Why you are wheat intolerant
ARE you wheat intolerant? Are you illiberal about your wheat? Why are more of us allergic to bread? Well, the wheat we eat is pretty new:
[M]odern wheat remained essentially the same until the mid-twentieth century, when the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMWIC) and other wheat research centers set out to combat world hunger. Over the following decades, thousands of new varieties were created to dramatically increase yields. …
[William Davis, author of Wheat Belly] writes, “The 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.”
Can technology be blamed? Or can be lay the food intolerances at the feet of that other great 20th century revolution: the growth of the therapy industries?
Photo: Dan Gumbrell, a typical old English Farmer, lighting his pipe in a wheat field, c1900.
Posted: 17th, April 2012 | In: The Consumer Comments (4) | TrackBack | Permalink
