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Industrial wheat farming
Wheat is one of the most common foods in the American diet. For many Americans, every meal and snack contains foods made with wheat flour. However, recent reports have indicated that people increasingly cannot eat wheat due to celiac disease, an autoimmune reaction to wheat protein gluten that causes damage to the small intestine, or due to non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS). It is estimated that 1 in 133 Americans suffer from celiac disease, and many more cases are undiagnosed and/or unaccounted for.43 But wheat has been used for thousands of years. Why didn’t it cause problems until recently? It is clear that there could be more to this than gluten. The problem may lie in the differences between ancient and modern wheat.
According to William Davis, MD, author of the book Wheat Belly, modern wheat is not the same grain our ancestors used. In fact, everything has changed dramatically in the past 50 years under the influence of industrial agriculture. Wheat gluten proteins undergo considerable structural change with hybridization. In hybridizing wheat for food production reasons, we have engineered a new kind of wheat with significant genetic differences from the original grain. Those differences could potentially have impacts on human health.44
Industrial farming has also changed the way we grow, harvest, and process wheat. In addition to the use of pesticides and herbicides during wheat growth, ther herbicide Roundup (Monsanto, St Louis, Missouri) is also applied before harvest.10,45 The pre-harvest weed control application is a management strategy to not only control perennial weeds but also to facilitate harvest management and get a headstart on next year’s crop. The procedure of pre-harvest application of glyphosate was clearly described in the manual prepared by Monsanto, the company that makes the herbicide.46 Residual glyphosate in wheat products has been suggested as the cause for gluten intolerance and celiac disease.10
A whole grain of wheat consists of 3 layers: the bran, germ, and endosperm. The bran, the hard outer shell of the kernel, is the layer that contains most of the fiber. The germ is the nutrient-rich embryo that will sprout into a new wheat plant. The endosperm accounts for 83% of the grain and is mostly starch. Today’s milling industry is designed for mass production, using high-temperature, high-speed steel rollers. The resulting white flour, made from only the endosperm, is nearly all starch and has little nutritional value.47
Modern wheat starch contains high levels of a super starch called amylopectin A, a long chain of glucose with a very high glycemic index, meaning it converts to glucose very quickly. Thus, above average intake of wheat product is suggested to be a major contributor to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, depression, and many other conditions.44,48
Flour used to be aged with time, improving the gluten and the baking quality. Now it is treated with chlorine to instantly produce similar qualities in the flour. The use of chlorine in bleaching flour is considered an industry standard. The chlorine gas undergoes an oxidizing chemical reaction with some of the proteins in the flour, producing alloxan as an unintended byproduct.47 According to Professor Joe Schwarcz, Director of the McGill University Office of Science and Society, alloxan is the byproduct of xantophyll oxidation. Xantophylls are yellow compounds in wheat that react with oxygen, causing flour to turn white.49 Alloxan is a poison that is used to produce diabetes in healthy laboratory animals (mice and rats) so that scientists can then study diabetes “treatments” in the lab. Alloxan causes diabetes because it produces enormous amounts of free radicals in pancreatic beta cells, thus destroying them.