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Comment by tmaly | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting for people with gluten allergies, maybe there is a way they could one day consume the ancient wheat.

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Gluten allergies are relatively rare and extreme. People with Celiac have a major, sometimes life threatening reaction to gluten.

People who do not have Celiac and say they are gluten sensitive usually are not. They are either experiencing a nocebo effect or have gas from other components of wheat rather than gluten. Actual non Celiac reactions to gluten are minor if they exist at all. So when someone says they are gluten sensitive it is overwhelmingly likely they either have Celiac and even a very very tiny amount of gluten will cause them horrible consequences, or they are incorrect and they are not sensitive to gluten at all.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27523634/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29102613/

More on the "other components" issue -- a lot of people have issues with some of the fermentable carbohydrates (e.g. fructans) in wheat, which also happen to be present in the other gluten-containing grains. "Have gas" is a bit of an understatement. For some people this can lead to cramps, vomiting, and other fairly severe digestive problems.

So people on the low-FODMAPs diet end up using "gluten free" as a convenient shorthand for "doesn't contain these particular grains".

To be fair, the people with psychogenic gluten intolerance have massively increased the availability and variety of gluten-free foods for people with real Celiac disease. They seem to be doing more good than harm on balance.

Probably also caused by other aspects of American wheat (many "sensitive" people notice they can eat bread in Europe just fine), such as higher glyphosate content, fortification with nasty stuff like vitamin A, possibly others.

I remember reading something about it on BBC, how over processed American Wheat ( or food in general ) leads to those symptoms and they can eat European products and bread just fine.

Yes. Whatever "over processed" means.

>nasty stuff like vitamin A

Pardon?

People get far too much of it (IIRC there even was a Polish study that kids already have a way too high intake), large parts of the population in most Western countries are liver toxic avoiding to analysis of accident victims, it significantly increases your osteoporosis risk, many people (anecdotally, including me) experience lots of health improvements after reducing their intake, and so on.

> People get far too much of it

I find it hard to imagine how. Carrots don't seem to be especially popular last I checked; and to my understanding, produce generally has become more nutrient poor in recent times due to soil quality issues.

The forms of vitamin A you get from carrots and other plants (called carotenoids) aren't toxic, but the form you get from animal products and supplements (called retinols) can be. The US recommended daily intake for an adult male is 900 μg, which is also the recommended daily maximum for 4-8 year old children. This maximum includes a hefty safety margin, so there's no reason to worry if your children eat the same food as you.

Except if you really like liver. Chicken liver contains more than 4000 μg/100g and the liver of other animals contain more. And then you start skirting dangerous levels. Apparently Inuits would avoid eating liver for this specific reason and a few Arctic explorers became ill partly because of this.

Sources: the Wikipedia articles on Vitamin A and Hypervitaminosis A, so reader beware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_A

It's all the same carotene, but you absorb less from plants (unless juiced or souped and combined with fat, then you will absorb a ton). And plants produce plenty - nutrient poor soil only refers to minerals.

The body also reduces conversion of BC to vitamin A, but that is no binary off switch.

Not sure where you get your safety buffer from. People certainly get symptoms from less.

20 years ago I was "that guy" who went "uhm, actually, you almost certainly don't have celiac". Alas, my efforts did not stop the trend, and today the nocebo effect for gluten has become a multi-billion dollar racket.

And you know, the life of celiacs has improved a lot since then. Thanks to gluten sensitive people I, as a person with celiacs, can find some gluten free food in shops and even gluten free restaraunts in many big cities. Standard restaurants are not an option for me due to high chance of cross-contamination. I'm very thankful for this trend!

The "relatively rare" in numbers: so far, it's been assumed that about 1% of the population is celiac.

Italy recently started screening kids nation wide. Initial results are showing that of 4.4% of kids are affected. [1]

Celiac disease is massively under-diagnosed and GPs knowledge about the disease is limited. Also, celiac disease might cause issues which are not directly gut related: one might end up with a B12 or iron deficiency, one might get migraines, fatigue, gluten induced ataxia and many many more.

[1] https://celiac.org/2025/09/24/how-research-is-shaping-italys...

Celiac has a very high incidence in northern Spain as well - they attribute it to having a very similar Celtic genetic profile as the Irish.

Your first paragraph is correct but the second doesn't necessarily follow as there's other disease inflammation that resembles gluten sensitivity like that caused by Giardia. See the discussion here on an instance of giardiasis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855307

There's also things found alongside gluten like arabinoxylan which promotes the growth of certain bacteria like prevotella. At this I should mention that a possibly helpful daily breakfast to address digestion issues (with both prebiotics and probiotics) is greek yogurt + frozen blueberries + chopped walnuts. Source: https://www.northwell.edu/news/insights/are-blueberries-good... (see also doi:10.3390/nu10020244, doi:10.1016/j.jnutbio.2017.07.001, doi:10.1002/mnfr.202300096)

These studies are far less certain than you are. Also, gluten sensitivity is not just gas.

I don't think you are responding to what my post actually says.

Statistically there is still room for there to be some unexplained physical reaction to gluten that is not explained by Celiac. However, nonexistence of such a reaction is also compatible with the studies. What is not compatible with the studies is more than a single digit percentage of non Celiac having people, as a % of people who claim to be gluten sensitive, being able to even detect whether they are fed gluten vs a placebo, despite it being very trendy to claim that you are 'gluten sensitive'.

> People who do not have Celiac and say they are gluten sensitive usually are not.

“We don’t know any (other) mechanism by which gluten could hurt them, hence their lived experience is invalid.”

I _suspect_ gluten can contribute to my brain fog. The problem is, there are so many variables it is next to impossible to change only one in daily life. In fact, when you dig into it, so much literature is just trash as experiments don’t control for all variables.

Hence, I don’t claim that it does. But pasta reliably makes me a zombie and something like potato doesn’t, so glucose can’t be the mechanism.

Body is a complex system and pretending we understand it is hurting people.

Lived experience is not worth much when it fails to replicate while blinded. See Chinese Food Syndrome (MSG). Have you double blind tested whether gluten affects you beyond a statistical reasonable doubt? Food sensitivities hard to pin down and not usually immediate, so it ends up with a lot of magical thinking.

Heh, stats won’t help you with n=1!

Double blind? The only thing I can think of would be huge amounts of capsules, and even then there’s no guarantee a burp would not disclose what was eaten.

Designing a good experiment for this is seriously tough.

You could probably make a spicy bread soup or something but yeah it would be hard to be sufficiently blinded

This is a great example of modern attempts to claim that disagreeing with someone is 'literally violence'. Whenever I hear it I recognize it for what it is, an attempt to flip the script and turn a complete lack of any evidence or logic into a winning hand. Everyone has lived experience, and it's all equally worthless as a trump card to shut up people who are saying things that displease you.

Rarity depends on the local population, in Ireland its at least 1% of the population but probably higher as some people are asymptomatic and go undiagnosed.

Since you can't infect others with celiac, isn't "asymptomatic" essentially the same as "not having it"?

That day could be today: https://www.molinograssi.it/en/retail-line/miracolo-line/

There are US-based sellers of ancient wheat (both berries and milled flour) as well.

Here's one that I learned about via their YouTube channel

https://mtranchrescue.com/products/7-s-true-whole-wheat-flou...

This still contains gluten. It can't be consumed by celiacs.

Not really. Still has gluten - just less.

There are already things like gluten free wheat starch if you want wheat without gluten, but you still have to work around not having the gluten. Like the article alluded to, it is needed for breads to rise.

From what I understand, most "ancient" grains had far less gluten; it's the modern variants that have caused the widespread gluten issues we see today.

That's obviously an oversimplification.

American Red wheat is, as far as I know, the "hardest" wheat on the planet - breadmakers use it to "fortify" flours from Europe that do not have enough gluten (... forming amino acids).

Whilst having a high amount of gluten forming amino acids might sound good in prinicple, in fact breads do not rise as well when too much is present (the gluten is too strong, fighting the expansion of the dough from the leavening agent).

Cakes require flours to have less gluten forming amino acids again.

I'm not sure about pastry though, a bottom pastry for a pie I would guess needs to be quite strong, but I have no idea if there is an upper limit.

The point here is, flours can be as strong as they like, but too much is actually bad for breadmakers - meaning - gluten levels in the diet aren't changing that much.

Edit: I forgot to mention, some parts of China have a pure gluten dish - where they hydrate the gluten forming amino acids, then "wash" the starch out, leaving only the gluten, which they then cook and eat - so 100% Gluten

Seitan is a pretty common food among plant-based eaters.

I don't know if the new varieties caused the gluten intolerance problems, but, no, the ancient varieties have less "quality" gluten. It means that the ratio between glutenin and gliadin is skewed in a way that the gluten can't trap the gas to give it big volume.

[1]https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/10/11/1763

[2]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6769531/

I use every week these ancient grains because they give a different flavor to the bread (and not only in bread). I also, sometimes, replace 20-30% of wheat with oat, buckwheat, quinoa, barley flours etc.

What gluten issues do you have in mind here?

Vague digestion issues, maybe that has an effect.

For celiac there's not much evidence that the difference would change whether someone develops it, and once they do develop it even minuscule amounts are very bad for them.

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