- I have an embarrassing confession to make.
A few years ago, Poo-Pourri would have made
a very good father's day gift for me,
and an even more thoughtful one for my family.
- What can be done of that subtle scent
of a 300 cow dairy farm?
Aerosol air fresheners aren't the most effective option,
or the healthiest.
So, how do you make the world believe
your poop doesn't stink?
Or, in fact, that you never poop at all?
Poo-Pourri.
- I thought I had been dealt a very unfortunate genetic hand
and there was nothing to be done,
but to keep a bottle of Poo-Pourri Royal Flush handy
to hide my shame.
My stomach had always been this way.
It simply boiled and roiled a lot.
As much as I love the Alka-Seltzer ads when I was a teen,
plop, plop, fizz, fizz didn't work for me.
- I can't believe I ate that whole thing.
- [Ralph's Wife] You ate it, Ralph.
- I can't believe ate that whole thing.
- [Ralph's Wife] Take two Alka-Seltzer.
- I guess I thought I do Ironman triathlons,
which make you eat a ton.
So the engines gotta boil and toil
to process 5,000 calories per day, right?
I don't have the genes for celiac disease
that can produce symptoms like that,
and I had read that only maybe 16% of people
who think they have gluten intolerance, actually do.
But, just in case, I eliminated gluten for 90 days
and as if by magic, a lifetime of symptoms vanished.
Major spousal points.
Here's the crazy thing.
After the 90 days I tried to reintroduce
whole wheat bread again, and no symptoms.
How could that be?
Does your doctor have a poop chart on the wall
showing how they're supposed to look?
In my life, I had never scored a bullseye on that chart
and now I was a master of it while eating wheat.
I just shrugged it off and thought, "anecdote."
We'll probably never know why,
and let's just hope it doesn't return.
But then a family member took a very
sophisticated wheat sensitivity test
with incomprehensible list of chemical indicators
that indicated she had major non-gluten wheat sensitivity.
So, I went on a fascinating journey of discovery
to see if there's a simple explanation we can all understand
for why we're seeing gluten-free labels everywhere.
In this episode, I'll take you on my journey
and hopefully by the end of the episode
you'll be saying, "Ah, okay,
this is starting to make some sense."
The first thing that jumped out at me
is how doctors, scientists and food companies
all use the terms wheat and gluten
without explaining what they mean.
Do they mean this? What about this?
What about ancient forms of wheat, like einkorn and spelt?
The original wheat in einkorn,
a simple plant that's found in the wild.
Archeologists believe they have evidence
that primitive humans gathered it to eat
at least 30,000 years ago.
It makes for beautiful weighty green fields
because the stalks are tall
and the seeds on top are small and light.
Somehow, some renegade einkorn corn got together
with goat grass more than 10,000 years ago
and each of them took the rare step
of pooling their 14 chromosomes,
becoming the 28 chromosome wheat, emmer,
which also grows wild.
And then emmer got together with another goat grass,
maybe 6,000 years ago to form the 42 chromosome spelt,
the first bread wheat.
All three played a huge role in the formation
of civilization and the rise of
Egyptian, Phoenician, and Roman empires.
Early grains had heavy husks,
which protected them against insects,
so they could be grown without herbicides.
But removing the husks was a lot of work.
The killer feature among 42 chromosome bread wheat
that caused it to become the most popular grain
in the world is the strong elastic gluten
that let the bread rise so high.
The public preferred the color of bread wheat to be white,
not the yellow of older wheat.
So breeders obliged, unwittingly breeding
up the healthy orange and yellow carotenoids.
The steel mill revolution of the 1870s
made it easier to separate the bran and germs,
so it essentially put the stone grinding mills
out of business, making bread even whiter.
Wheat breeders obliged the millers
and made the bran hard and brittle.
Easy to chip off, but bad for foods like whole grain pasta,
because the bran made for a hard scratchy texture.
Italians love their pasta, however.
- Bon appetit.
- So they stuck with durum wheat.
- You need semolina durum wheat.
- Which is yellow, soft, and sticks together.
It has a different, more nutritious, profile.
and this is where our story becomes absolutely astonishing.
FDR and Harry Truman became very concerned
about starving nations like Mexico, India, and Pakistan,
so they helped convince the Rockefeller Foundation
to fund a small plant research outpost in Mexico.
They recruited an idealistic young plant scientist
who left his cushy job at DuPont
for an opportunity to help solve world hunger.
He was influenced by the starvation
he saw in American cities during the depression.
So he labored in obscurity for years in primitive conditions
in Mexico, working in the fields for 12 hours a day
to crossbreed wheat varieties to get resistance
to disease and high yields.
After years of fighting with his bosses
and other plant breeders who thought his methods were crazy,
his long suffering saint of a wife, Margaret,
drove out to the field where he was working with a coworker,
got herself on the wrong side of a canal
and shouted across the field,
"Norman, you've won the Nobel Prize."
And he shot back and waved and went back to work
until an Associated Press reporter paid some kids
some pesos in town to tell him where Dr. Borlaug was.
Dr. Borlaug went on to be awarded
the Congressional Gold Medal,
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 50 honorary doctorates,
and the highest civilian honors you can receive
from countries like Mexico, Pakistan, and India.
There's a statue of him in the Capitol rotunda.
He's considered the father of the green revolution
who may have saved as many as
2 billion people from starvation.
Ninety-five percent of the wheat we eat today
comes from his disease resistant high yield varieties.
The other 5% is mainly durum, for Italian style pasta.
I laugh when I think of all the research methods that Norman
used to make so many breakthroughs with his wheat.
Wheat is self pollinating, So it takes a lot of dexterity
with tweezers to figure out how to cross-pollinate
different varieties of wheat.
So he recruited what must've been future Rubik's cube stars
from nearby towns and paid them some pesos
to work the tweezers.
He was already paying some of them to chase birds
from the fields, and this way they could earn enough money
to go to school, and he could speed up
his plant breeding revolution.
I found a book written by one of his colleagues,
Noel Vietmeyer, that was so fascinating
I blew off a whole night's sleep to read it.
Norman had a long list of criteria for his best varieties,
the first of which was disease resistance.
Unfortunately, disease resistance
is usually orthogonal to nutritional content.
Unless, of course, you can achieve it
by mechanical means, like a heavy husk.
Hm. Like the heavy husks that ancient grains have
that help them fight off insects and grow in the wild.
Here's a food made resistant to bacteria and fungus.
They've been sitting on my counter for eight months.
and so far, no bacteria or fungus has touched them.
We have cockroaches out in our backyard,
so I set some Twinkies out at night
to see if there were any cockroach takers.
I apologize in advance
for my poor cockroach language skills,
but I think this is what their leader told me.
Yeah. What do you think we're stupid or something?
We're not touching that cockroach poison.
Why don't you give it to some human children
and see if they develop wheat intolerance or something?
- Hey.
- But say, why don't you spread a few of them
einkorn kernels out in the backyard? Delicious.
So the next criteria for Norman was yield
and he famously figured out that he could grow
big heads of wheat on dwarf stocks
and the heads could be heavy and still not break the stocks.
And he bred varieties that could tolerate heavy doses
of nitrogen to grow big berries.
and that was a bonanza for the big chemical companies
who had every incentive to promote his wheat.
And he had to please the bakers who wanted strong gluten
to make the bread raise high and the millers
who wanted easy to mill wheat.
Nutrition wasn't something he could test for or think about.
And he was a strong believer in chemicals like DDT.
So armed with that context around wheat, I was eager
to hear what doctors say who recommend gluten-free diets.
There's Dr. Davis who wrote Wheat Belly.
- No wheat, no grains, especially modern wheat,
modern high yield semi dwarf wheat
created in the laboratory.
- Dr. Perlmutter who sometimes appears in vegan conferences.
- I make sure, as best I can, that my patients
get the message that they've got to ditch gluten 100%.
- Here's the thing. Totally gluten-free diets are difficult.
They send you to other hyper industrialized foods
that have their own set of problems.
And you have to ignore the overwhelming
amount of research that says for a large majority of people,
whole grains are super healthy.
- It is very important to have a medical diagnosis
before starting any restrictive diet.
If you have celiac disease, this is a medical indication
for a gluten free diet.
If you are not celiac, then it is not that clear
that a gluten-free diet is going to be
the healthiest option for you.
When you do a gluten-free diet, you are withdrawing
fiber, fermentable foods, that are important
for your gut health.
- So I wanted to know what doctors say
who recommend diets high in whole grains,
like the Mediterranean and vegan diets.
Here's the gastroenterologist Will Bulsiewicz
who wrote the book Fiber Fueled.
You must carry the gene for celiac to get it.
About 35% of Americans carry the gene for celiac disease
but only 1% manifest the disease.
In the last 50 years, we've seen a 500% increase
in celiac disease. So what explains the rapid increase?
Dr. Elena Verdu from McMaster University in Canada
showed us through a series of eloquent studies
that there are three criteria that must be met
to develop celiac disease.
One, presence of the gene. Two, exposure to gluten.
And three, you guessed it,
alteration or damage to the gut microbiota.
Fascinating, but I would've thought me and my family member
who had wheat sensitivity had champion microbiomes.
We both don't eat any refined foods and I've hardly ever
had antibiotics, certainly not any strong ones.
- What about so called ancient grains?
Are they any better than modern varieties?
- There was Dr. Greger who did a video on studies
comparing the heritage wheat Kamut
to the wheat most of us are eating,
and the health differences seem stunning to me.
- So after switching to the ancient grain,
patients experienced a significant global improvement
in the extent and severity of symptoms
related to their irritable bowel.
What about liver inflammation?
The liver function of those
with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
randomized to eat Kamut improved compared to those
eating the same amount of regular wheat.
This suggesting Kamut is superior in diabetics
better cholesterol and insulin sensitivity
on the same ancient grain.
In those with heart disease, better blood sugar control
and better cholesterol, better artery function
in those without overt heart disease.
The bottom line is findings derived from human studies
suggest that ancient wheat products
are more anti-inflammatory and improve things
like blood sugar control and cholesterol.
- But that was a short video and I wanted more.
One thing that was disturbing, at least to me,
is the diet doctors often use the word 'rare'
referring to celiac disease.
Actually, the definition of rare diseases in America
is one in 200,000 and celiac is more like one in a hundred.
And non-celiac wheat sensitivity
may be even higher than that.
So I turned to doctors who specialize in celiac disease
and learned some fascinating things.
- [Ciaran Kelly] Because at the time,
the accepted prevalence of celiac disease in the US
was in the order of one in 5,000.
But that has changed dramatically.
- The most frequent way that disease presents today
is anemia, and with that, chronic fatigue.
- [Ivor Hill] We used to think that oats are the problem,
but it seems in retrospect, oats was contaminated
with wheat flour during the milling in the processing plant.
So that's why it was implicated.
For many, many years, people have wondered
why it's so variable.
You can have celiac disease presenting very early.
You can have celiac disease presenting late.
You can have severe symptoms, minor symptoms.
And so people have often suggested
there's an additional trigger factor.
You have the gene, you eat the wheat,
but there's additional trigger factor
that then precipitates the disease.
- So what we have found is that the bacteria
that you have in your small intestine
will significantly contribute to the digestion
and modification of those peptides.
- So yes, fascinating, but still hardly any mention
of the characteristics of the wheat we're consuming.
If only there were a plant scientist who understood wheat
and modern farming practices,
and was involved in human health studies.
That would be the man or the woman of the hour.
But sadly, to me, it sounded like a unicorn
that probably doesn't exist.
And that's when I discovered an amazing book
by unicorn Bob Quinn, PhD, plant biochemist,
organic farmer specializing in Kamut ancient wheat.
And the man behind the studies, Dr. Greger,
cited earlier in this episode.
I'm glad you wore your big hat.
- Oh yeah. I couldn't.
I'd feel half naked without it, you know?
- Ah, you look good in that
and that's your wheat in your hat?
- Yep. That's the Kamut.
- Oh, that's really great.
You think people's sensitivity to wheat
is somewhere around 12% to 20% now?
- That's what the literature says.
- I've also heard you say there are four things
that are contributing to it.
- Well, I tell people that have trouble
there are four things you can do
to probably give yourself an 85% to 95% chance,
a real high chance, that you will no longer
have trouble with wheat.
So the first one is to eat only ancient heirloom varieties,
and make sure that that's what they are
and it's just not some fancy marketing thing.
The second is to eat only organic,
so you don't have the possibility of having
eating chemical residues.
Glyphosate, for example, so the main component of Roundup,
imitates some of the same symptoms that people feel
and blame on wheat sensitivity.
- Glyphosate is an antibiotic too, right?
- It is. And that's how it works.
The third thing is eat whole grain.
And the fourth thing I'd say to people is to eat sourdough.
If you're going to eat bread, eat sourdough,
because sourdough is a fermentation is made from bread.
It's been fermented for at least overnight,
sometimes 24 hours, sometimes longer than that,
particularly, if they're refrigerating it.
And it's being fermented by a combination of yeast
and bacteria, and within 48 hours,
about 90% of your gluten is destroyed.
So even in 24 hours, or even 12 hours,
you're getting a significant reduction in gluten
the way it exists in a yeasted bread.
And yeasted bread, as I mentioned earlier,
is made with fast rising yeast.
It doesn't, and the bakers don't even give it time
to start to digest the gluten or the starch in the bread
because they add sugar to the bread.
And the yeast is immediately attacking the sugar
because it's so simple to breakdown.
Any one of those four will help you,
but putting all four together will give you
the maximum possibility for being able to enjoy wheat again.
- A lot of conventional bread is,
from dough to loaf, in about four hours.
Our sourdoughs and our breads take about 60 hours.
- Now watch your heads as you come down here.
- We start soakers and pre-ferments on one day.
- This is our sourdough soaker.
This'll start fermenting naturally.
Good bread in the bake house starts here.
- We come in the following day
and we incorporate them into a dough,
usually with some sourdough starter for leavening.
We bulk ferment them for about four hours
before shaping them.
And those will ferment overnight in the cooler.
- Let's just see how you do on this ingredient list.
- Okay. Are you keeping tally?
- So this is a big brand.
This is Oroweat.
The main claim here is that it's double the fiber.
- Okay. What does that mean?
- It's double.
- Double the what?
- Well, their wheat must be better than your wheat
because this wheat has double the fiber.
- Right. We use all the fiber it comes with,
so I guess that's only a single dose.
- This has 36 grams of whole grains per two slices.
I don't know what that means.
And the package that I got a couple of months ago
said no nonsense ingredients.
So don't be calling any of this nonsense.
I noticed they took that off the ingredients list now.
Okay. Whole wheat flour, We know something about that.
Water. Wheat gluten.
- Yeah.
- So they're adding wheat gluten.
- Yep.
- Sugar.
- Yep.
- Modified wheat starch.
- Wheat gluten's probably coming from Europe
because they have access to send to us
after they make starch out of it.
And it's added to a lot of bread
to help it to rise even more.
- I see. Modified wheat starch. What does that mean?
- I don't know how they're modifying it.
I wouldn't, I don't know.
- I'm gonna have to dock you one point on that.
- Yeah. I can't.
- Cellulose fiber
- Cellulose is from wood.
- They're adding wood pulp to it.
- Yeah.
Yeah. That doesn't market well, right?
That doesn't market quite as well.
- Really? They're adding wood pulp to ice cream
and everything else? I don't know if it's-
- Well, it's fiber.
I mean, everybody wants more fiber
instead of eating the plants whole.
- Yeah.
- Novel idea.
Then they add something like-
- Wood chips.
- Probably a lot cheaper.
We know that there's lots of wood chips around.
- Yeah. Next time I take down one of my trees I'll know
to grind it up and throw it in food.
- That's right.
- Just to be clear, Bob's recommendations were for people
who have wheat sensitivity, not celiac disease.
People with celiac can't even have heritage sourdough.
Bob is such a jewel.
I'll post the complete interview in a few days.
So after all that, what are my conclusions?
The first one is that the big agricultural companies
are turning wheat into an unhealthy factory food.
Just like they're doing with other foods
where they can make billions by turning agriculture
into a chemical and antibiotic arms race.
The second is that as scary as celiac disease is,
it doesn't compare to the diseases like cancer
and heart attacks we get from animal and refined foods.
If you do get celiac disease,
at least you can make a complete recovery
with foods like oats, quinoa, rice, and buckwheat.
- If you go on a gluten free diet,
that's the landmark treatment of celiac disease,
you completely reverse the out immune process.
Because these people will have no symptoms anymore
and the damage of the intestine that is the own mark
of the out immune insult is gone.
- When I started eating wheat again,
we went for organically grown heritage wheats
and maybe that's what made the difference.
We're lucky to have a great bakery nearby
that sells organic sourdough heritage breads.
Mm.
Turns out you can make awesome sourdough breads
from heritage grains. Who knew?
Mm.
On behalf of our new favorite unicorn,
thank you so much for watching.
We hope you'll give it a like.
We'd love to read your comments.
And can I just say that Kamut bread
with a little nut butter on it really is delicious?
Mm.
Oh yeah.