Gluten Isn't The Problem

I get a lot of questions about gluten. Why is it bad for me? How do I replace it? And so on. For anyone interested in the rising trend of gluten-free diets, the vilification of wheat, and the ways in which the industrial food system is messing with our bodies (which, in theory, should be everyone in this country who eats), I highly recommend that you read the two articles below.

They’re co-written by Bob Quinn, an organic farmer from Big Sandy, Montana, and Liz Carlisle, an agricultural researcher and lecturer at Stanford University. Basically, they ask and answer the following question: If we’ve been eating wheat for 10,000 years, why has it suddenly started giving us trouble? They write:

Gluten-free diets simply sidestep deeper problems in our food system, problems that wheat points out to us. As one of the most intensively industrialized crops in the world, wheat is giving us a glimpse of where we’re headed as we continue on this path with other foods. If we ignore these warnings, we’ll soon add other foods to our list of dietary sensitivities. But if we heed them, we have a golden opportunity to address many other pressing problems linked to our food system, including its climate footprint and its devastating impact on rural communities. So instead of ditching wheat, let’s fix the way it’s bred, the way it’s grown, and the way it’s processed.

These articles provide a crucial glimpse (one via a fascinating agricultural experiment) into how our industrial food system has fundamentally changed the composition of things that used to nourish us. I know, it’s not the most uplifting reading heading into the weekend, but it matters.

—Mark

The wheat you eat in a typical store-bought cookie or hamburger is very different from the wheat your great grandparents ate. Modern wheat has been shown to cause inflammation; ancient wheat actually reduces it.