Wheat Belly. William MD Davis
Читать онлайн книгу.
Peace Prize in 1970. On his death in 2009, the Wall Street Journal eulogised 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 per cent 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 make-up 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 hybridisation 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 hybridisation 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 hybridisation has the potential to generate hybrids that are unhealthy for humans. After all, hybridisation 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.
Judging by research findings of agricultural geneticists, such assumptions may be 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 per cent of the proteins expressed in the offspring are the same, 5 per cent are unique, found in neither parent.5 Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with hybridisation. In one hybridisation experiment, fourteen new gluten proteins were identified in the offspring that were not present in either parent wheat plant.6 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 coeliac disease.7
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 attach to other wheat products?
I decided to put einkorn to the test, grinding 900 grams of whole grain to flour, which I then used to make bread. I also ground 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 flavourings. 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 lacked the mouldability of conventional wheat flour dough. The dough smelt 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 expected 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. So, in the interest of science, I conducted my own little experiment: 115 grams of einkorn bread on day one versus 115 grams of modern organic whole-wheat bread on day two. I braced myself for the worst, since in the past my reactions have been rather unpleasant.
Beyond simply observing my physical reaction, I also performed fingerstick blood sugars 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. Afterwards, though, I felt no perceptible effects – no sleepiness, no nausea, nothing hurt. In short, I felt fine. Whew!
The next day, I repeated the procedure, substituting 115 grams of conventional organic whole-wheat bread. Blood sugar at the start: 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, though filled with vivid dreams. I couldn’t think straight, nor could I understand the research papers I was trying to read the next morning, 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 the ancient wheat and the 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.
Multiply these alterations by the tens of thousands of hybridisations 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 created by hybridisation for the wheat plants themselves were essentially fatal, since the thousands of new wheat breeds were helpless when left to grow in the wild, relying on human assistance for survival.8
The new agriculture of increased wheat yield was initially met with scepticism 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 hybridisation, answered critics of high-yield wheat by blaming explosive world population growth, making high-tech agriculture a ‘necessity’. The marvellously 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 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?
In the future, the science of genetic modification has the potential to change wheat even further. No longer do scientists need to breed strains, cross their fingers and hope for just the right mix of chromosomal exchange. Instead, single genes can be purposefully inserted or removed, and strains bred for disease resistance, pesticide resistance, cold or drought tolerance, or any number of other genetically determined characteristics. In particular, new strains can be genetically tailored to be compatible with specific fertilisers or pesticides. This is a financially rewarding process for big agribusiness, and seed and farm chemical producers such as Cargill, Monsanto and ADM, since specific strains of seed can be patent protected and thereby command a premium and boost sales of the compatible chemical treatments.
Genetic modification is built on the premise that a single gene can be inserted in just the right place without disrupting the genetic expression of other characteristics. While the concept seems sound, it doesn’t always work out that cleanly. In the first decade of genetic modification, no animal or safety testing was required for genetically modified plants, since the practice was considered no different than the assumed-to-be-benign practice of hybridisation. Public pressure has, more recently, caused regulatory agencies, such as the food-regulating branch of the FDA,