Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health Read Online Free PDF Page A

cultivating them using organic principles. After living in the Middle East for ten years and working with the Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian GenBank project to collect nearly extinct ancient wheat strains, Eli returned to the United States with seeds descended from the original wheat plants of ancient Egypt and Canaan. She has since devoted herself to cultivating the ancient grains that sustained her ancestors.
    My first contact with Ms. Rogosa began with an exchange of e-mails that resulted from my request for two pounds of einkorn wheat grain. She couldn’t stop herself from educating me about her unique crop, which was not just any old wheat grain, after all. Eli described the taste of einkorn bread as “rich, subtle, with more complex flavor,” unlike bread made from modern wheat flour, which she claimed tasted like cardboard.
    Eli bristles at the suggestion that wheat products might be unhealthy, citing instead the yield-increasing, profit-expanding agricultural practices of the past few decades as the source of adverse health effects of wheat. She views einkorn and emmer as the solution, restoring the original grasses, grown under organic conditions, to replace modern industrial wheat.
    And so it went, a gradual expansion of the reach of wheat plants with only modest and gradual evolutionary selection at work.
    Today einkorn, emmer, and the original wild and cultivated strains of
Triticum aestivum
have been replaced by thousands of modern human-bred offspring of
Triticum aestivum,
as well as
Triticum durum
(pasta) and
Triticum compactum
(very fine flours used to make cupcakes and other products). To find einkorn or emmer today, you’d have to look for the limited wild collections or modesthuman plantings scattered around the Middle East, southern France, and northern Italy. Courtesy of modern human-designed hybridizations,
Triticum
species of today are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of genes apart from the original einkorn wheat that bred naturally.
    Triticum
wheat of today is the product of breeding to generate greater yield and characteristics such as disease, drought, and heat resistance. In fact, wheat has been modified by humans to such a degree that modern strains are unable to survive in the wild without human support such as nitrate fertilization and pest control. 3 (Imagine this bizarre situation in the world of domesticated animals: an animal able to exist only with human assistance, such as special feed, or else it would die.)
    Differences between the wheat of the Natufians and what we call wheat in the twenty-first century would be evident to the naked eye. Original einkorn and emmer wheat were “hulled” forms, in which the seeds clung tightly to the stem. Modern wheats are “naked” forms, in which the seeds depart from the stem more readily, a characteristic that makes threshing (separating the edible grain from the inedible chaff) easier and more efficient, determined by mutations at the
Q
and
Tg (tenacious glume)
genes. 4 But other differences are even more obvious. Modern wheat is much shorter. The romantic notion of tall fields of wheat grain gracefully waving in the wind has been replaced by “dwarf” and “semi-dwarf” varieties that stand barely a foot or two tall, yet another product of breeding experiments to increase yield.
SMALL IS THE NEW BIG
    For as long as humans have practiced agriculture, farmers have strived to increase yield. Marrying a woman with a dowry of several acres of farmland was, for many centuries, the primary means of increasing crop yield, arrangements often accompanied by severalgoats and a sack of rice. The twentieth century introduced mechanized farm machinery, which replaced animal power and increased efficiency and yield with less manpower, providing another incremental increase in yield per acre. While production in the United States was usually sufficient to meet demand (with distribution limited more by poverty than by supply), many other nations