The Great Gluten Panic, Part 2

Reader Contribution by Stan Cox
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Click hereto read “The Great Gluten Panic, Part 1.”

The manager of an organic flour mill told me recently that he is seeing huge demand among his customers for flour produced from the grain of a single variety: the heirloom hard red winter wheat ‘Turkey Red.’ That popularity is good for his business, but he was curious about customers’ reason for seeking out Turkey Red flour; some of them, it turns out, believe they are gluten intolerant and they claim that their symptoms go away when they eat only Turkey.

The miller, like anyone who works with wheat, is aware that the kernels of all varieties, including Turkey and other heirlooms, contain high concentrations of gluten proteins. The forms of gluten that are extremely hazardous to people suffering from celiac disease are present in all wheats, and there is no evidence that old-time wheat varieties like Turkey are any less likely than modern ones to hurt people who suffer from allergies or milder forms of gluten intolerance either.

Given the mass confusion over wheat and gluten that has arisen in recent years, it is very likely that the miller’s customers who see benefits when they switch to Turkey are experiencing the kind of placebo effect that I discussed in my previous post.

A rise in the diagnosis of celiac disease in particular has been attributed by some, including William Davis, author of the book Wheat Belly, to an assumed increase in the human population’s exposure to certain partial digestion products of gluten proteins called “epitopes” that have been implicated in celiac disease. One of the known problem peptides, called Glia-α9, was examined in an oft-cited study done in the Netherlands. In it, the authors concluded that modern wheat varieties produce higher concentrations of Glia-α9 than do varieties from earlier in the twentieth century. 

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