Are you sure it’s the gluten*? or are you a victim of marketing?
(*This article is only to highlight whether you are sensitive to gluten, and does not relate if you have Celiac’s disease or any other gluten intolerance which may endanger your life!)
Let’s put this on the table right now – I love bread.
I ate homemade bread most of my childhood, mainly local Caribbean breads. Once a month a family friend brought us a hefty brown loaf of delicious manna, flavoured with local molasses. There was the Sunday treat called a Light Sweet Bread (I guess because it was lightly sweetened?), a small loaf that was studded with raisins brushed with a shimmer of sugar glaze and was awesome with Cheddar cheese for school lunch the following day - if it lasted. There were small bap-like breads called Salt Breads which, prior to baking were given a small strip of banana leaf – awesome with fish and pepper sauce! All these breads were prepped the day before and ready to bake off the next day. Then one day a digit of the commercial and corporate fingers, which had started to slowly take over the world, hooked us and we fell into the trap to purchasing a plastic bag of sliced Wonder Bread. What a strange experience that endure the better part of a week. It was soft. It was super-soft. It was flavourless. It made for terribly sticky sandwiches that stuck to the inside of plastic lunch boxes in the tropical humidity and heat. It later grew a black mould! Our island bread mould was usually a whitish-grey, but this looked like a black gross spider that quickly formed into a monster. It was a stomach churning experience and that was the end of the sliced bread experiment for us.
The best thing since sliced bread is probably the most ridiculous phrase uttered when one considers how harmful sliced processed bread is for the human body. It has destroyed the ability for the body to process gluten from a grain which humans have been eating for millennia. Yet, within the course of twenty years a vast percentage of the US population claim (through brilliant marketing schemes) to be gluten sensitive or intolerant. Why?
It primarily boils down to the manufacture of processed bread.
The average bread recipe calls for nothing more than flour, water, salt, maybe a small amount of yeast, is allowed to rise for hours, punched down and risen again before baking. If sourdough bread is being made this may mean as much as 3 days for a loaf to be made, and it will last about a day or two before it has to be recreated into another creation. Hence we have recipes such as bread pudding, pain perdu, French toast, croutons, breadcrumbs…anything to not simply toss stale bread.
A commercially made loaf has in as much as 22 ingredients and can be sourdough ‘flavoured’! A loaf of bread can be pumped out in less than 3 hours, due to the use commercial yeast that not only is it “fast acting”, but is used in two to three times the amount of what is used in a traditionally made, fermented loaf of bread! They also last for days, maybe weeks.
We are walking around with more gut and heartburn issues than ever.
Processed breads contain a myriad of chemicals and have a weak crumb structure ... think super soft. They relieve us of chewing so much when chewing is essentially the most important role in eating. Properly chewing any food before it is swallowed, allows the food to be properly broken down with acids in your mouth, and nutrients to be dispersed in the body before it reaches the stomach and small intestine, so they do not have to work so hard and so many beneficial nutrients are not lost. Now take the loaf of traditional bread which has been allowed to slowly rise, ferment, develop structure and break down gluten proteins. Non-scientifically speaking, fermentation is akin to the first stage of chewing, so that by the time that loaf has been baked and we take a bite, we are further breaking down and consuming less gluten than what is in a commercially processed ultra-soft loaf.
So why do we in America continue to purchase flabby, tasteless industrial bread? Convenience mixed with a tablespoon of laziness and a pinch of political economics. America is vast and corporations are rampant. Big chains dominate the landscape and push out mom and pop stores and artisan makers in small towns. Therefore the one-stop-shop has become the way of life and who has the time or can be bothered to learn how to make their own bread for better health?
In Europe there are far less cases of gluten intolerance and sensitivity, because they are still in the habits of buying fresh bread on a daily basis. There are still village and corner shop bakeries which practice old world methods and techniques, and though that is slowly changing, there is also a strong pushback movement from bakers to help keep you and your gut healthy by creating wonderfully fermented and flavourful breads and re-introducing old world grains as well.
Experiment and introduce a small piece of truly fermented sourdough bread into your life and see how that make you feel.
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