In my mid-30s, I got ill with a range of multiplying symptoms: a bad gut, hormones causing havoc, eczema and hives, cystitis and constant infections, and allergies, it seemed, to everything in the world.
As I worked to heal my gut and much more with a pioneering integrative doctor, many of these symptoms disappeared and my skin improved overnight when I made a single change: I stopped eating wheat.
As it turned out, I wasn’t celiac—I could eat oats, rye and barley, and even small amounts of wheat in gravy—but my penance for a slice of bread was a bad gut for days.
For all these years, I assumed that I was wheat intolerant, especially after our eldest daughter discovered she was wheat intolerant, as did, to some extent, our youngest.
For decades now I’ve avoided wheat in everything: bread, pasta, cakes, even soy sauce. I don’t eat much in the way of grains anymore, but if I do eat them, they’re not wheat.
The only strange exception, early in my wheat-free journey, was a holiday in southern Italy. The freshly made bread looked so delicious that I couldn’t resist cutting off a good-sized chunk of it for myself. I waited, expecting to pay for it in the following days . . . but nothing happened.
I just assumed the reactions I experienced in the UK and US, but not in Italy, had to do with the way bread was produced. The standard supermarket loaf, including “whole wheat bread,” is so overprocessed and stuffed with chemicals as to be unrecognizable as food.
I also assumed it had to do with the way bread is now commercially prepared. In 1961, Britain launched what came to be known as the Chorleywood process, created by the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association (formerly the BBIRA) at Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, which vastly reduced the time it took to bake a loaf of commercial bread.
Breadmaking is an arduous process, requiring mixing, kneading the dough, and allowing the dough to stand for up three hours, depending on the amount of yeast added and the temperature of the mixture, so the yeast will ferment, or “prove.” This transforms the dough from a dense blob into an elastic goo.
The dough then goes through more “proving” (the last rise before baking so it assumes its final shape), an essential step so that the loaf will be light, before baking, cooling and slicing.
Proving “develops” the gluten, the protein structure in wheat, by allowing the yeast to consume sugars in the dough and exhale carbon dioxide, trapping gas in air bubbles and enabling the gluten to expand and stretch.
But with the Chorleywood process, those first mixing, kneading and proving steps are vastly sped up via machines. High-speed mixing makes use of a mechanical form of rapid kneading to develop the gluten. This step saves hours in the initial fermentation process, but to achieve it, bakeries have to add ascorbic acid as a flour treatment agent, along with a bit of fat and an emulsifier.
Although the Chorleywood process has been hailed as “the greatest invention since sliced bread,” speeding up the gluten-developing process with additives and machines may have vastly contributed to human inability to tolerate gluten and wheat, a food staple that has been consumed for thousands of years.
But now there seems to be another, more basic issue, as Sue Becker discovered. Becker, who holds a food science degree, has studied breadmaking for two decades but was prompted to go deeper after realizing that commercial processing methods were stripping valuable nutrients from wheat.
She discovered that the problems with bread start with the way it is grown and milled. Most wheat these days is grown with pesticides—in the States, usually glyphosate—and modern milling usually grinds up wheat finely and then sifts out the bran and the wheat germ. Wheat contains 40 of the 44 essential nutrients needed to sustain human life, but most of these get discarded in processing, leaving the carbohydrate-rich interior and not a good deal else.
Although modern bread is “enriched” so that three of the B vitamins and iron removed during flour-making are restored, it also contains about 20 chemicals, at least one found to cause cancer.
Convinced that modern breadmaking was behind many modern diseases, Becker began making her own bread from scratch, grinding wheat berries with a small countertop grinder. Many of her own health problems and those of her children—from gut issues and sinus congestion requiring daily antihistamines to warts—disappeared.
Becker began holding breadmaking classes, and among her students were many people who believed they were sensitive to gluten but then discovered that it wasn’t the wheat but the way bread is made. Other students with chronic constipation and even autoimmune diseases like lupus get healed when eating freshly ground, homemade bread. Many talk about never feeling better in their lives.
My New Year’s resolution is to grind my own wheat berries and try making my own bread from scratch to see whether I’m truly gluten sensitive or it’s just the wheat itself.
And here’s one good New Year’s resolution to apply across the board: for good health, cook, as always, from scratch.
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