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

efforts to increase yield, so confident were plant geneticists that hybridization yielded safe products for human consumption, so urgent was the cause of world hunger, that these products of agricultural research were released into the food supply without human safety concerns being part of the equation.
    It was simply assumed that, because hybridization and breeding efforts yielded plants that remained essentially “wheat,” new strains would be perfectly well tolerated by the consuming public. Agricultural scientists, in fact, scoff at the idea that hybridization has the potential to generate hybrids that are unhealthy for humans. After all, hybridization techniques have been used, albeit in cruder form, in crops, animals, even humans for centuries. Mate two varieties of tomatoes, you still get tomatoes, right? What’s the problem? The question of animal or human safety testing is never raised. With wheat, it was likewise assumed that variations in gluten content and structure, modifications of other enzymes and proteins, qualities that confer susceptibility or resistance to various plant diseases, would all make their way to humans without consequence.
    Judging by research findings of agricultural geneticists, such assumptions may be unfounded and just plain wrong. Analyses of proteins expressed by a wheat hybrid compared to its two parent strains have demonstrated that, while approximately 95 percent of the proteins expressed in the offspring are the same, 5 percent are unique, found in
neither
parent. 5 Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with hybridization. In one hybridization experiment,
fourteen
new gluten proteins were identified in the offspring that were not present in either parent wheat plant. 6 Moreover, when compared to century-old strains of wheat, modern strains of
Triticum aestivum
express a higher quantity of genes for gluten proteins that are associated with celiac disease. 7
    A Good Grain Gone Bad?
    Given the genetic distance that has evolved between modern-day wheat and its evolutionary predecessors, is it possible that ancient grains such as emmer and einkorn can be eaten without the unwanted effects that attach to other wheat products?
    I decided to put einkorn to the test, grinding two pounds of whole grain to flour, which I then used to make bread. I also ground conventional organic whole wheat flour from seed. I made bread from both the einkorn and conventional flour using only water and yeast with no added sugars or flavorings. The einkorn flour looked much like conventional whole wheat flour, but once water and yeast were added, differences became evident: The light brown dough was less stretchy, less pliable, and stickier than a traditional dough, and lacked the moldability of conventional wheat flour dough. The dough smelled different, too, more like peanut butter rather than the standard neutral smell of dough. It rose less than modern dough, rising just a little, compared to the doubling in size expected of modern bread. And, as Eli Rogosa claimed, the final bread product did indeed taste different: heavier, nutty, with an astringent aftertaste. I could envision this loaf of crude einkorn bread on the tables of third century BC Amorites or Mesopotamians.
    I have a wheat sensitivity. So, in the interest of science, I conducted my own little experiment: four ounces of einkorn bread on day one versus four ounces of modern organic whole wheat bread on day two. I braced myself for the worst, since in the past my reactions have been rather unpleasant.
    Beyond simply observing my physical reaction, I also performed fingerstick blood sugars after eating each type of bread. The differences were striking.
    Blood sugar at the start: 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming einkorn bread: 110 mg/dl. This was more or less the expected response to eating some carbohydrate. Afterwards, though, I felt no perceptible effects—no sleepiness, no nausea, nothing hurt. In