Wheat Belly. William Davis, MD

many other nations were unable to feed their populations, resulting in widespread hunger.

      In modern times, humans have tried to increase yield by creating new strains, crossbreeding different wheats and grasses and generating new genetic varieties in the laboratory. Hybridization efforts involved techniques such as introgression and “back-crossing,” in which offspring of plant breeding are mated with their parents or with different strains of wheat or even other grasses. Such efforts, though first formally described by Austrian priest and botanist Gregor Mendel in 1866, did not begin in earnest until the mid-twentieth century, when concepts such as heterozygosity and gene dominance were better understood. Since Mendel’s early efforts, geneticists have developed elaborate techniques to obtain a desired trait, though much trial and error is still required.

      Much of the current world supply of purposefully bred wheat is descended from strains developed at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMWIC), located at the foot of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains east of Mexico City. IMWIC began as an agricultural research program in 1943 through a collaboration of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government to help Mexico achieve agricultural self-sufficiency. It grew into an impressive worldwide effort to increase the yield of corn, soy, and wheat, with the admirable goal of reducing world hunger. Mexico provided an efficient proving ground for plant hybridization, since the climate allows two growing seasons per year, cutting the time required to hybridize strains by half. By 1980, these efforts produced thousands of new strains of wheat, the most high-yielding of which have since been adopted worldwide, from Third World countries to modern industrialized nations, including the United States.

      One of the practical difficulties solved during IMWIC’s push to increase yield is that, when large quantities of synthetic nitrogen-rich fertilizer are applied to wheat fields, the seed head at the top of the plant grows to enormous proportions. The top-heavy seed head, however, buckles the stalk (what agricultural scientists call “lodging”). Lodging kills the plant and makes harvesting problematic. University of Minnesota–trained agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, working at IMWIC, is credited with developing the exceptionally high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat that was shorter and stockier, allowing the plant to maintain erect posture and resist buckling under the large seed head. Short stalks are also more efficient; they reach maturity more quickly, which means a shorter growing season with less fertilizer required to generate the otherwise useless stalk.

      Dr. Borlaug’s wheat-hybridizing accomplishments earned him the title of “Father of the Green Revolution” in the agricultural community, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. On his death in 2009, the Wall Street Journal eulogized him: “More than any other single person, Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.” Dr. Borlaug lived to see his dream come true: His high-yield semi-dwarf wheat did indeed help solve world hunger, with the wheat crop yield in China, for example, increasing eightfold from 1961 to 1999.

      Semi-dwarf wheat today has essentially replaced virtually all other strains of wheat in the United States and much of the world thanks to its extraordinary capacity for high yield. According to Allan Fritz, PhD, professor of wheat breeding at Kansas State University, semi-dwarf wheat now comprises more than 99 percent of all wheat grown worldwide.

      BAD BREEDING

      The peculiar oversight in the flurry of breeding activity, such as that conducted at IMWIC, was that, despite dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of wheat and other crops in achieving the goal of increased yield, no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created. So intent were the efforts to increase yield, so confident were plant geneticists that hybridization yielded safe products for human consumption, so urgent was the cause of world hunger, that products of agricultural research were released into the food supply without human safety concerns being part of the equation.

      It was simply assumed that, because breeding efforts yielded plants that remained essentially “wheat,” new strains would be perfectly well tolerated by the consuming public. Agricultural scientists, in fact, scoff at the idea that breeding manipulations have the potential to generate strains that are unhealthy for humans. After all, breeding techniques have been used, albeit in cruder form, in crops, animals, even humans for centuries. Mate two varieties of tomatoes, you still get tomatoes, right? Breed a Chihuahua with a Great Dane, you still get a dog. What’s the problem? The question of animal or human safety testing was never raised. With wheat, it was likewise assumed that variations in gluten content and structure, modifications of other enzymes and proteins, qualities that confer susceptibility or resistance to various plant diseases, would all make their way to humans without consequence.

      Judging by research findings of agricultural geneticists, such assumptions are unfounded and just plain wrong. Analyses of proteins expressed by a wheat hybrid compared to its two parent strains have demonstrated that, while approximately 95 percent of the proteins expressed in the offspring are the same, 5 percent are unique, found in neither parent.¹⁰ Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with a method as basic as hybridization. In one hybridization experiment, fourteen new gluten proteins were identified in the offspring that were not present in either parent wheat plant.¹¹ Moreover, when compared to century-old strains of wheat, modern strains of Triticum aestivum express a higher quantity of genes for gluten proteins that are associated with celiac disease.¹²

      The changes introduced into wheat go even further, involving a process called chemical mutagenesis. BASF, the world’s largest chemical manufacturer, holds the patent on a strain of wheat called Clearfield that is resistant to the herbicide imazamox (Beyond). Clearfield wheat is impervious to imazamox, allowing the farmer to spray it on his field to kill weeds but not the wheat, similar to corn and soy that are genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate (Roundup). In their marketing, BASF proudly declares that Clearfield is not the product of genetic-modification. So how did they get Clearfield wheat to be herbicide resistant?

      Clearfield wheat was developed by exposing seeds and embryos to sodium azide, a toxic chemical used in industrial settings. If the compound is mixed with water or an acid or comes into contact with metal (for example, as a result of an accident in a laboratory) it can create a potentially deadly toxic gas. The sodium azide was used to induce genetic mutations in wheat seeds and embryos until the desired mutation was obtained. Problem: Dozens of other mutations were also induced, but as long as the wheat plant did its job in yielding satisfactory bagels and biscuits, no further questions were asked and the end product was sold to the public.¹³ In addition to the process of chemical mutagenesis, there are also gamma ray and high-dose x-ray mutagenesis, all relatively indiscriminate methods to introduce mutations.

      In the semantic game that Big Agribusiness likes to play, these methods do not fall under the umbrella of “genetic modification” even though they yield even more genetic changes than genetic modification. Clearfield wheat is now grown on about a million acres in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

      Surely the wheat industry deserves an honorary doctorate from the Vladimir Putin College of Obfuscation.

       A GOOD GRAIN GONE BAD?

      Given the genetic distance that has evolved between modern-day wheat and its evolutionary predecessors, is it possible that ancient grains such as emmer and einkorn can be eaten without the unwanted effects that accompany modern wheat products?

      I decided to put ancient wheat to the test, grinding 2 pounds of whole einkorn grain to flour, which I then used to make bread. I also ground modern conventional organic whole wheat flour from seed. I made bread from both the einkorn and conventional flour using only water and yeast with no added sugars or flavorings. The einkorn flour looked much like conventional whole wheat flour, but once water and yeast were added, differences became evident: The light brown dough was less stretchy, less pliable, and stickier than a traditional dough, and it lacked the moldability of conventional wheat flour dough. The dough smelled different, too, more like peanut butter rather than the standard neutral smell of dough. It rose less than modern dough, rising just a little, compared to the doubling in size of modern bread. And, as Eli Rogosa