Why do so many people now have trouble eating bread even though people have been eating it for thousands of years?

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Mind boggling.. :O

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Part of this is that it just *seems* like a new thing. Bread has been so common across most cultures, people didnt have an easy choice to avoid it. And the science understanding gluten or similar sensitivities is relatively new. So, previously, people would have these bad reactions and just suffer through them.

We didn’t have an obvious way to pinpoint the cause casually because bread is so endemic.

This is true for quite a lot of things. If your read older literature, youll see people described as ‘sickly,’ or ‘feeble.’ Those are vague of course, but in many cases, if you could time warp those people to this time, we would know what it was and maybe be able to treat it.

It think there is also a dose of probable poor self diagnosis in this. Bad diet, other bad habits, hearing about the new science or from people who legitimately have gluten sensitivities, they experiment on themselves. And it can easily be something else, like too much sugar, which is, to make it simple, sorta what very processed bread turns in to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The bread we have now is not like anything we have had before. The first issues we saw was in the 1800s when we started bleaching flour to make it look white. But this also removed important vitamins so people got scurvy from eating it. This is why flour is required to have certain vitamins and minerals added to it. And we are still eating bleached flour.

We have also been selectively breeding the grains to produce a lot of gluten and carbohydrates. This makes the bread fluffy and taste sweet. A lot of people who are allergic to gluten can eat the bread we were making 200 years ago but not modern bread. And modern bread contains a lot more easily digestible calories so you are more likely to get fat from eating bread then every before.

Another thing which have recently being highlighted is that modern grains have a lot more fructanes then ever before. Fructanes are sugar which is hard for your upper intestines to absorb but easy for your gut microbes to feast on. You may know fructanes from its part in darker beers and wines which have a negative effect on your digestion system. The lactose in milk is also a fructane but 30% of the population is immune to it. And now modern bread also have a lot of fructanes which does change how our digestion system reacts to it.

Edit: fructone -> fructane (curse you chemists for naming things so similarly)

Anonymous 0 Comments

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

It’s cheaper and much faster but more likely to cause inflammation.

Real bread baking takes time.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Worth keeping in mind that we live in a different world, and our bodies reflect it. A study was done recently that found that the Black Death selected for resistant humans, but that resistance likely came with mutations for autoimmune diseases.

Our bodies used to be riddled with parasites and exposed to lots more bacteria than now. Diets also had more wild plants, and a higher tolerance for bitter foods, both likely giving us plant compounds we no longer get. Our food was less clean, so we were also ingesting bread with more insect parts in it. This is all to say that our bodies evolved with very different inputs in mind than our highly processed cleaner foods.

We also know that ancient people suffered from a variety of chronic stomach issues, so we can’t even be sure this is a new thing.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Diagnosis bias(I think that’s what it’s called)

These problems always happened just as they do now.

People just weren’t as aware, if aware at all.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It seems like a new thing and while I don’t know what it is like for non-celiac gluten sensitive people, I can speak on celiac disease. I know that in WW2, when there was less bread, some sick children got healthier. When bread came back to tables, the kids got sick again. These sick children found to have celiac disease.

Celiac disease, affecting around 1% of the population (about half the amount of redheads in the world, for scale) is a weird disease with over 300 different symptoms, many of which can be explained away by other ailments. This makes celiac disease go under the radar a lot.

If the culprit is going under the radar, people don’t attribute bread to being the problem.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I have a daughter with celiac. She would complain her stomach hurt for years and we didn’t know why. It wasn’t until I pointed out to doctors that she wasn’t growing at age 5 that we tested her for celiac. In 1900 that’s not really a thing. You just have a short kid who complains about their stomach pains.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m a celiac and getting real sick of this information in this thread. No, celiacs cannot travel to Europe and magically eat their wheat because it’s somehow superior. Two, it’s not a new thing but the knowledge of it is more. When I was a kid I came from a long line of ‘banana babies” where babies that constantly were sick were just given a full banana diet. Three celiac disease is extraordinarily harmful. It cannot and should be compared to lactose intolerance. Will I shit my brains out? Yes, but that’s the very least of it. My original diagnosis was actually leukemia (luckily they were wrong) because my white blood cells were SO high from my autoimmune disease. Four, people can carry the celiac gene without having celiac disease. If you carry the gene it can activate for any reason during any part of your life. I was not born with celiac disease, but developed it after a traumatic car accident which I could only link in hindsight.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Back in the days you simply died. My father was diagnosed with celiac disease in his 60s. His mother died to anemia when she was 60, that was back in 1978. There is family history of people dying to anemia or “swamp feaver” in their 50s and 60s.