Could This Baker Solve the Gluten Mystery? | Hacker News Reader

Could This Baker Solve the Gluten Mystery?

motherjones.com

65 pointsrosser48 comments

So. My girlfriend is Lithuanian, I am Dutch. We met when she was an exchange student in the Netherlands. The thing she hated the most about our country? The bread.

It's kinda like described in the article: comparatively, we got the fluffy factory stuff, they have black bread, a very dense sourdough made from rye. When I say dense I mean dense: one slice of their bread equals three of ours. It stays good for a whole month instead of a week. It has flavour that takes a bit of getting used to but once you are, then the Dutch bread is indeed quite boring by comparison.

I suspect it's because they have a much more traditional (and quite delicious) kitchen in general - I'll let you guess the reasons for that.

I'm Lithuanian and I think we have the best bread.

But what are the reasons for the more traditional kitchen? I haven't thought about it.

Until recently, less exposure to the bad consequences of economic policies and such that we commonly associate with capitalism. I know that's vague handwaving, sorry.

I'm not one of those "capitalism is bad!" guys, or saying that the Eastern European countries did it right, but what has happened in the West to the food industry has had some definitive downsides of its own.

The Baltic countries, Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asian countries are all aboriginal countries. They have preserved their traditional culture and all the lessons learned over many generations.

In contrast, Europe is mostly immigrants from the east, and people's conquered by the Goths and Romans who lived in slavery for hundreds of years and lost everything except the ability to just barely survive.

I'm afraid your knowledge of history is almost completely inaccurate.

The "Goths" were just a few dozens Germanic tribes who moved West and conquered territory which was already occupied by Germanic tribes. Now, before the latter Germans started pushing West so hard, ca. 500 BCE, there were Celts in a lot of these regions, but 1) current Celtic populations don't show any evidence of "Aboriginal Bread"; 2) Celts are very closely related genetically, culturally, and linguistically to both the Italic and Germanic peoples; 3)the Baltic peoples are Indo-European too. They aren't "aborigines," and certainly not culturally distinct and exemplary of some multi-millenial cultural continuity distinct from the Germans or Celts or Italians or Greeks or Albanians or Iranian or Indo-Aryans...etc. The non-Indo-European and non-Finno-Ugric Neolithic peoples of Europe disappeared under waves of IE and Finno-Ugric immigration everywhere (except possibly for the Basque).

The only non-immigrants are people who stayed very near the North shore of the Black Sea, but it's nonsense to claim that because they didn't move much in 5.5K years, they remembered how to make their ancestral bread, while no one else did. That area itself saw waves of immigrants (both IE and non-IE) and was basically part of the East-West highway, so the opposite scenario is much more likely.

Moreover, while the Romans enslaved people from various conquered populations, they did not enslave whole regions or tribes or clans or what have you. Prisoners were taken here and there, but large populations and their cultures were not lost to slavery. In addition, all those Germanic tribes and other conquered peoples _were_ most of the Roman Empire eventually. They didn't get enslaved or absorbed, nor did they conform much. They just took over.

One might also point out that the Northern and Western European diets never conformed to the Mediterranean.

Luckily, dense sourdough rye bread is really simple to bake yourself.

I just came back from AH with some dark german bread. There is a ton of selection here in the Netherlands. But you're right, most people just take the whitest, fluffiest bread available. Unusual for a place where people eat more bread than they breathe air.

What is "AH"?

> What is "AH"?

Probably "Albert Heijn", a supermarket chain in the Netherlands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Heijn

Sorry, yes, its Albert Heijn. A huge (as in they have a location on every corner) grocery store.

The title seems to be link bait. What exactly is the gluten mystery this guy is solving? All I found in the article is that he is making whole wheat(%100) bread that has less gluten which as far as I can tell is not at all a mystery?

Agreed.

Just apply the usual headline rule: If the title is a question, the answer is "No."

The fact that people without Coeliac Disease buy gluten-free bread seems pretty mysterious to me.

It might not to you, but if you can't say for sure whether it's (a) just a fad; (b) actually the secret to a great and healthy life; or (c) partly a reaction to modern mass-baking techniques (as the article posits), there's at least a little mystery.

My wife has Celiac's and all I can say is that I am very glad that gluten-free has become a bit of a fad. There is a much larger variety of gluten free foods than there were 6 years ago when she was first diagnosed, and the prices of many of them have dropped by half.

Not to mention all the foods that had no real reason to contain wheat but had it added as a filler or something and have now dropped it.

Life is much easier for us now.

Indeed. The minor change for me has been that the slightly annoying question I'm most likely to be asked on any given day has transitioned from "What's that?" to "Oh, you're one of those people?"—which is, at worst, a push.

The major change is that everyone else's favorite fad diet has made my mandatory dietary restrictions so much easier to manage.

I will say that prepared food is still very much a roll of the dice, as those who maintain a gluten-free diet by choice tend not to care a whit about cross-contamination. Hence most businesses catering to them often don't make it a consideration.

There are exceptions though; I can walk into any In'n'Out and order my burger "Protein style, allergy" and whoever makes it will change their gloves, cook everything in an area away from where the buns are toasted, and spread condiments with a clean knife. One of the many reasons why In'n'Out is not merely one of the best fast food restaurants in the world, but simply one of the best things in the world.

> The fact that people without Coeliac Disease buy gluten-free bread seems pretty mysterious to me.

So I know for a fact that if I eat large quantities of gluten, I break out in a rash and get a headache. I'm not a diagnosed Celiac sufferer, because I've been told it's an invasive test[1], and I'm not going to back to my symptoms and a gluten-filled diet just for confirmation.

I feel better when I don't eat bread - but I do buy gluten-free stuff once in a while, because, well, I can do without bread/pastries most of the time but really like to fill a craving once in a while, and I'd prefer not to suffer my symptoms.

[1] http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/celiac-disease/celi...

You may be in my boat, which is actually a wheat allergy.

I had serious headaches, really irritable skin, unclear thinking, and other consequences until I went for a checkup on the advice of a similarly afflicted friend. I would recommend a visit to your local allergist to nail it down.

If you're in the US, the only provider of decent 'gluten free' versions of foods normally produced with wheat, oat, etc. is Udi's. Buying GF is the easiest way to avoid wheat, if that is your problem.

At any rate, don't self-diagnose too much. Bread is too awesome to give up without a fight. :)

I admit that the rise of Coeliac Disease is pretty mysterious but my problem is this article title conveys the notion that the article is going to give some insight into the mystery which it does not at all.

Celiacs are not the only ones who react badly to gluten. There's non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

See, for example:

http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/glutenintolerance/a/Gluten...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gluten-sensitivity...

Google ~ gluten + Sweden, the gluten problems are so bad up there, the Micky D's are even gluten-free also,most island nations have problems with gluten.

> most industrial bakeries only allow bread to rise for a matter of minutes—not nearly long enough to let the yeast and bacteria digest all the gluten in the flour, let alone the extra dose in the additives

Nor will they ever. Fermentation is the digestion of carbohydrates. Gliadin and glutenin are proteins.

ETA: That's not to say that autolyse and a slow rise won't improve flavor and texture, which they certainly do.

I'm by no means an expert on this stuff, but what about this paper? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1932817/

> In this work, we used a new mixture of selected sourdough lactobacilli and fungal proteases to eliminate the toxicity of wheat flour during long-time fermentation ... Albumins, globulins, and gliadins were completely hydrolyzed, while ca. 20% of glutenins persisted.

Sourdough starter is a mix of yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Those bacteria will, as a side effect of their activity, break down proteins. That study looked at amplifying this action with additional proteases (which also break down protein) to eliminate enough wheat proteins to make the dough non-toxic to celiacs. Since it is driven by bacteria, this action is unique to sourdough breads.

Just googling it (because I've heard it from several places) that the longer rising of bread does start to break down some of the gluten (hence making it easier to digest)

Fermentation of proteins. Some bacteria of the genus Clostridium (putrescent anaerobes) are able to ferment amino acids as well as carbohydrates. These bacteria are better adapted to utilize proteins, which they break down to amino acids by means of proteolytic enzymes; the amino acids are then fermented. The process of protein fermentation is important in the circulation of matter in nature.

source: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Fermentation+Proc...

Being gluten free (wife as well) I was unfortunately very frustrated by this article. I was expecting some degree of information regarding how those of us with gluten allergies might have some hope of eating real pizza again. All I found was marketing for a wheat lab dabbling in cooking processes to make better tasting bread. Maybe lower in gluten, but there is zero mystery solved here.

I agree there wasn't much information either... But Have you tried lower gluten flour before ? perhaps from France or Italy ? I know people who are gluten intolerant in the US but totally fine when they eat bread/pizza in these countries.

I wasn't aware that it was possible to develop coeliac disease.

9 years ago I went to Russia, and for the first time I had Russian white bread. Wow! What a delicious bread! They follow the same basic recipe as the French, flour, water and yeast, but they bake them in the traditional blocky loaf shape with the curved top. In North America I won't touch white bread unless it is genuine French or Italian baking. But even then it is not as delicious as Russian bread. I remember thinking that if this is what they feed people in the Gulag on bread and water, it isn't as bad as I imagined.

Kudos to these scientists and lets hope that they can grow a movement for better wheat, grown for the people who eat it, not for agribusiness interests.

I've heard that the gluten content of what we eat has increased 500% over the years (they add it to everything now).

Anyways, check out Spelt, the original bread -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelt

I don't do well with non-white breads because the bran and germ are kind of hard on your digestive system with respect to producing an allergic reaction.

But I have not been able to find Spelt that's not whole-grain (it's white and lite variety seems to be just a reduced bran/germ mixture).

But overall, they say Spelt is allot more soluble and digestible than wheat.

But I still don't understand this part of the article:

While people with celiac disease genuinely can't process the gluten in wheat, they argue, most people actually can... The result can lead to all kinds of problems in our gut.

So, most people handle gluten just fine, but the article is still asserting that it causes gut problems?

Celiacs can handle effectively zero gluten. Normal people can handle more than zero, but perhaps not as much as goes into modern bread.

With that last sentence we're coming right up on the frontier of science (perhaps surprisingly!), so it's hard to be definitive. But it's not unreasonable to think that quantity matters; it fits the known facts, even if it's not proved.

As an example of an alternate hypothesis still on the table, the possibility of an external factor that causes a side effect of increased gluten sensitivity is not something we can currently rule out either. One such specific hypothesis I've read is the sudden and large move towards formula feeding over breast milk in the 70s. And of course there's still one of the Universe's favorite choices, "a little of all of the above".

> but perhaps not as much as goes into modern bread.

People can handle food made from 100% gluten. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan (fried with some soy sauce it's really delicious).

Some set of people can handle 100% gluten. Since I am not in that set, it clearly is not 100% of the people on Earth. We do not know the distribution of the people in the middle; we have only begun to see that there is even a question to ask. Science is probably going to need a decade or two to work out the answer to that. (Alas, the studies can not be fast, as they must work at human speeds.)

Further, we have also established that there is a non-empty set of people who can't handle gluten, and often do not realize it for decades at a time. (Again, I am in that set, so I know it exists. For various reasons this can be a difficult reaction to work out, even when you have full-blast Celiac as I do.) This is not making it any easier to work out the distribution. Some of the people who think they can handle 100% gluten may in fact be having more of a negative reaction than they realize.

You implied that "Normal people" can not handle as much gluten as in bread. And I showed you that not only can they handle the small amount in bread, they can handle way more.

Now you are trying to back up behind "we don't really know", but actually it's only a minority that have a problem with gluten.

The slow experiment has been done: We have been eating gluten for millennia, and only a small number of people had a problem with it. Not eating gluten has become a fad now.

No, I'm saying there is a continuum of reactions, and we have a poor picture of it. Establishing that there is a non-zero population on one extreme doesn't establish very much about the distribution.

You appear to be arguing something along the line of "A: Gluten-free diets have become a fad B: I think that's silly C: Therefore gluten is safe." Yes, I'm interpolating a bit, but it seems to be your general thrust. There's substantial but non-determinative reasons to believe the picture may be much more complicated than that, particularly the rising incidence of celiac disease (which, as the article says, appears to be a real thing and not merely better detection, which was my most-likely belief until I read this article).

We've been eating non-zero amounts of gluten for millenia, but a lot of things have changed in the past few decades; how it is processed, what it is in, even perhaps things like I mentioned in my previous post, such as a generation raised on rather more baby formula than before. We have rather poor data, but something's going on.

My position has not changed one whit in this conversation.

> the rising incidence of celiac disease (which, as the article says, appears to be a real thing and not merely better detection, which was my most-likely belief until I read this article).

Autoimmune disorders in general are on the rise.

We aren't arguing all that much, except for your statement that gluten is a problem for everyone, but some can handle more some less. I say gluten is perfectly fine for most, and bad only for a small number.

Meaning there is no reason to try to reduce gluten in food or blame some nebulous "processing". Or claim that there is more gluten in bread now. All those things are just part of a fad.

If a person has a problem with gluten then they do. For everyone else it's a non-issue.

I think the article was trying to say that most people who avoid gluten don't have celiac disease, which is relatively rare. Those people can process the gluten, but it still leads to other gut problems.

Gluten aside, the trend away from bread is a good thing. For most people, the biggest problem with calorie control is eating enough to feel full. In terms of satiation, bread had poor bang for your buck. Do an expertiment: put together a 500 calorie meal at Chipotle with and without a bread component. Maybe three soft tacos with meat, salsa, no cheese or sour cream, versus a salad bowl with meat, cheese, salsa, and guacamole. For me, the former leaves me snacky before dinner. The latter leaves me full, even uncomfortably so at first, the whole afternoon.

No, but this baker can.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/gluten-pani...

Awesome, I never thought I'd see a link to Mother Earth News on HN. I suppose plenty of us are interested in DIY homesteading to various degrees, just that the occasion to link so rarely appears.

What the original article barely touched on, and this one ignores, are the industrial wheat varieties and chemical additives in industrial breads. It seems like people have demonstrated that artificially inducing quick rising in bread increases its gluten. The solution would seem to be to shame industrial bread and encourage traditional bread.

So why is no one advocating/advertising heritage grain, no-additive, slow-rise bread? I see a lot of "artisanal" breads in natural food stores, and some of them taste great, but how are consumers supposed to know they're buying the real deal.

Because, as that article pointed out, gluten is relatively inconsequential culprit: hysteria and individuals capitalizing on it by recycling shoddy science are the problem.

Gluten is the new vaccine.

"Wheat kernels have contained gliadins for as long as there has been wheat. For example, two purportedly ancient wheat varieties, 'Kamut' and 'Graziella Ra', have higher gliadin concentrations than modern wheats do, and other old-time wheats are also high in gliadins. According to Graybosch, “It probably is not speculation to say we could actually be consuming less gliadin than great-grandpa did.” And per-capita wheat flour consumption back in 1900, long before the rise in incidence of celiac disease, was 67 percent higher than today's average consumption.)"

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/great-glute...

The bit about a Dutch Oven reminds me of the time that I baked a Black Forest cake in one over a campfire in the mountains of British Columbia.

I've gone back to making my own Bread. It started off as a hobby and I really got into artisan slow bread making.

And there is is Subway and it's chemical lased bread. http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/06/health/subway-bread-chemical/

Chemical laced perhaps? Baking bread with chemical lasers sounds cool, if inefficient and potentially toxic.

The only gluten my family ingest is Einkorn and in very limited quantities.

I am not celiac, recently I tried to stop eating gluten (for several) reasons, and when I end eating gluten, I feel like crap.

Or maybe I am a undiagnosed celiac, who knows.

Allez les Cougs!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFEh12Fm078

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