An Evolutionary Explanation for Gluten Intolerance

Just to clarify, these are the thoughts/findings of someone else... I just summarized.

 

Even so, vegetarianism doesn't figure into this... we're talking about processed foods here. Since our earliest years, we could eat both vegetation and meat. The versatility of our diet is evidenced by our dentition. We have canines, incisors and molars: we essentially have the choice of eating whatever we want. Thus, meat and vegetables are equally "correct" for a human diet.

 

Processed foods, on the other hand, were NOT available when we evolved. These are the foods that the research calls into question.

The author points to "meat and vegetables are equally "correct" for a human diet." WRONG meat and vegetables are not equally correct. Without meat the lack of vital sustaining nutrients is amplified and less than optimal. B-12 comes quickly to mind. Processed foods are of another nature all together and are not part of the author's vegetarianism.

Irradiation of wheat to kill insects started about 1970's.  I never heard of a person with gluten intolerance, nor knew of ANY, growing up before then.  Irradiation, I understand, can change certain qualities of the grain.  My grandmother - a great baker - often found the little pests (tiny bugs) in her flour which had perhaps been around a while.  I'd rather chance throwing out some old flour....than changing anything about the structure of wheat.

There is no evidence that irradiating wheat would make it toxic, or make it trigger celiac disease. Since celiac disease was really only discovered and described by medical doctors in the 1940's, it makes sense that it wasn't being diagnosed much just 30 years later. At that point it was mistakenly considered a rare disease that only 1:5,000 people had, but after blood tests for it were in wide use (1990's), it was discovered to be 1:133.