Gluten and the American diet. A blog mirror rambling journey.

Wheat field, Walla Walla Washington, 1941.

This interesting item appeared on the always interesting A Hundred Years Ago blog just recently:

1919 Farwell & Rhines Gluten Flour Advertisement

As folks here know, I'll riff off of the excellent blog A Hundred Years Ago from time to time. When I do, I usually have already posted on the thread there and I usually post a link to my item here, if I build one based on one of the many interesting topics there.

In this case, I didn't comment and I'm not going to post a link back, as I want to avoid unintentionally offending, which would be easy to do with this post.

That's because I'm a "Gluten Skeptic", if you will, and somebody there has already noted in a comment to this post that they've had to give up foods with gluten.  I'm frankly of the opinion that most people who give up foods with gluten don't need to, just as I'm of the opinion that about 90% of our modern "must give up" food fads is not only a fad, it's part of the remaining Puritan DNA in our American culture.*  If we're not suffering we're just not living right.

Before we look at this, what the heck is gluten anyway?  Well, here's a snipped from an article in Scientific American:

Gluten is a protein found in many grains, including wheat, rye and barley. It's found in most breads, cereals, pastas and many processed foods, according to WebMD. People who have a condition called celiac disease develop an immune reaction to gluten that damages the intestine, and so they need to avoid the protein. About 1 percent of the population has celiac disease.

Wait a minute. . . not only do we now know what gluten is, but did that say 1% of the population has celiac disease?

Yes it did.

1%.

Now, in a country that is as populated as the United States is, 1% is not a small number.  It'd mean something like 3,600,000 people.  That's a lot.

But if you go through the store and read the articles and talk to people who really follow the latest trends in things, you'd be left with the impression that something like 30% of the population is wheat intolerant now, and that's just flat out bull.

The headline of that article was, by the way, the following:

Most People Shouldn't Eat Gluten-Free

Gluten-free products made with refined grains can be low in fiber, vitamins and minerals

Yup, most people ought to knock that off.

The article further noted:

For most other people, a gluten-free diet won't provide a benefit, said Katherine Tallmadge, a dietitian and the author of "Diet Simple" (LifeLine Press, 2011). What's more, people who unnecessarily shun gluten may do so at the expense of their health, Tallmadge said.

This article, I'd note, is kind.  I've seen others that just flat out state that most of the people who are dead set convinced they have some sort of intolerance to gluten are just flat out wrong.

While I'll not go into it, I'll also note that there's some speculation why we've arrived at a point where this is a concern when it wasn't previously.  If it hasn't always been the case that 1% of the population has been so afflicted, then there's something going on. And nearly anyone over 30 years of age can recall a time when there was no concern in this area whatsoever. That would suggest that this is a disease, for those who actually have it that has come on in very modern times. Why?

The same has been noted for allergies, I'll note.  The percentage of the population that suffers from allergies is higher today than at any time in t he past, and I'm in that group.  Why?

In my case, I'm certain its genetic.  I didn't lead a sheltered life indoors as a kid prior to my developing asthma, and my mother didn't douse the house with more anti biologic agents than are used in a biological weapons lab like most modern mothers seem to do (Americans are insanely germ phobic).  It's in my DNA, darn it.  And so is the case, no doubt for most of those with celiac disease. 

But if more people than the historical norm are developing this condition otherwise. . . something is going on.

Humans have eaten grains, we now know, back to the neolithic age.  For years and years archaeologists and anthropologists used to have the nonsensical idea, which a lot of them still advance, that there were hunters and gathers and then suddenly one day farmers sprang up and everyone moved to the farm.  That never made any sense and we now know that hunters and gatherers, in the regions friendly to grains, started cultivating it.  They did that for an extremely long, long time, before they settled on farms.  While that's another story, one we've already told, what that also tells us is that humans have been eating grains for a really long time, although not necessarily wheat for the whole time, but other grasses in addition to, or in place of, wheat.  Wheat has been cultivated, according to archaeologists from between 9,000 and 8,000 years ago, which means that in reality it's almost certainly been cultivated for 10,000 to 14,000 years.

It's never been grown everywhere, and that's important to note. The reason for this is that it's also fairly clear, but widely ignored, that individual human populations are evolved to eat certain foods more than others, or even where others are not. This is the entire basis of certain people being lactose intolerant. Cultures that have drank cow's milk for a long time are not lactose intolerant, as evolution operated against that condition.  Where cow's milk was not drunk, it wouldn't matter, and when the ancestors of people from those cultures encounter milk it can be unpleasant.

Mediterranean cultures have been growing wheat forever and it spread all over the grain growing regions of Europe in antiquity.  It was grown way out in the steppes, all over North Africa, as far north as Greenland, and into regions of Africa that are deserts and grow nothing today.  But that isn't everywhere.  That alone may explain the rise in gluten, which is in wheat of course, but also in rye and barely.  It isn't in rice, which is the other major grain spread all over the world.

But it isn't in simply everything either, and if its a much bigger problem now than it once was, there's a reason for that. The reason may not be there and it might not be a much bigger problem than it once was.  Or, if it is there, there's an explanation, but what is it?

One of the hypothesis that was advanced is that modern wheat flours had more gluten in them.  Indeed, the item noted above had been blended to triple the amount of gluten in the what in issue.  At least one study, however, has been skeptical of that explanation.

In response to the suggestion that an increase in the incidence of celiac disease might be attributable to an increase in the gluten content of wheat resulting from wheat breeding, a survey of data from the 20th and 21st centuries for the United States was carried out. The results do not support the likelihood that wheat breeding has increased the protein content (proportional to gluten content) of wheat in the United States. Possible roles for changes in the per capita consumption of wheat flour and the use of vital gluten as a food additive are discussed.

None of which gets back to the item originally linked in. . . or does it? 

A century ago, we find an advertisement, amazingly, for something with added gluten.  Why was that?

One thing is that it changed the consistency of bread, improving it.  It also boosted protein, but I don't know that this was the reason.  Indeed, I don't know what the real reason for really adding gluten was.

Quite a change from what we see today, of course, at the grocery store, where there are things you darned well know never had gluten in them, advertised as "gluten free".

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*The Puritan comment alone is likely to offend some and be cheered by others for the wrong reasons, but its meant sincerely.  One of the real offshoots of the Reformation was that certain strands of Protestant theology that rapidly developed contained a very strong sense of suffering and double predestination which provided no relief from it.  The Puritans, if recalled today positively for their "work ethic" and various virtues, were notable in this regard, although contrary to what people imagine, they weren't opposed to alcohol and they were very much not opposed to marital sex (something nearly completely forgotten about them).

This post doesn't deal with their theology in any meaningful sense, and it's not going to.  There are still those who fairly closely adhere to some variants of it, and this isn't intended to debate them. Rather, what it notes is that their early views and developed ones had a very strong influence on current cultural views, and likewise strains of thought developed during the Reformation continue to have an influence on European secular thought as well, even though those holding them would hardly recognize that and in fact would likely deny it.  A certain irony exists here, however, as the cliches of "Catholic guilt" and "Jewish guilt" are in fact largely wholesale myths, whereas the inherited need for suffering that springs to some degree from the Reformation isn't even really recognized.

The Puritans, whom we used to cite, and did cite up until very recently, as the foundational cultural pioneers of America, were opposed to all other religions and religious tolerance itself, and they were also extremely strictly opposed to a lot of activities that average people enjoyed, including sports, for example.  Activities on Sundays were extremely strictly limited where they held sway.  All this caused them to really be hated by people who had to deal with them who were not Puritans, including outright banning their presence in some areas of Colonial North America, but none the less,  as time developed in the United States, offshoots of their lines of thought continued to be influential and highly opposed to certain things.  Added to this, a very literal reading of certain portions of the New Testament, and the omission of study of others, lead to a sense that everything was foreordained and that most people were going to Hell, which made suffering on Earth the basic norm.  This line of thought, we should note, was by no means limited to the Puritans and it spread to some other Protestant regions during the Reformation, although it did not characterize all of them by any means and it has very much waned even among those Protestant faiths that descend from denominations that were sympathetic to that view.  Of interest to an upcoming post, it spread to Scandinavia late but took hold very strongly there, which has an impact on certain things today.

Be all that as it may, and without intending to offend anyone, in the modern United States the Puritan heritage in particular, and certain reformation strains elsewhere in Europe in general, while very much cast off by the population in religious terms continues to express itself in the idea that we must suffer, and suffering in diet is a good way to do that.  It also expresses itself in a certain desire to spread the suffering in a puritanical cultural way.  A person can hardly go to a restaurant, for example, in a group without somebody who has chosen to endure food deprivation of some sort making it public in the group and basically casting implied aspersions on those who don't join in the culinary grief.  We like to imagine that all of this is very much past us, but it isn't.  A person ordering a steak with a big side of wheat rolls is just as welcome at a lot of dinner tables in 2019 as a person ordering a bucket of beer would have been in 1919, or a person suggesting in a that everyone go enjoy a football game in England in 1645.

Again, this isn't intended to be a religious comment.  There remain those who hold views very close to those held by the Puritans, the Congregationalist is a direct descendant of them, and there are those who hold views that are close to theirs on most things or even stricter in regard to some.  The theological points that could be debated regarding those views aren't going to be debated here now or at any time. Rather, what's interesting about this is that the United States, culturally, is a very Protestant country, as are some European countries, even among those who don't recognize that or who are not Protestants of any kind.  It gets back to our Third Law of History.