Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Has the Gluten Health Mystery Been Solved?
Mother Jones [1] / By Tom Philpott [2]
February 12, 2014 |
This article originally appeared on Mother Jones [3] and is reprinted here with their permission.
Washington State University’s agriculture research and extension facility in Mount Vernon, about an hour due north along the Puget Sound from Seattle, looks at first glance like any recently built academic edifice: that is to say, boring and austere. On the outside, it’s surrounded by test plots of wheat and other grains, as well as greenhouses, shrouded in the Pacific Northwest’s classic gray skies and mist. Inside, professors and grad students shuffle through the long halls, passing quiet offices and labs.
Yet one of those labs is not like the others — or any other that I know of, for that matter. When you look down the length of the room from the back wall, you see two distinct chambers, separated by long, adjoining tables: gleaming chunks of impressive-looking machinery to the left; flour sacks, mixing bowls, a large, multileveled oven to the right. And in place of the vaguely chemical smell of most university labs, you get the rich, toasty aroma of fresh-baked bread.
Mounted on the outer edge of the short wall that divides the two tables, there’s an image of a human brain, with its two halves. “Aha, that symbolizes the lab,” says lab staffer Jonathan McDowell. The left side is the “analytical laboratory, where raw objective data is generated by high-tech machinery,” he says, gesturing to a contraption that measures the protein level in flour. The right side, meanwhile, is the “intuitive laboratory of the artisan baker, where hands and palate are the means of validation.” Taken together, the Bread Lab is like a “unified mind, where science and art coalescence,” he says.
McDowell is a slender, bespectacled, slightly flour-dusted young man in red trousers, black loafers, and V-necked white T-shirt, his face framed by a thick beard and mop of close-cropped dark hair. He looks like he’d fit in better onstage at an indie rock show than at an ag research center in a rural county. Yet he couldn’t be more at home. McDowell is the staff baker here at the Bread Lab, the brainchild of Washington State wheat breeder Stephen Jones [4], who’s also the director of the Mount Vernon research outpost. Jones believes fervently that grain breeding — the art and science of creating new varieties — has been hijacked by large seed, milling, and baking interests, giving rise to high-yielding but boring varieties geared to the mass production of crappy, and mostly white, bread.
For the last half-century or so, says Jones, wheat has been bred for industrial mills, where it is ground and separated into its three components: flour, germ, and bran. Usually, the flour gets turned into white bread, while the germ and bran — which contain all of wheat’s healthy fats and fiber, and much of the vitamins — go to other uses, including supplements and livestock feed [5]. In most of what we now know as “whole wheat” bread, some — but not all — of the bran and germ are mixed back in. (Read Full Article)
To Your Health 