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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I appear to be one of those weirdos who reacts to something in bread but not celiac.

I was watching that Michael Pollan series and he was talking about his theory that industrial bread was the problem and everyone would be fine if we went back to sourdough. Well this feels like one of those things that sounds good but has no substance, but clearly at this point I'm willing to try anything. There's a little bakery on my way home and they're open late. I've had half a loaf of sourdough bread in two and a half days and other than burping more, I feel no worse than I did last week.

What I wonder every time someone posts about ketosis is just how bad are sugars and starches for us, and how did we get this far without figuring it out?

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To answer your second question, this is something we knew and collectively forgot in the middle of the 20th century. Gary Taubes' theory is that if WW2 had not been so devastating, the European scientific community mighy have been healthy enough to prevent the "fat is bad" myth from taking over.

Stephen Jones is a wheat grower who is also an advocate for long rise times. You can read more about him and his ideas here: http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/cooking-tips/article/...

There's also more and more rhetoric now about the microbial gut biome and the various stuff that we eat nowadays (antibiotics in meat, artificial sweeteners) changes whatever balance we might have had, once upon a time... you get the idea. The more I read, the more it seems like my "sometimes this makes me sick and sometimes it doesn't" experience with food, wheat in particular, is due to something more complicated. Possibly the sprue stage is a symptom rather than its own disease?

I am the same. I did a 23andme and found I had the highest risk gene for Celiac (HLA-DQ2.5). If you have that gene, you get an inflammatory response to gliadin (one of the proteins in gluten and mimicked by proteins in other things) regardless of whether you develop the enteropathy of your intestines that is required for a Celiac diagnoses. Certain parts of Europe never ate bread until globalized food and did not evolve to digest triticea family plants. Eliminating these foods from my diet made me calmer than I have been in my entire life within a week. I find that flour is much worse than baked bread, and baked bread is much worse than sourdough. And this is reflected in the amount of unmetabolized gliadin in each of them. I tried reintroducing enough times to just give up and accept it. And I continue to feel better as time passes - so far no diminishing returns.

Most bakeries use commercial yeast in addition to starter in what they call sourdough. If you haven't already been doing this, you need to ask if there's commercial yeast in their sourdough. You might need to shop around to find a bakery that does it pure.

My partner has a similar condition (not celiac, not gluten sensitive, but 'something in bread' sensitive) and she found that sourdough from locally made starter was way easier on her system than anything from bakeries or the store.

(Source: We've been experimenting with breadmaking at home, so I've learned more than I ever expected to about bread over the past year.)

It's hard to not start a starter with yeast and can be dangerous to not use a commercial yeast to keep a starter going. If the conditions are not right or it's not a safe yeast colonizing your starter it can be deadly.

I don't have a strong opinion about the origin of the starter. It will definitely influence the flavor of the bread but other than that I don't think the origin is important. More important is the rise times. A longer rise is more likely to convert more sugars and also more likely to give indicators of a bad batch.

I heard a crazy thing last year that there's a wasp in France that harbors one of the yeasts that flavors the wines of the region. The wasps, while a pest, also end up inoculating the vines and grape skins with the 'right' kind of yeast.

I wondered about that. 'Tastes like sourdough' might not mean actually sourdough. Good to have a confirmation of my suspicions.

I said bakery, but there are commercial bakeries around and I meant a baker bakery (a boulangerie, if you will). The place I went to is the sort where you walk in, the bread is on wooden racks and they give it to you in a paper bag. I figured there are maybe three places I can think of that are more likely to be doing 'real' sourdough and they're all in the other direction.

Was posted a few months ago on HN: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...

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