Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (4 page)

The result: A loaf of bread, biscuit, or pancake of today is different than its counterpart of a thousand years ago, different even from what our grandmothers made. They might look the same, even taste much the same, but there are biochemical differences. Small changes in wheat protein structure can spell the difference between a devastating immune response to wheat protein versus no immune response at all.

Wheat is uniquely adaptable to environmental conditions, growing in Jericho, 850 feet below sea level, to Himalayan mountainous regions 10,000 feet above sea level. Its latitudinal range is also wide, ranging from as far north as Norway, 65° north latitude, to Argentina, 45° south latitude. Wheat occupies sixty million acres of farmland in the United States, an area equal to the state of Ohio. Worldwide, wheat is grown on an area ten times that figure, or twice the total acreage of Western Europe.

The first wild, then cultivated, wheat was einkorn, the great-granddaddy of all subsequent wheat. Einkorn has the simplest genetic code of all wheat, containing only fourteen chromosomes. Circa 3300
BC
, hardy, cold-tolerant einkorn wheat was a popular grain in Europe. This was the age of the Tyrolean Iceman,
fondly known as Otzi. Examination of the intestinal contents of this naturally mummified Late Neolithic hunter, killed by attackers and left to freeze in the mountain glaciers of the Italian Alps, revealed the partially digested remains of einkorn wheat consumed as unleavened flatbread, along with remains of plants, deer, and ibex meat.
¹

Shortly after the cultivation of the first einkorn plant, the emmer variety of wheat, the natural offspring of parents einkorn and an unrelated wild grass,
Aegilops speltoides
or goatgrass, made its appearance in the Middle East.
²
Goatgrass added its genetic code to that of einkorn, resulting in the more complex twenty-eight-chromosome emmer wheat. Plants such as wheat have the ability to retain the
sum
of the genes of their forebears. Imagine that, when your parents mated to create you, rather than mixing chromosomes and coming up with forty-six chromosomes to create their offspring, they
combined
forty-six chromosomes from Mom with forty-six chromosomes from Dad, totaling ninety-two chromosomes in you. This, of course, doesn’t happen in higher species. Such additive accumulation of chromosomes in plants is called polyploidy.

Einkorn and its evolutionary successor emmer wheat remained popular for several thousand years, sufficient to earn their place as food staples and religious icons, despite their relatively poor yield and less desirable baking characteristics compared to modern wheat. (These denser, cruder flours would have yielded lousy ciabattas or bear claws.) Emmer wheat is probably what Moses referred to in his pronouncements, as well as the
kussemeth
mentioned in the Bible, and the variety that persisted up until the dawn of the Roman Empire.

Sumerians, credited with developing the first written language, left us tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets. Pictographic characters scrawled on several tablets, dated to 3000
BC
, describe recipes for breads and pastries, all made by taking mortar and pestle or a hand-pushed grinding wheel to emmer wheat. Sand was often
added to the mixture to hasten the laborious grinding process, leaving bread-eating Sumerians with sand-chipped teeth.

Emmer wheat flourished in ancient Egypt, its cycle of growth suited to the seasonal rise and fall of the Nile. Egyptians are credited with learning how to make bread “rise” by the addition of yeast. When the Jews fled Egypt, in their hurry they failed to take the leavening mixture with them, forcing them to consume unleavened bread made from emmer wheat.

Sometime in the millennia predating Biblical times, twenty-eight-chromosome emmer wheat
(Triticum turgidum)
mated naturally with another grass,
Triticum tauschii,
yielding primordial forty-two-chromosome
Triticum aestivum,
genetically closest to what we now call wheat. Because it contains the sum total of the chromosomal content of three unique plants with forty-two chromosomes, it is the most genetically complex. It is therefore the most genetically “pliable,” an issue that will serve future genetics researchers well in the millennia to come.

Over time, the higher yielding and more baking-compatible
Triticum aestivum
species gradually overshadowed its parents einkorn and emmer wheat. For many ensuing centuries,
Triticum aestivum
wheat changed little. By the mid-eighteenth century, the great Swedish botanist and biological cataloguer, Carolus Linnaeus, father of the Linnean system of the categorization of species, counted five different varieties falling under the
Triticum
genus.

Wheat did not evolve naturally in the New World, but was introduced by Christopher Columbus, whose crew first planted a few grains in Puerto Rico in 1493. Spanish explorers accidentally brought wheat seeds in a sack of rice to Mexico in 1530, and later introduced it to the American southwest. The namer of Cape Cod and discoverer of Martha’s Vineyard, Bartholomew Gos-nold, first brought wheat to New England in 1602, followed shortly thereafter by the Pilgrims, who transported wheat with them on the
Mayflower.

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 modest
human 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.

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 several
goats 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 worldwide were unable to feed their populations, resulting in widespread hunger.

In modern times, humans have tried to increase yield by creating new strains, crossbreeding different wheats and grasses and generating new genetic varieties in the laboratory. Hybridization efforts involve techniques such as introgression and “back-crossing,” in which offspring of plant breeding are mated with their parents or with different strains of wheat or even other grasses. Such efforts, though first formally described by Austrian priest and botanist Gregor Mendel in 1866, did not begin in earnest until the mid-twentieth century, when concepts such as heterozygosity and gene dominance were better understood. Since Mendel’s early efforts, geneticists have developed elaborate techniques to obtain a desired trait, though much trial and error is still required.

Much of the current world supply of purposefully bred wheat is descended from strains developed at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMWIC), located east of Mexico City at the foot of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains. IMWIC began as an agricultural research program in 1943 through a collaboration of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government to help Mexico achieve agricultural self-sufficiency. It grew into an impressive worldwide effort to increase the yield of corn, soy, and wheat, with the admirable goal of reducing world hunger. Mexico provided an efficient proving ground for plant hybridization, since the climate allows two growing seasons per year, cutting the time required to hybridize strains by half. By 1980, these efforts had produced thousands of new strains of wheat, the most high-yielding of which have since been adopted worldwide, from
Third World countries to modern industrialized nations, including the United States.

One of the practical difficulties solved during IMWIC’s push to increase yield is that, when large quantities of nitrogen-rich fertilizer are applied to wheat fields, the seed head at the top of the plant grows to enormous proportions. The top-heavy seed head, however, buckles the stalk (what agricultural scientists call “lodging”). Buckling kills the plant and makes harvesting problematic. University of Minnesota-trained geneticist Norman Borlaug, working at IMWIC, is credited with developing the exceptionally high-yielding dwarf wheat that was shorter and stockier, allowing the plant to maintain erect posture and resist buckling under the large seed head. Tall stalks are also inefficient; short stalks reach maturity more quickly, which means a shorter growing season with less fertilizer required to generate the otherwise useless stalk.

Dr. Borlaug’s wheat-hybridizing accomplishments earned him the title of “Father of the Green Revolution” in the agricultural community, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. On his death in 2009, the
Wall Street Journal
eulogized him: “More than any other single person, Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.” Dr. Borlaug lived to see his dream come true: His high-yield dwarf wheat did indeed help solve world hunger, with the wheat crop yield in China, for example, increasing eightfold from 1961 to 1999.

Dwarf wheat today has essentially replaced most other strains of wheat in the United States and much of the world thanks to its extraordinary capacity for high yield. According to Allan Fritz, PhD, professor of wheat breeding at Kansas State University, dwarf and semi-dwarf wheat now comprise more than 99 percent of all wheat grown worldwide.

The peculiar oversight in the flurry of breeding activity, such as that conducted at IMWIC, was that, despite dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of wheat and other crops, no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created. So intent were the 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.