Wheat Belly (Revised and Expanded Edition)

by William Davis

  Over time, the higher yielding and more baking-compatible Triticum aestivum species gradually overshadowed its parents, einkorn and emmer wheat. In the ensuing centuries, Triticum aestivum wheat changed little. By the mid-eighteenth century, the great Swedish botanist and biological cataloger, 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 Gosnold, first brought wheat to New England in 1602, followed shortly thereafter by the Pilgrims, who transported wheat with them on the Mayflower.

  WILL THE REAL WHEAT PLEASE STAND UP?

  What was the wheat grown ten thousand years ago and harvested by hand from wild fields like? That simple question took me to the Middle East—or more precisely, to a small organic farm in western Massachusetts.

  There I found Elisheva Rogosa. Eli is not only a science teacher but an organic farmer, advocate of sustainable agriculture, and founder of the Heritage Grain Conservancy (www.growseed.org), an organization devoted to preserving ancient food crops and cultivating them using organic principles. After living in the Middle East for ten years and working with the Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian GenBank project to collect nearly extinct ancient wheat strains, Eli returned to the United States with seeds descended from the original wheat plants of ancient Egypt and Canaan. She has since devoted herself to cultivating the ancient grains that sustained her ancestors.

  My first contact with Eli began with an exchange of e-mails that resulted from my request for 2 pounds of einkorn wheat grain. She couldn’t stop herself from educating me about her unique crop, which was not just any old wheat grain, after all. Eli described the taste of einkorn bread as “rich, subtle, with more complex flavor,” unlike bread made from modern wheat flour that she believes tastes like cardboard.

  Eli bristles at the suggestion that wheat products might be unhealthy, citing instead the yield-increasing, profit-expanding agricultural practices of the past few decades as the source of the adverse health effects of wheat. She views einkorn and emmer as the solution, restoring the original grasses, grown under organic conditions, to replace modern industrial wheat.

  And so it went, a gradual expansion of the reach of wheat plants with only modest and continual 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 (yielding 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, northern Italy, or Eli Rogosa’s farm. Courtesy of modern human-managed hybridizations and other genetic manipulations, Triticum species of today are thousands of genes apart from the original einkorn wheat that grew naturally, farther apart than you are from the primates hanging from trees in the zoo.

  Modern Triticum wheat 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.8 (Imagine this bizarre situation in the world of domesticated animals: an animal able to exist only with human assistance, such as special feed or antibiotics, else it would die.)

  Differences between the wheat of the Natufians and what we call wheat in the twenty-first century are evident to the naked eye. Original einkorn and emmer wheat were “hulled” forms, simply meaning that 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 seed from the chaff) easier, determined by mutations at the Q and Tg (tenacious glume) genes.9 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 and reflecting the extensive genetic changes that this grass has undergone.

  SMALL IS THE NEW BIG

  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 potatoes. The twentieth century introduced mechanized farm machinery that replaced animal power and increased efficiency, 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 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 involved 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 at the foot of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains east of Mexico City. 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 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 synthetic 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”). Lodging kills the plant and makes harvesting problematic. University of Minnesota–trained agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, working at IMWIC, is credited with developing the exceptionally high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat that was shorter and stockier, allowing the plant to maintain erect posture and resist buckling under the large seed head. Short stalks are also more efficient; they 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 semi-dwarf wheat did indeed help solve world hunger, with the wheat crop yield in China, for example, increasing eightfold from 1961 to 1999.

  Semi-dwarf wheat today has essentially replaced virtually all 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, semi-dwarf wheat now comprises more than 99 percent of all wheat grown worldwide.

  BAD BREEDING

  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 in achieving the goal of increased yield, 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 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 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 breeding manipulations have the potential to generate strains that are unhealthy for humans. After all, breeding 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? Breed a Chihuahua with a Great Dane, you still get a dog. What’s the problem? The question of animal or human safety testing was 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.

  Judging by research findings of agricultural geneticists, such assumptions are unfounded and just plain wrong. Analyses of proteins expressed by a wheat hybrid compared to its two parent strains have demonstrated that, while approximately 95 percent of the proteins expressed in the offspring are the same, 5 percent are unique, found in neither parent.10 Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with a method as basic as hybridization. In one hybridization experiment, fourteen new gluten proteins were identified in the offspring that were not present in either parent wheat plant.11 Moreover, when compared to century-old strains of wheat, modern strains of Triticum aestivum express a higher quantity of genes for gluten proteins that are associated with celiac disease.12

  The changes introduced into wheat go even further, involving a process called chemical mutagenesis. BASF, the world’s largest chemical manufacturer, holds the patent on a strain of wheat called Clearfield that is resistant to the herbicide imazamox (Beyond). Clearfield wheat is impervious to imazamox, allowing the farmer to spray it on his field to kill weeds but not the wheat, similar to corn and soy that are genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate (Roundup). In their marketing, BASF proudly declares that Clearfield is not the product of genetic-modification. So how did they get Clearfield wheat to be herbicide resistant?

  Clearfield wheat was developed by exposing seeds and embryos to the chemical sodium azide, a toxic chemical used in industrial settings. Human exposures to sodium azide have been documented, by the way, that resulted in immediate cardiac arrest and death. CDC poison control people advise bystanders to not offer CPR, as the hapless rescuer will die with the victim, and to not throw any vomit in the sink, as it may explode, and that has indeed happened in real life. So sodium azide was used to induce genetic mutations in wheat seeds and embryos until the desired mutation was obtained. Problem: Dozens of other mutations were induced, but as long as the wheat plant did its job in yielding satisfactory bagels and biscuits, no further questions were asked and the end product was sold to the public.13 And, of course, products made with Clearfield wheat now contain plenty of imazamox. In addition to the process of chemical mutagenesis, there are also gamma ray and high-dose x-ray mutagenesis, all relatively indiscriminate methods to introduce mutations.

  In the semantic game that Big Agribusiness likes to play, these methods do not fall under the umbrella of “genetic modification” even though they yield even more genetic changes than genetic modification. Clearfield wheat is now grown on about a million acres in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

  Surely the wheat industry deserves an honorary doctorate from the Vladimir Putin College of Obfuscation.

  A GOOD GRAIN GONE BAD?

  Given the genetic distance that has evolved between modern-day wheat and its evolutionary predecessors, is it possible that ancient grains such as emmer and einkorn can be eaten without the unwanted effects that accompany modern wheat products?

  I decided to put ancient wheat to the test, grinding 2 pounds of whole einkorn grain to flour, which I then used to make bread. I also ground modern conventional organic whole wheat flour from seed. I made bread from both the einkorn and conventional flour using only water and yeast with no added sugars or flavorings. The einkorn flour looked much like conventional whole wheat flour, but once water and yeast were added, differences became evident: The light brown dough was less stretchy, less pliable, and stickier than a traditional dough, and it lacked the moldability of conventional wheat flour dough. The dough smelled different, too, more like peanut butter rather than the standard neutral smell of dough. It rose less than modern dough, rising just a little, compared to the doubling in size of modern bread. And, as Eli Rogosa claimed, the final bread product did indeed taste different: heavier, nutty, with an astringent aftertaste. I could envision this loaf of crude einkorn bread on the tables of third century BC Amorites or Mesopotamians.

  I have a wheat sensitivity and become quite ill with any re-exposure. So, in the interest of science, I conducted my own little experiment: four ounces of einkorn bread on day one versus four ounces of modern organic whole wheat bread on day two. I braced myself for the worst, since my reactions have been rather unpleasant.

  Beyond simply observing my physical reaction, I also performed fingerstick blood sugar tests after eating each type of bread. The differences were striking.

  Blood sugar at the start: 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming einkorn bread: 110 mg/dl. This was more or less the expected response to eating some carbohydrate. Afterward, though, I felt no perceptible effects—no sleepiness, no nausea, no pain, no urge to pound something. In short, I felt fine. Whew!

  The next day, I repeated the procedure, substituting four ounces of conventional organic whole wheat bread. Blood sugar at the start: again 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming conventional bread: 167 mg/dl. Moreover, I soon became nauseated, nearly losing my lunch. The queasy effect persisted for thirty-six hours, accompanied by stomach cramps that started almost immediately and lasted for many hours. Sleep that night was fitful, filled with vivid, unpleasant dreams. The next morning, I couldn’t think straight, nor could I understand the research papers I was trying to read, having to read and reread paragraphs four or five times; I finally gave up. Only a full day and a half later did I start feeling normal again.

  I survived my little wheat experiment, but I was impressed with the difference in responses to ancient wheat and modern wheat in my whole wheat bread. Surely something odd was going on here.

  My personal experience, of course, does not qualify as a clinical trial. But it raises some questions about the potential differences that span a distance of ten thousand years: ancient wheat that predates the changes introduced by human genetic intervention versus modern wheat. (Please don’t interpret my comments to mean that heirloom or traditional strains of wheat are healthy
or benign: They have their own set of problems when unwitting humans consume them, something I shall discuss later.)

  Multiply these alterations by the tens of thousands of hybridizations, mutagenesis, and other manipulations to which wheat has been subjected and you have the potential for dramatic shifts in genetically determined traits such as gluten structure. And note that the genetic modifications inflicted on wheat plants are essentially fatal, since the thousands of new wheat breeds were helpless when left to grow in the wild, relying on human assistance for survival.14

  The new agriculture of increased wheat yield was initially met with skepticism in the Third World, with objections based mostly on the perennial “That’s not how we used to do it” variety. Dr. Borlaug, hero of wheat hybridization, answered critics of high-yield wheat by blaming explosive world population growth, making high-tech agriculture a “necessity.” The marvelously increased yields enjoyed in hunger-plagued India, Pakistan, China, Colombia, and other countries quickly quieted naysayers. Yields improved exponentially, turning shortages into surplus and making wheat products cheap and accessible.

  Can you blame farmers for preferring high-yield semi-dwarf hybrid strains? After all, many small farmers struggle financially. If they can increase yield-per-acre up to tenfold, with a shorter growing season and easier harvest, why wouldn’t they?