Nutrition
The Seemingly Innocent Wheat
Wheat proteins like amylase-trypsin inhibitors trigger chronic inflammation throughout the body. Research demonstrates these effects can extend from the gut to the brain.
Nutrition
Wheat proteins like amylase-trypsin inhibitors trigger chronic inflammation throughout the body. Research demonstrates these effects can extend from the gut to the brain.
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We suspect we speak for most people when we say:
Bread, rolls, and cake … taste good.
Who doesn't enjoy a fresh, high-quality sourdough bread or a pizza made by a talented Italian baker?
That's why we'll never completely forbid wheat consumption to our readers. For many of us, a fresh roll on Sunday morning is simply a piece of life's pleasure. Fair point!
And yet we are plagued by diseases of civilization—the leading cause of death in Western countries—all of which share the common feature that they only kill because they are accompanied by chronic, low-grade inflammation.
It doesn't matter whether it's rapidly progressive Alzheimer's dementia, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease. Chronic inflammatory disease doesn't even have to be fatal to massively shorten our healthspan and severely limit our quality of life.
Consider obesity, gout, allergies, some cancers, even many mental illnesses—in the broader sense, diseases of civilization that "function" through inflammation.
In particular, white flour has no place in a preventive diet. In our energy-saturated world, empty calories without any physiological benefit are pure excess that promotes disease development.
The fact that our rolls are not something harmlessly innocuous becomes clear when you engage with the research of Professor Dr. Dr. Schuppan from Mainz.
His research focuses on a specific class of wheat proteins called amylase-trypsin inhibitors. These proteins in wheat actually serve the plant's predator defense mechanism. And apparently our immune system doesn't like this protein at all.
In a series of animal studies, Schuppan was able to show that ATIs…
Most recently, in 2023, a Schuppan study was published showing that "dietary wheat amylase-trypsin inhibitors exacerbate CNS inflammation in experimental multiple sclerosis"¹—in a dose-dependent manner.
In these studies, the poor mice, essentially fed rolls, had much worse progression in a model of multiple sclerosis. In the animals, inflammation spread from the intestine via lymphatic vessels all the way to the brain.
Schuppan and colleagues used ATI quantities in their research that occur in conventional food in our diets. An important point of criticism is certainly that these are not (yet) human studies.
But the fact that many people with autoimmune diseases achieve significant improvement through a well-known autoimmune protocol based on the wheat-reduced "Paleolithic diet" (Paleo-AIP; Wahls Protocol) fits at least anecdotally into the picture.
For us it should be clear: no, the usual wheat consumption is not "innocent" when it comes to the multitude of inflammatory diseases and metabolic disorders in our country.
That it naturally takes a long time to be broadly accepted is understandable and certainly due to our opening remarks. After all, it simply tastes too good, doesn't it?
