By John Mattingly
In places that sell and serve food these days, we see lots of GLUTEN-FREE signs. As an old wheat farmer, I want to make a sign that says FREE GLUTEN, like FREE TIBET, to encourage people to think a little differently about this. Many people have told me that they didn’t realize how much they liked gluten until it went missing from their favorite baked goods.
That said, celiac disease is a real and potentially dangerous intolerance for gluten, and it’s inarguable that many people have allergies to the particular protein complex comprising gluten. It’s also true that gluten tends to make you fat: “Once across the lips, forever on the hips,” is the saying now associated with eating bread. Many diets recommend eliminating bread from your diet as a first step to losing weight, essentially bypassing the real first step: self-control.
As both a bread lover and a farmer who always enjoyed growing wheat, I want to come to the defense of gluten, and by association, the defense of wheat. After allowing that there are those who are severely and legitimately affected by gluten, I’d like to offer a wide-angle view of wheat and bread, and try to see them free of the current marketing-advertising hysteria that seems to be telling us gluten is some sort of toxin.
The data indicates that about 10 percent of the U.S. population has confirmed celiac disease. Those affected have an autoimmune response in the small intestine to the gluten complex – gliadin, and three peptides present in prolamin – that results in inflammation and digestive disorders of varying magnitude, including failure to absorb calcium and vitamin D. It is thought that celiac disease is a genetic disorder, as most of those affected have the same HLA (human leukocyte antigen) on the short arm of the sixth chromosome, but there is evidence that the disease can be provoked by infantile exposure to gluten before the tissue of the gut barrier of the small intestine is fully developed.
The data also states that 99 percent of those affected with celiac disease are currently undiagnosed. Apart from violating the old rule against proving a negative, this strikes me as misleading at best, bogus at worst. If 99 percent of those affected are undiagnosed, then it really isn’t possible to know if you have it. But the 99 percent number pushes a person pretty hard in the direction of being affected, but undiagnosed. The power of suggestion here is clearly, obviously and unfairly tipped toward convicting gluten when, in fact, the percentage of people who actually have gluten intolerance is not known.
The symptoms of severe celiac disease are constant digestive dysfunction, vacillating between extremes of constipation and diarrhea leading to anemia, weight loss and an obvious failure to thrive. The symptoms of gluten intolerance, or a gluten allergy, are gas, bloating, fatigue, constipation, diarrhea, anxiety and a slight failure to thrive. These symptoms are shared by so many other disorders that many people might be tempted to make the old mistake of attributing causation to correlation, especially when “99% of those affected are currently undiagnosed.”
There are genetic and blood tests for celiac disease, but these are expensive and generally inconclusive, unless followed by an upper endoscopy of the duodenum, requiring a minimum of six to eight biopsy samples, as all areas of the bowel may not be reactive. This sounds like a lot of trouble for an inconclusive diagnosis. An alternate way to confirm an intolerance to gluten is to remove it from your diet for a month and then reintroduce it to assess your reaction. Personally, I find it difficult to remember all the things I eat in a given day unless I make notes (and then I forget to make notes), so this strategy for self-diagnosis requires (a) discipline, with no accidental consumption of wheat, barley or rye; (b) attention to detail by reading labels carefully to be sure you’re eating gluten-free; (c) control of variables (What else did I eat that could have caused those farts?); and (d) total objectivity with no influence or suggestive interference from the current GLUTEN-FREE hysteria found in most supermarkets and restaurants.
A lot of people might just say, “Hey, I have gas on occasion, and sometimes I have constipation and at other times diarrhea … and maybe I’m not thriving like I could … and in the end, I could stand to lose a few pounds, so why not go gluten-free? After all, “everybody else is.”
Maybe I’m listening too much to my Inner Old Man, but as an old wheat farmer, I hate to see wheat and gluten get a bad reputation. I understand and respect that those with celiac disease and wheat allergies have to eliminate gluten from their diet. My concern is that the “99% undiagnosed” statistic is deceiving, and flanked by the GLUTEN-FREE campaign, may be tilting folks away from a perfectly good food.
Of course, my affection for growing wheat probably interferes with my judgment. When farming on the Eastern slope, I liked to plant hard red winter wheat after harvesting pinto beans. The wheat sprouted in September and often remained green until about Thanksgiving, greening up again by the Ides of March. In the San Luis Valley, I began growing hard red winter wheat in the early 1990s as a strategy for having the crop tilled and growing strong against the inevitable spring winds. Planting wheat in the spring was sometimes dicey in that a strong wind either stressed the young sprouts, or blew them out.
I like to grow hard red winter wheat, not soft white spring wheat, which is low gluten and used for pasta and crackers, and known as “cracker wheat.” Over the years, I’ve sought out varieties that produced the heaviest bushel weight and highest protein, meaning the varieties that produced the greatest gluten. A great old friend of mine, Ted Whitmer, grew Whitmer Gold, which was an old wheat cultivar which he grew organically on the high plains of eastern Montana and bagged himself for distribution to the blossoming food coops that matured into health food stores back in the mid-1980s. The golden-brown kernels of Whitmer Gold were gigantic, the bushel weights often came in above 65 pounds, and the taste was exceptional because of the high gluten content.
As far as bread and gluten making a person fat, it’s true, but if we’re going to free up the supermarket shelves of all the substances that make us fat, there won’t be much left. In upcoming articles of this series, I hope to look into what might be guiding this attack on gluten and wheat, an attack that is far out of proportion to the danger posed by a plant also known as the staff of life.
