Bread Commotion: A Look at Gluten Intolerance and Celiac Disease through the Eyes of a Homestead Baker.
By
Henning Sehmsdorf
Kneading Conference West, Mt. Vernon, WA
September 13th, 2013
In this session I want to address the problem of gluten intolerance and celiac disease that is becoming so widespread and tell you about how we deal with this problem on our farm.
Let me begin by telling you a bit about myself. My family and I have been biodynamic farmers on Lopez Island, Washington, since 1970. The mission of S&S Homestead Farm is to produce fresh, local, organic, seasonally, and sustainably grown food, while providing education in ecological farming and sustainable living for the community. In our view, the defining aspect of a biodynamic farm is that it supplies most of its inputs from within the farm itself, i.e. food for the people living on the farm, feed for the animals, fertility for the soil, energy, water, and wood products. We sell our surplus to the community of Lopez Island through a whole-diet CSA which includes meat, eggs, fresh and processed vegetables, fruits and staples, as well large, 2-pound loaves of sourdough rye bread made from grain raised on the farm.
So why sourdough rye bread and how does that relate to the question of how to prevent or address the problem of gluten intolerance and celiac disease? Before I get into the details of answering that question, allow me to repeat the summary of my talk from the conference program. The informal research I have donesuggests that the phenomenon of gluten intolerance is at least in part a cultural problem, resulting from the wheat varieties developed since before the turn of thetwentieth century, coupled with changes in the way bread isprocessed commercially. At S&S Homestead Farm, we bake sourdough rye bread using rye grown on the farm, and fermenting the sponge and kneaded dough(finished with King Arthur wheat flour) for more than 48 hours in order to digest the gluten. The extended fermentationbreaks downthe gluten in the rye, and in the wheat,into formsof protein that are easyon humandigestion. In commercial breads, fermentation isoften missing entirely or cut short by adding more gluten and yeast to speed up the rising process (to save time/money), resulting in breads in which most of the gluten remains undigestedwhich in turn has adeleterious effect on the so-called villi in the digestive tractand leads to celiac disease. By contrast, we have found that friends of ours with celiac disease can consume genuine soudough bread without digestive distress or autoimmune symptoms.
Let us start by taking a look at the prevalence of gluten intolerance and celiac disease today. As Katherine Czapp (staff editor at Weston Price Foundation) writes, “gluten intolerance, wheat allergy and celiac disease are all related categories of digestive and immune system disorders that have become increasingly familiar to anyone following modern trends in human health. Barely a decade ago, gluten intolerance and celiac disease were considered uncommon genetic aberrations, occurring in perhaps 1 in 2500 persons worldwide. In just the last few years the prevalence of putative sufferers has been revised upward so frequently that it is hard to find general consensus moment by moment, but about 1 in 130 (or approaching 1 percent of the U.S. population) seems to be the current speculation by several researchers and celiac support organizations, with similar numbers recorded in Europe. The National Institutes of Health convened its first conference on celiac disease only in 2004, however, yet concluded in its report that the condition is "widely unrecognized" and "greatly underdiagnosed" while symptom-free cases appear to be increasing.The story of how a class of food long revered as "the staff of life" should suddenly become a toxic substance to large numbers of people worldwide is complex and controversial, yet also provides revealing insights into modern agriculture, world trade and industrialized methods of food production” (Against the Grain,” Westin Price Foundation, 2006).
Authorities seem mystified why gluten intolerance has quadrupled in the U.S. since World War Two (Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “Who has the Gut for Gluten?”, 2013). One apparent mystery is that while “roughly 30 percent of people with European ancestry carry predisposing genes, …yet more than 95 percent of the carriers tolerate gluten just fine. So while these genes (plus gluten) are necessary to produce the disease, they’re evidently insufficient to cause it” (ibid).
Alessio Fassio, head of the Center for Celiac Research and
Treatment at the Massachussetts General Hospital for Children in Boston, concludes in a recent study, “You’re talking about an autoimmune disease in which we thought we had all the dots connected, then we start to accumulate evidence that there was something else” (ibid).
The A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine defines celiac disease as “a condition that damages the lining of the small intestine and prevents it from absorbing parts of food that are important for staying healthy. The damage is due to a reaction to eating gluten, which is found in wheat, barley, rye, and possibly oats” (2010). But why should these grains that have been consumed in cultures throughout the world for many centuries suddenly cause this dread disease during the last half century? What are the causes precipitating gluten intolerance? Why should people world wide develop an inability to properly digest gluten, the compound protein that lends elasticity and coherence to bread dough?
As Katherine Czapp points out, modern wheat, whose history as a domesticated food goes back some 8,000 years, has undergone constant hybridization, but the trend has been accelerated critically by the application of scientific methods to agriculture and baking methods. Especially during the last half century, this process has been advanced chemically “in order to increase yields, resist fungal diseases and pest attacks, improve the ease of mechanical harvesting and meet rigorous demands of industrial milling and mechanized baking methods” (Czapp, 2004).
Leavened bread made from wheat (triticum aestivum) apparently
first developed in Egypt some 1,700 years B.C., where growing conditions were favorable for the cultivation of this grain. At about the same time, in northern Europe Slavs, Celts and Germanic peoples developed rye (secale cereale) as a major bread grain in areas where the growing season was too short and cool for the dependable production of wheat. As recent mapping of modern grains has shown, both wheat and rye carry a small chain of peptides as part of the gluten protein that can potentially cause gluten intolerance in the digestive system, while some other grains such as the wild ancestors of wheat, as well as certain cultivated einkorn, emner, kamut, do not carry this genetic material.
It is well beyond my expertise to ferret out the full range of impacts of hybridization and industrialization on the potential of bread grains to precipitate gluten intolerance and cause celiac disease. I leave that to the experts such as Dr. Stephen Jones, internationally known wheat breeder and director of the Mt. Vernon Research Center. Instead, let me turn to two related topics, the physiology of gluten intolerance, and the cultural context in which it occurs. There seems to be a wide range of opinion of how gluten intolerance manifests in the body. As stated previously, the A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia describes celiac disease as a condition that damages the lining of the small intestine, the so-called villi, and prevents it from absorbing parts of food that are important for staying healthy. The unpleasant symptoms include abdominal pain, diarrhea, decreased appetite and weight loss, nausea, vomiting, lactose intolerance. Further down the line, the disease may cause depression, chronic fatique, hair loss, itchy skin, cramping and joint pain, ulcers, missed menstrual periods, even seizures, and more. More than that, celiac disease seems to correlate with other scourges of the modern age, such as rheumatoid arthritis, Addison’s disease, down syndrome, intestinal cancer and lymphoma, lactose intolerance, thyroid disease, autoimmune disorders, bone disease, low blood count and low blood sugar, infertility and miscarriage. The whole confounding symptomatology points to the cardinal importance of putting the right and properly prepared food stuffs into our stomachs.
Here we turn to the question of the cultural context of gluten intolerance. We noted that leavened wheat bread had its origin in ancient Egypt, while in northern Europe the preferred grain was rye which is lower in gluten. Wheat became the major world grain not until the Industrial Revolution when, in England and on the Continent, rural populations shifted into burgeoning cities, requiring the development of labor-efficient and cost-effective ways to produce bread for a swelling urban labor force. Now the choice of grain became the gluten-rich wheat rather than rye, made possible by wheat imports from the rich podsols of Poland. Even in Denmark and Sweden, bread production converted to imported wheat. In America, too, where until the 1800’s, wheat was merely “an horticultural hobby” (Czapp, 2004), and corn long remained the preferred grain, industrialization encouraged the switch to gluten-rich wheat. The notable exception to this dramatic shift in food culture occurred in large parts of Germany, Russia and eastern Finland, where “physicians and farmers insisted that people who for centuries had eaten the dark bread of their fathers, which gave forth a spicy fragrance like the earth itself, could not find the soft white wheat bread filling” (ibid). By contrast, in the U.S. and in Great Britain, the two wealthiest industrialized countries in the 19th-20th centuries, industrialization and adulteration of bread production (for instance, by the addition of aluminum sulphate to whiten the bread) gained ground more rapidly than anywhere else, and the two nations eventually earned reputations as producers of the worst bread anywhere. While aluminum sulphate was outlawed at the end of the 19th century, the bread industry did not abandon the use of chemical additives and “improvers” to facilitate modern mechanized methods. In the meantime, small-scale artisan and home baking declined rapidly. By 1910, 70% of bread was still baked at home in the U.S., but by 1927 when “Wonder Bread” was introduced, it had shrunk to less than 30%. The government eventually recognized that “Wonder Bread” was impoverished as a food, but to cure the deficiency mandated the addition of vitamins, instead of curing the cause of the deficiency arising from the mechanized methods of bread production, notably the continuing mixing method developed in the 1950’s, by which all ingredients are added to a slurry (a batter, not a dough), travelling by conveyor belt to the oven in the shortest time possible (a little more than three hours), thus eliminating the gradual rising process requiring extended periods of rest during which the bacteria in the yeast become active.
Altogether, the contrast between the industrial, mechanized methods of bread production, and traditional methods allowing for a long, gradual process of fermentation, could not be greater. Grains, like any seed, are naturally endowed with enzyme inhibitors and other anti-nutrients which protect them from premature germination during storage. These inhibitors are neutralized in the process of soaking and souring in the long and slow process of fermenting the grain which has been ground into flour, mixed with liquids of various kinds (water, beer, milk, for example) and inoculated with bacteria from a sourdough starter, added yeast, or by harvesting ambient fungi and lactobacilli in the local environment. Since these bacteria come from the baker’s own environment, they are in a way part of him or her, and support the baker’s health in a symbiotic relationship of mutually sustaining dependence. Furthermore, and this is centrally important to our topic, current microbiological research is discovering that the “toxic” peptides in the gluten protein are neutralized or digested by the microorganisms in the dough fermenting over a 24-48 hour period. In the course of this research, when bread made in this manner was given to recovering celiac patients, they were able to digest the bread with no ill effects. This report completely matches our own experience on the farm when we offered our sourdough rye bread, which had fermented over four days, to folks who were gluten intolerant. One of them, Joseph Freeman, a biodynamic farmer from Battleground, WA had eliminated all foodstuffs containing any gluten from his diet, until we told him about our rye bread. He tried it, with no ill effect, and since then has reintroduced bread, i.e. long-fermented, sourdough rye bread, to his diet. At a recent farm workshop at S&S Homestead, he reported about his experience, and two other workshop participants who were also gluten-intolerant, repeated his experiment with the same beneficial results. Another woman, Heather, who occasionally helps out on the farm and watched me bake bread over four days, said that she was gluten-intolerant, but with my encouragement ate some of our bread, and digested it without any trouble.
To put this in a wider perspective, let me cite three examples from other places in the world. Dr. Weston Price who in the 1920’s studied traditional diets in various parts of the world, reported on the peasants of Loetschental in Switzerland who lived on an exclusive diet of mostly sourdough rye bread and dairy products. Since, as Europeans, they were genetically predisposed to gluten intolerance, why was the disease unknown among them, in spite of the fact that bread was the mainstay of their diet?