicides. The main herbicide being sprayed with wheat is Roundup with the main active ingredient being Glyphosate but the herbicide being sprayed on wheat is not being sprayed the way most people would think a herbicide would be used.
This is where things get really interesting, the glyphosate/roundup is being sprayed on the crop about a week before harvest to kill the wheat plant and dry it out. When glyphosate is used like this it's called a desiccant or a chemical ripening agent. This is done to ensure an even harvest as slightly unripe wheat will be forced to loosen its grip on the wheat grains an enable the threshing machines to extract all the wheat that would normally be lost. So to reiterate almost ripe wheat is drenched in glyphosate/roundup just before harvest. This has become industry standard practice in many agricultural grain crops.
But Glyphosate has been proven to be non toxic in mammals because we lack the pathway that plants and other lower forms of life have that facilitates Glyphosate's effectiveness, most of it simply just washes out of our system as it's water soluble and any residue is not toxic because we lack that the required pathways to metabilise it. ie the shikimic acid pathway
Let's examine Glyphosate a bit further. Glyphosate is a synthetic amino acid based on the common amino acid glycine with a side chain of methyl phosphonate attached. So basically Glyphosate is an analogue of glycine and our bodies can't tell the difference and will even use glyphosate in preference to glycine in some cases when proteins are constructed & cells are created.
When glyphosate is incorporated into newly manufactured proteins the proteins created are inferior to normal protiens, they tend to make to make poorly formed weak structures and sometimes proteins that can't function as they should. This known as a protein folding issue. Glycine is the most abundant amino acid in the human body and it's the basis of many different types of collagen (protiens) that hold us together.
A common problem with gluten intolerance diseases is a condition known as leaky gut syndrome. Naturopaths have been diagnosing and treating this problem for decades and the modern chemical medicine establishment has until recently outright denied that a leaky gut is gut is even possible but investigation with scanning electron microscopy has proven without doubt that intestinal linings can indeed develop "loose junctions" and allow undigested proteins to pass through the gut wall and create havoc with the immune system. Google zonulin-gliadin loose junctions to see how this works. One common symptom is peeling flaking skin around the fingertips (it's a dead give away to any natural practitioner).
So when we start to put the pieces together we can start to form a hypothesis as to why an ancient grain that's been eaten for millennia without issue has recently started to trigger a wave of intolerance syndromes. First the wheat is sprayed with glyphosate (sometimes within days of harvest if rain is coming) and the wheat is harvested after soaking up the Roundup. Roundup is glyphosate with added surfactants to enable it to soak in. Then the wheat is harvested and milled while it still contains traces of glyphosate and made into bread and other common wheat products. When we digest the products our bodies then mistake the glyphosate molecules for glycine when our cells construct new protiens, sometimes because of its electrical charge the glyphosate molecule will even be used in preference to glycine.
So our bodies start constructing new proteins & cells with faulty glyphosate substituted proteins that don't have the structural integrity of cells created with unadulterated glycine as the building block (amino acid) when the proteins are manufactured. This is particularly important when it comes to the formation of collagen structures as collagen is the most abundant form of protein in our bodies. Our gut walls are largely made of several different types of collagen and when they are poorly formed and lack the structural integrity they should have we start to see an exacerbation of gluten sensitivity issues arise.
So now we have a (speculative) mechanism as to why these leaky gut syndromes are becoming more common and gluten insensitivity rates have sky rocketed in the last 20-30 years. I say speculative because there's no published research on this specific gut collagen issue yet but the research is there for other types of collagen so it doesn't seem like a great stretch of the imagination to me.
End of part 1