Not your grandparents bread

  • One of the first if not first GMO that almost all of us do or did eat is wheat. Whole wheat bread, white bread it doesn't matter. 70 years ago no one on the planet eat what we eat now.

    I know about Norman Burloag and the green revolution. His impetus was to create higher yielding wheat varieties. But nothing works in isolation. Wheat today is very different than 70 years ago. Higher yields, yes. But also genetically much different.

    I came across 2 interesting websites.

    http://drhyman.com/blog/2012/02/13/t...you-fat/#close

    http://www.infowars.com/modern-wheat...n-says-expert/

    I was fasinated by the second one and this part of the article:

    Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn’t the wheat your grandma had: “It’s an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the ’60s and ’70s,” he said on “CBS This Morning.” “This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there’s a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It’s not gluten. I’m not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I’m talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 440 more calories per day, 365 days per year.”

    No one set out to do this..but when you mess with wheat or any crop a lot of unintended consequences were sure to be introduced.

    I remember when I use to eat McDonalds. I use to joke they used opium in them. Well..Unfortunately it doesn't look like a joke. I could never understand why I wanted another one a few hours, or days later. Ok they use a tasty sauce, meat, limp veggies but none of those made much sense. But the buns.....ah. Not only I am sure a bunch of HFCS but this gentically modified wheat we all eat if we are eating wheat.

    Anyhow I thought these were interesting takes. Histoical fact wheat is heavily modified since the 1960s. Does it contain that gliadin protein now? If you Google it there are a lot of articles on it. Does gliadin work like stated in the above passage? I know I was a lot hungrier when I was eating wheat, even whole wheat.
  • I do not know about gliadin, but flour in the US contains more gluten that is for sure. Having said that, I could never eat regular bread in the US. It is too fluffy and neither fills me up nor does it taste well. I always made my own European style bread. Mostly whole wheat. You need to chew it, you cannot just swallow it down. I do occasionally like burgers, but up to today, I still leave the bun behind.
  • Infowars is not really a source you want to be citing if you want claims to be taken as serious and credible. Gliadin is not a brand new protein. Einkorn wheat also contains gliadin - that's not the point. The point is that through selective breeding, the wheat we're eating today is vastly different from wheat in biblical times. Einkorn has 14 chromosomes, and modern wheat has 42. The argument is that "older" wheat was much easier to digest, had lower gluten levels, and was "less toxic" in many respects.

    (This is coming from someone also very interested in the recent hybridization of wheat and its implications. For these ideas to be taken seriously, it's important not to use or spread easily disproven claims. It sounds like that Davis guy you quoted is spreading false information, which does not help at all.)