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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

What’s weird about it?

Is emmer or kamut much better? What about red fife, a strain of wheat from ~170 years ago?

It's not necessarily the wheat itself, though residual glyphosate and other herbicides are a concern, it's more the industrial processing of it. Industrial baking is very different to traditional baking, and the proteins may be exposed to the immune system in very different ways as a result, i.e. different epitopes.

The hybrid varieties bred in the late 50's have about 50x the amount of gluten as previous strains of wheat did.

Fascinating. I was curious because I eat the three I mentioned kind of like rice (along with barley and oats).

I’m behind on this science. A 50x increase in gluten sounds crazy, but I don’t know how much gluten is known to be bad. For example, I sometimes eat things with wheat gluten powder as a primary ingredient. It doesn’t seem to cause harm, but maybe I’m missing something.

I certainly don’t think of it as a health food (nothing so heavily processed is), but is it actually harmful?

The science on gluten is ongoing and controversial, but the position I believe will ultimately be vindicated is that some people seem to derive no ill effects while many others develop a mild allergy to it, which can fly under the radar and lead to all sorts of chronic inflammation issues if the person keeps eating it. As a result, there's no 'standard safe dosage' of gluten, some people become violently ill if they encounter a trace, others (myself included) find a lot of seemingly unconnected annoyances clear up if they avoid it for a few weeks. Excess weight gain seems to be one of those, though in my case the major symptom was actually an excessively fast metabolism.

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