Chances are it's May NOT be the gluten!

     As soon as the "gluten bandwagon" hit, I was hit with a barrage of customers at my kitchen where I worked. Some were shy, some matter of fact and some downright indignant.  "Is what your serving gluten free"?  Is it,uh, (reading a note on paper) glutten free? Is the product gluten free?????
     It began to sound like the wicked witch of the west from the Wizard of Oz. "Is it gluten FREEEEEEEE? And your little dog too!  Apparently every celiac had moved to the small town of Boerne (pronounced burney) Texas.
     Isn't it amazing that people have "gluten issues" that weren't around when their mothers and grandmothers were little?  We have to ask ourselves what has happened that has caused these changes. It is not necessarily the gluten.
     Grinding wheat has been around for a millennia, however, today it is not even remotely the same milling process.
     Wheat is made up of three parts The outside is the bran with the middle being the germ and lastly, at the core there is the endosperm.  Each layer is has it's own importance nutritionally. Proteins, vitamins and a host of minerals as well as fiber are located in the bran itself. The middle layer, or the germ, has yet more protein but also fats and B vitamins to name a few. Essential amino acids are located in the endosperm.
     Wheat used to be harvested, (locally grown) and the entire grai
n milled between two large grinding stones. It was then sold locally and made into bread. The grinding stones caused a frictional heat which actually sealed in the nutrients.  Unfortunately, only the endosperm is actually necessary to make into flour. What kind of flour? The highly processed void of nutrients, vitamins and fiber kind of flour. You would have to tie me down and shove it down my throat while I attempt to scream that I would tell them any secrets they wanted to know. Also, where and how was it milled? What was the "quality" of the flour to begin with? The dead flour is then synthetically "enriched"  (not in adequate amounts to do any good) in an attempt to put some sort of nutrition back into it, thus making enriched flour one of worst things you can ingest.   It is through this modern milling that the problems really started with our intestinal systems.
      The medical field as early as the beginning of the 20th century were voicing their concerns stating  that the new milling process would overburden our intestines causing a host of devastating results.  Our country, in spite of all the protesting (even from the FDA which was still in it's infancy) went ahead with the process of destroying (as I call it) the beautiful grain of wheat.  Mass production was now possible and less labor was required. The flour now had a much longer shelf life, which to me is another red flag.  Part of further processing then makes the gluten "less elastic" and the quality goes further down hill.
     Do a little research and seek out stone ground wheat bread and flours for baking.  I live in the real world and when I bake I do combine flours.  I always make sure the flour is from a company that cares about the quality of their products. Now, after hearing all this, do you still think it's the gluten?  There may just be a whole lot more going on.
Check out some of these ingredients on these  .Just a few things to look for. Enriched flour, corn syrup, modified, artificial dyes and flavorings, partially produced with GMO's.