I used to get really upset when I was wrong.
About anything.
I’m not sure how I thought I should always be right, and I bet I put my poor parents through a lot with this tendency.
A lot of people recognize that teenagers’ lack of life experience gives them that “invincible” mentality that makes them blind to the dangers of reckless driving and other death-defying behavior. For me, I was invincible in judgment, even though I was far too young and inexperienced to have any sort of good judgment!
Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize that I’m wrong a lot. Like all the time.
And you know what?
It still upsets me.
I just have learned a bit better to either do something about it, fix the fallacy, or let it go and improve next time.
In this case, I get to fix the fallacy.
I’ve been saying, in person and online, that one of the reasons gluten sensitivity is on the rise is that wheat has been altered so that it has higher gluten content.
The article linked above will explain much better than I can how wheat has changed and why it causes our digestive systems to react poorly. (And yes, I said our, as in everyone’s, according to Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly.)
RELATED: Symptoms of Food Sensitivity in Kids
I’ve also been gently and lovingly corrected (the beautiful part about writing about stewardship and food through the eyes of faith is that my readers will forgive me as sisters in Christ when I mess up!) when I mistakenly wrote a few weeks back that wheat’s problems originated because wheat is genetically modified (GMO).
There is no genetically modified wheat on the market in 2013.
(Yet.)
Wheat is in the process of experimentation for genetic modification, which is never a good thing. Learn more and take action against it here.
That said, wheat is already quite a mess and causing a health crisis that few are even aware of. It’s not GMO, but it has been altered, including at the genetic level, which is why I made the mistake of using the (very) wrong terminology.
UPDATE 5/2013: Uh oh. They’ve found rogue GM wheat from the trials still hanging out in Oregon after 12 years. Read more HERE. Nobody really knows what is going on…
No “Round Up Ready” Wheat, BUT…
There IS wheat on the market that is herbicide-resistant. It is not genetically modified but altered through a process called chemical mutagenesis, which sounds pretty scary (and rightfully so).
It involves exposing the seed to a super-poisonous chemical as well as radiation, with the intent of introducing a mutation. This is all unregulated and does not need labeling because it still counts as “traditional breeding methods” or “hybridization” rather than genetic modification, which is more highly regulated. No safety testing is required. Read more here.
Modern Wheat has been Unrecognizably Hybridized
Dr. William Davis has a lot of bad things to say about wheat, but he generally starts by explaining why “wheat” of today shouldn’t even be called wheat anymore:
The genetic distance modern wheat has drifted from its ancient origins exceeds the difference between chimpanzees and humans. Chimps and humans genes differ by only a few percent, sharing at least 90%—but what a difference a few percent can make! But that’s more than modern wheat is genetically removed from its ancestors.
Read more here from Dr. Davis.
Dr. Davis tackles the “Wheat is not GMO” issue head on, saying that he believes the methods used to create modern wheat are “worse than genetic-modification” and like mating a human with an orangutan…and then worse.
Is Wheat Worse Than Sugar?
I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, even people who eat a Standard American Diet of junk food and convenience quickies, who would honestly say that sugar is good for you. Many say it’s “okay in moderation,” but no one is touting the health benefits of sugar. (I think. I hope! I could be wrong again; it’s happened before.)
As a doctor treating many patients with diabetes and heart disease, Dr. Davis was shocked by the fact that “two slices of whole wheat bread raise blood sugar higher than six teaspoons of table sugar.” He began investigating and learned many disturbing facts about wheat and how it reacts in our bodies.
Wheat is not genetically modified…but it may be worse for you than sugar.
Does Wheat Wage War on the Intestines?
One of the parts of wheat altered by all the “hybridization” is called wheat germ agglutinin. It’s a lectin protein that functions as the defense system for the plant to battle mold, fungus, and insects, much like our immune system battles viruses and bacteria for us.
The “new” wheat lectin now wreaks havoc on the digestive system of lab animals (when administered by itself) and in humans, it “disables the normal discriminatory capacity of the human intestinal tract that helps it determine what should remain in the intestine and what should be allowed entry into the bloodstream,” causing many forms of digestive distress including heartburn, acid reflux, and IBS. (source) (Seriously, how many infants do you know of who are on prescription medication for reflux??? That scares me…)
Wheat is not genetically modified…but it is darn right modified.
Does Wheat Act Like a Gluttony Drug?
The final major change in wheat that is NOT a result of genetic modification but is serious nonetheless is the way gliadin, a certain wheat protein, has been altered over the last half decade.
Gliadin has always been in wheat, but it now acts as an opiate. Yes, an opiate, the same class of drug as heroin or morphine. You won’t be free from pain when you eat wheat (far from it), but you might get the munchies. The “new” gliadin stimulates the appetite by suppressing the body’s system of telling you “I’m full.” Research shows that people who eat wheat eat an average of over 400 calories more, every day than people who don’t eat wheat. (more here)
Wheat is found in just about every processed food there is, so the majority of the country is eating lots of wheat, all the time. And we’re obese, in epic proportions.
Is wheat the culprit? Dr. Davis asks some scary questions that bring me back to MY original hypothesis, that perhaps Satan really does hate wheat, and he’s using our sinfulness – including greed and power, not just gluttony – to exploit what God created to be good.
Are you concerned yet?
I am. I don’t want to jump on any “hype” bandwagons, but our changing wheat is definitely an issue I’ll be following closely over the next few years to see what happens.
What About GMOs?
If wheat becomes genetically modified, my heart tells me, without doing a speck of research, that only bad things will come of it. Humans don’t seem to have the foresight to interfere with God’s creation without screwing things up royally.
You can learn about what foods are currently GMO in this Non GMO Shopping Guide that a reader shared in the “bread” post.
There are also tools to find and avoid GMOs and other health threats in The New Health Paradigm by Anthony Gucciardi, as well as many resources for gluten-free living and healthy eating in the Extreme Health Library Sale (Link no longer available), 53 resources bundled together for 95% off through next Thursday only. Read more about this unique deal HERE (Link no longer available).
How about you? Does genetic modification play a role in deciding what you purchase and eat?
Just a point of clarification since the world is oddly anti-GMO at the moment, or pretends to be anyway. Human are NOT allergic to GMO… it’s not a product or ingredient. Nearly everything on the market today is GMO in some sort. GMO is a broad category that just means the natural process was interrupted to create a better and usually safer product. Wheat is GMO, all grain is. Even if you plan the seed in your own backyard, the plant it came from was modified by human intervention to make it grow faster, taller, better, resist pests and disease.
In the near future we will all be touting the benefits of GMO, but today it’s the hot thing to pretend to hate.
Anyone ever seen what non-GMO corn looks like? You haven’t, I don’t even think it exists anymore, but it wasn’t big and yellow. It was about the size of a grown mans thumb originally until we GMO’d it to where it is today.
Sorry for the soap box, this GMO hating is so old and takes the blame for so many unrelated things. Ask yourself this one question, if Monsanto Wheat was causing gluten intolerance and driving away customers, don’t you think they’d quietly remove the gene that was causing it? If it existed, they would have done it already.
Bruce, You’re completely right that the food we grow today has been *modified* by humans along the way, but that’s called hybridization and it’s something that (sometimes) could happen naturally in the wild. Hybridization and human intervention is not a concern – it’s taking actual genetic material from one species and inserting it into another. That’s *genetically* modifying a plant, and it’s much more of a new process without enough data IMO to support its safety.
Modifying a plant at the level of DNA has only been possible by science in the last few decades, and it’s definitely a different process (and result) from hybridization.
Also, no, I do not think Monsanto would remove something that was causing “some” people to have problems, or they would stop growing corn and soy as well.
Thanks for commenting, because this may have helped clear up a confusion for others as well, Katie
Ill throw in something highly overlooked. When you modify one food that gets eaten, that effects how every other food reacts or gets digested in the gut. It works like this, nucleic acids from one modified food gets taken up by the but flora. This is what bacteria do naturally by the way, tho it can be forced to happen faster through science and the use of transfection. Anyway after this happens the gut flora are now changed since they took up the new DNA known as nucleic acids from the modified food. So they act and react differently and produce different by-products according to the nucleic acids they took in. And as such also effecting how they break down other foods in the gut and the by-products released from those. Its just what bacteria do, they take in foreign DNA wherever they come across it and then it becomes part of their functioning DNA, its a survival thing that allows them to survive most anything given nucleic acids or DNA can be found everywhere.
Pingback: Reads & Recipes {February 2013} - The Humbled Homemaker