Across the country, Americans have begun realizing they have a gluten sensitivity — but other countries don’t have the same issue. And according to Christian homesteader Michelle Visser, it’s not the fault of bread, but rather, how it’s made in America.
“Talking about other countries, back when we were adding into our flour and enriching it, other countries didn’t do that. In fact, in Italy, they had a pellagra outbreak around the same time that we were dealing with it here, but they responded completely different in little towns in Italy,” Visser tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey.
“They literally built communal ovens, bread ovens, and they encouraged them to use good grains, which had not gone through the green revolution of our country … and make whole wheat bread,” she explains.
“They knew that it was related to folate, and they knew it was dietary, and they said, ‘What can we do? We have in these small towns a lot of poor people who can’t necessarily afford good food. So one thing is, let’s at least give them the equipment to make the bread,’” she continues.
And the result of this, Visser explains, was wiping out pellagra — which was attributed to spoiled bread and polenta.
“So do you think gluten is unfairly demonized?” Stuckey asks.
“I think it is,” Visser says, using Norman Borlaug, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, as an example of being focused on the wrong issue when it comes to gluten.
“He had figured out how to manipulate wheat to give it a higher yield and to just simply grow more wheat for your buck. And while there’s definite advantages to understanding plant science, unfortunately, every time that we genetically change or we breed certain characteristics into any of our food, we are losing some nutrition,” she tells Stuckey.
“When they started milling it with the steel mills, they went from 20 barrels of flour a day to 500 barrels of flour a day with no extra energy, no extra expense. So there’s definitely money involved in the whole story is what I’m saying,” she explains.
“This bread that has been stripped of the good stuff, inserted with the synthetic stuff, that is maybe what’s causing the problems, especially in America,” Stuckey comments, surprised.
“Yeah,” Vasser confirms, noting that we’ve also added more protein into modern-day wheat, which has created a “franken-wheat.”
And then on top of what already is “franken-wheat,” wheat manufacturers have begun using pesticides and herbicides.
“If you are not buying organic flour, glyphosate is in trace amounts in your flour. It’s just, it’s there … if we are exposing our gut to glyphosate, we are killing the good bacteria. We’ve had gut problems in this country for many decades … and I think a lot of it has to do with this glyphosate in our flour.”
Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
The post ‘Franken-wheat’: The real reason Americans can’t eat bread anymore appeared first on TheBlaze.
