My granddaughter had a miserable first few years with digestive problems which was eventually cured by a gluten free diet. It's a real pain continually avoiding wheat products but I saw an article suggesting that natural sourdough bread could be taken by most Celiacs a with no ill-effect. It has to be 100% naturally fermented sourdough though, not commercial so called sourdough, so you have to make it yourself.
We read up on how to bake sourdough and after some disasters both me and our granddaughter now get to eat real crusty old fashioned bread like I remember as a kid.
When we lived in Springfield Grove I would be sent to get the bread from Worths at the top of Victoria Way and would eat the crusty end piece and the black burnt bits on the slow walk home. I was amazed when I found the sourdough bread tasting just like I remember and it takes nothing more than flour, water, salt and patience. I've also stopped getting indigestion after eating bread.
Reading up on artisan baking it all makes sense why many people can't digest modern bread, it is not bread at all as our ancestors would have recognised, it is steamed flour and water with bubbles from artificially bred yeast that works with added sugar rather than the bread starch. Real bread is fermented flour and water and it takes upwards of 18 hours to happen. In the process the flour is converted into nutrients that the body can digest. It is not gluten which is the problem I believe, because sourdough has the same gluten as any bread, it must simply be that because modern bread is not fermented the gluten remains in a form which our system has not been designed to digest. Before the 1960s bread took longer to make even though commercial yeasts were used, so it had time to ferment. From the 1960s a new method of commercial bread making was invented that used foreign hard wheat so they could beat the daylights out of the dough and it took only minutes rather than days to produce bread.
Anyway, if there are any people having to avoid bread or struggle with indigestion after eating it, give it a try and I guarantee you will be hooked.
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They get their bread on prescription, which is just as well as they get through a loaf a day and it costs a bomb. You have to order the fresh stuff though. The stuff you get in shops is like cardboard.
None of that has anything to do with morality, but if the NHS is going to spend money on people who have no plans to stop eating, drinking and smoking to excess, then I have to say I have no qualms about getting my kids' bread on prescription.
Appl Environ Microbiol. 2004 Feb;70(2):1088-1096
Celiac.com 02/26/2004 - Please note that the sourdough bread used in this study is not your garden-variety sourdough bread, and as far as I know it is not commercially available. Even though this study had very promising results, it was conducted on a relatively small number of people, and larger studies need to be carried out before reaching any conclusions about the long-term safety of celiacs consuming this type of sourdough bread. -Scott Adams
Researchers in Europe conducted a novel study which utilized a highly specialized sourdough lactobacilli containing peptidases that have the ability to hydrolyze Pro-rich peptides, including the 33-mer peptide, which is the main culprit in the immune response associated with celiac disease. The sourdough bread in the study was made from a dough mixture that contained 30% wheat flour and other nontoxic flours including oat, millet, and buckwheat, which was then started with the specialized lactobacilli. After 24 hours of fermentation all 33-mer peptides and low-molecular-mass, alcohol-soluble polypeptides were almost totally hydrolyzed.
For the next step in the study the researchers extracted proteins fro the sourdough and used them to produce a "peptic-tryptic digest" for in vitro agglutination tests on human K 562 subclone cell. The agglutinating activity of the sourdough proteins was found to be 250 times higher that that of normal bakers-yeast or lactobacilli started breads.
A double blind test was then conducted in which 17 celiac disease patients were given 2 grams of gluten-containing bread started with bakers yeast or lactobacilli. Thirteen of them showed distinct, negative changes in their intestinal permeability after eating the bread, and 4 of them did not show any negative effects. The specially prepared sourdough bread was then given to all 17 patients and none of them had intestinal permeability reactions that differed from their normal baseline values.
The researchers conclude: "These results showed that a bread biotechnology that uses selected lactobacilli, nontoxic flours, and a long fermentation time is a novel tool for decreasing the level of gluten intolerance in humans."
Agree with regards obese alcoholics and smokers though
So, starting in January, I've gone on a gluten-free diet too. Haven't been able to stick to it so rigidly, but I've definitely noticed a difference in my digestion, almost immediately.
It is tough though, I REALLY miss bread. The GF stuff is simply not as good.
Coeliac disease is an illness, more so than pissed up people causing havoc in town centres every Friday night before abusing every A & E department.
Even worse was the bread we made for PKU patients, with no protein whatsoever in the bread - PKU means a severe intolerance to the amino acid phenyalanine.
The company I worked for even featured in a major film, whose name escapes me about a young child whose life is saved by being diagnosed & put on a special diet....
When my girls were diagnosed the doc said that one in a hundred have it, but only one in a thousand knows that they have it, so it might just be that diagnosis rates are up. There are plenty of misconceptions though, which does confuse the picture.
SLL, can't say I've tried that myself: will read up on it, thaks.
We've been eating fermented wheat for thousands of years because that's the only way its food value could be absorbed by the body, the alcoholic by-product didn't go amiss either. Modern bread is not fermented wheat, it is an over-processed industrial bread substitute, but obviously much cheaper than the real thing. That's the problem, real bread would be double the price which is why you should make it yourself. It is water, flour and salt and the only extra cost is your time.
As for gluten free bread, its the pits.
It is a condition that you can be born with, long before you ever get to taste your first slice of white Warbies toast.