Evolutionary Association, Chapter 6: Sourdough
During the lockdowns, half the country suddenly took up making sourdough: flour sold out for a while, and in countless kitchens a jar of some moist, amorphous mass bubbled away to itself - no doubt the stuff has a proper name among the initiated. A hobby born of boredom - sure. But quite incidentally, millions of people thereby returned to a technique that does the grain some good that modern turbo-bread lacks - without anyone having intended it.
What exactly is going on there, we’ll get to. One thing at a time:
The Dietary Change
After the advent of agriculture, bread in its many forms became a staple food. Grain is today one of the most important global commodities, and the usual dietary guidelines are unthinkable without it. It happily turns up there as “wholegrain preferred” - but without any mention that both the white flour and the outer layers of the grain also carry risks - anti-nutrients - and how one might minimise them:
For a long time grain was fermented as sourdough - 24 hours, 48 hours or longer. A modern loaf of bread is finished today in less than 2 hours.
In parallel, in the middle of the last century a new variety of wheat, dwarf wheat, was bred, which is far higher-yielding than the old varieties, but also brings other properties with it.
The Phenomenon
Many people complain of bloating, irritable bowel, skin rashes, “brain fog"(1), without any classic coeliac disease(2) being present.
Medically, I quite often see “non-coeliac wheat sensitivity"(3) being called into question - but many people, myself included, report that a longer-term avoidance of grain products makes a big difference to these and other symptoms.
And since butterbei.de gives no medical advice anyway, it makes no difference whether medicine has a billing code for it or not: as long as people feel better without grain, I think it matters to know about this phenomenon, so that everyone can decide for themselves whether avoiding grain - and the potential absence of the symptoms described - is worth a personal experiment:
For my own life, generally feeling better is enough. I don’t need a medical diagnostic code to judge that.
The Biochemical Association
Let’s take wheat as an example. Wheat contains not only gluten, but also a whole lot of other nutrients and anti-nutrients - especially when it comes to wholegrain wheat.
Let’s see what sorts of processes these set off in digestion and in the body…
ATI: Amylase-Trypsin Inhibitors
A group of proteins in various types of grain that are essentially the built-in bug spray: these proteins suppress (“inhibit”) digestive enzymes - they serve to protect the seed, which is, after all, “the baby” of the plant.
They make up only 2-4% of the protein, yet they can cause quite a lot of trouble in the digestive tract. On top of that they are very stable - ordinary baking doesn’t bother them, and they aren’t fully digested either: blocking digestive enzymes is, after all, precisely their job, and one they do very well. So they often end up completely intact in our gut.
Via a receptor of the innate immune system(4), ATI trigger an inflammatory reaction and can provoke a cytokine response(5). This mechanism is a different one from what coeliac diagnostics look at: it runs via the innate immune system, whereas coeliac disease is defined via the adaptive one. An unremarkable coeliac test therefore does not rule it out.
One can imagine that triggering the immune system may well lead to symptoms - and when the immune system is triggered permanently, it all feels very much like an autoimmune disease - as if the body were attacking itself, even though it really only wants to eliminate the foreign proteins that have bound to its own cells.
Indeed, at least some of the symptoms listed above can be plausibly connected to these mechanisms: ATI act not only locally in the gut, but can also set off systemic inflammatory reactions(6). Whether that also explains something as diffuse as “brain fog” is an open question - from the digestive point of view the research reaches as far as systemic immune activation, but it does not (yet) make the leap to cognition. That leap would in any case sit more within the field of neurology or immunology than of gastroenterology. It is telling, at least, that precisely those fields discuss neuroinflammation, among other things, as a mechanism behind “brain fog"(1) - so again inflammation, just one floor up. That the systemic inflammation from the gut actually reaches that far is not thereby shown - but the two ends at least speak the same language.
From the plant’s side, that is exactly the point of ATI: they make eating its seed unattractive to the predator, and so secure the survival of its species.
FODMAP
Better known are FODMAPs(7) - some readers will surely have heard of them before; in some cases nutritional counselling even addresses them and advises caution or avoidance of FODMAPs.
The “fermentable” hints that these substances are in good hands in an article about sourdough, and the three “saccharides” tell us that they are carbohydrates (What is sugar?).
Fermentation produces gases - usually CO2 - and when the fermentation happens inside the body, for example in the gut, we already have a culprit for the “bloating” mentioned above; but an irritable bowel, too, can be explained very well by FODMAPs.
Phytic Acid (Phytate, IP6)
I have already written more about how phytic acid works in the article “Superfood or Antinutrient”. Rather than repeat it here, I will simply point to the relevant passage in that article:
Phytic acid and other anti-nutrients
Superfood or Antinutrient?
Foods praised for their ingredients often bring the antidote along too. How do antinutrients work? Can they be rendered harmless? A selection.
Read more →The Antidote: Sourdough?
Yes and no: FODMAPs already carry fermentability in their very name - and for them, a (sufficiently long) sourdough fermentation is an excellent means of moving the fermentation out of the gut and into the mixing bowl.
ATI, by contrast, are fairly resistant and react nowhere near as quickly. They are broken down considerably more slowly by fermentation, and so are usually still present, in reduced quantity, even after sourdough proving.
Phytates are found above all in the outer layers of the grain and are broken down well by sourdough fermentation. I consider it very negligent to recommend wholegrain cereals and then not spare a single word for the processing they need.
So we see: even if medicine shies away from a diagnosis of “non-coeliac wheat sensitivity”, the term works well enough as a description, because alongside gluten there are other constituents in grain that have effects of their own. Since these are present in gluten-free grain too, a gluten-free diet is not enough for those sensitive to them; it has to be “grain-free” - or (in the case of FODMAPs and phytate) a suitable “pre-digestion” that prepares the grain so that it no longer causes the body any problems.
A Detour into the Food Industry
With an increasingly industrial food supply, however, these techniques are more and more forgotten: in industrial processing, what counts in the end is simple production, little storage space, low time expenditure, or long shelf life, rather than a high content of well-unlocked nutrients. Bread is sold by weight, not by the effort put into making it.
If dough rises nicely within 30 minutes, then yeast and other leavening agents are naturally more attractive than a 48-hour sourdough fermentation, which also requires the appropriately temperature-controlled storage capacity to exist in the first place.
All of this, paired with the loss of knowledge about the importance and effects of sourdough fermentation, is a perfect storm:
The dietary guidelines recommend grain and wholegrain products at every level - but nowhere do they include the note that it also has to be prepared appropriately. Since hardly anyone prepares food themselves any more anyway, we rely more and more on industrial processing, which in turn has other priorities than the health of its customers or products (within certain limits, of course).
Conclusion
So we have a good explanation for why, even without coeliac disease, an - at least trial - avoidance of all grain can have far-reaching effects on one’s personal well-being.
The hurdle: many cannot imagine a life without grain. And the food industry likes to use grain in an enormous number of ready-made products. With these in particular, one can almost assume that no sufficient fermentation has taken place.
The next best alternative is therefore the appropriate preparation of grain, in order to deactivate the problematic substances as far as possible.
In my eyes, simpler than sourdough: doing without. At the very least it gives, even as only a temporary test, a very clear signal as to whether some constituents are problematic or not.
