A paper appearing on PLOS One today suggest that switching to Sourdough bread products can significantly reduce the symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).
IBS is something of a catch-all diagnosis of a number of gastrointestinal disorders usually involving excess gas, bloating, pain, etc. It is often confused with Celiac disease — the disease spawning the current Gluten Free diet fad.
The PLOS One study, done at The University of Reading in the UK, suggests that the problem may be related to how we make our bread and the differences in intestinal bacteria that is induced by different bread making processes.
It turns out that most bread is made differently in the UK. Due to the type of low-protein grain available in the UK most bread was made with the Chorleywood bread process which is characterized by high speed sheering (cutting) mixers (and tight control of air pressure) that mix bread so fast that they need external cooling. This method is also characterized by very short fermentation (rising) time. This method is used in over 80 percent of factory-produced bread in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and India, but is virtually unknown in North America due to higher protein grains.
The scientists compared Chorleywood bread (type A) with yeasted long fermentation bread (type B) and Sourdough bread (type C).
In general, IBS subjects showed higher rates of gas production compared to healthy controls. Rates of gas production for type A and conventional long fermentation (type B) breads were almost identical in IBS and healthy subjects. But Sourdough bread produced significantly lower cumulative gas after 15 h fermentation as compared to type A and B breads in IBS subjects.
The sourdough bread also tended to make more butyrate during digestion. According to a Japanese Study:
The researchers, led by a group from the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS-RCAI) in Kanagawa, believe their findings make a case for using butyrate to treat inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn's disease.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Friday October 31 2014, @08:48PM
A few years ago I got interested in transglutaminase, the so-called meat glue. It's an enzyme that joins other proteins together and is deactivated with heat. At the time chefs like Wylie Dufresne were making shrimp spaghetti with it, I thought it might improve the texture of my imitation buffalo mozzarella (goat milk has a protein that affects the ability to form firm curds). The advice on egullet at the time was to contact one of the manufacturers with a story and asking for a sample. I did that and they accidentally sent me back an email intended for a large southern hemisphere bread manufacturer. The problem they were having was there was so little flour (gluten) in the bread they were having trouble forming a dough, they needed transglutaminase to hold the "dough" together.
Also, most products labelled sourdough are type A or B breads. They do have a preferment with all the right acids and organic compounds to taste authentic, but it's added to an ordinary commercial dough at the last minute, it doesn't have the required long rise times for the microflora to start breaking down the inflammatory compounds that are prominent in modern wheat. Get your sourdough from a good local bakery, or buy a culture from Ed Wood and make it yourself. He has one from the Ischia Island Bakery near Naples that is hundreds of years old and is particularly nice.
(Score: 1) by jpkunst on Friday October 31 2014, @08:56PM
Just stop eating bread (and other stuff) made from wheat altogether. Best dietary change I ever made, a few years ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jcm on Friday October 31 2014, @10:04PM
My IBS symptoms completely disappeared in one week along with a chronic dermatitis.
I was always tired and depressed before.
Now, I sleep much less and eat much less, since my body needed more food because it couldn't make us of the wheat.
My advice:
In my case, the only thing I lost is the "gas belly" that disappeared after one week of diet (and that reappears in 30 minutes when I ingest gluten).
Of course, there are substitutes, but they are very costly, and frankly tasting not very good.
Once the renouncement has been accepted, gluten-free diet is very easy.
You probably don't need it.
Curiously, all extensively "engineered" food is poison for my body.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Saturday November 01 2014, @12:48AM
Not all soy sauce has wheat, traditionally fermented soy sauce has none. I suddenly became allergic to gluten four months ago and I'm finding you don't have to give up much at all. The Caputo gluten free 00 flour is expensive but it tastes pretty good and can make everything from biscuits to pasta to pizza. Eating out can be hard though.
(Score: 1) by jcm on Sunday November 02 2014, @11:25AM
Agreed, but all cheap soy sauces contain gluten.
Tamari-shoyu is the original soy sauce, but you cannot even be sure that it's gluten-free.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday November 01 2014, @03:13AM
when eating in a restaurant, choice becomes very limited
My son has medically diagnosed celiac, for the last decade or so its steak / salad and variations on that theme. Buffets are awesome.
By personal choice I try to eat paleo-ish food (never eat something less paleo if theres a more paleo alternative) and we end up eating pretty much the same thing. This won't work for a real allergy, but for a "personal choice" thing, a place like Arbys has a pretty good meat to corn syrup ratio if you avoid the drinks and sauces. Its a little lacking in vegetables of course. But its better than the pizza joint next door or mcdonalds down the road. Its obviously not GF but I was alone and traveling and hungry last night so I just want the best ratio I can get if perfection is unattainable.
Also "Chinese" is kind of imprecise. There's a lot of American-Chinese restaurant food that boils down to spiced fried wheat covered "meat" and some veggie fillers drowned in hot spiced corn syrup with slight variations in ingredient and flavoring. But the buffets have stuff like "steamed crab legs" and if he's cool eating that, well OK then. I mean, its crab, and steam, and I don't think the locals even bother salting them. On a bed of plain ole white rice? He doesn't complain, so I guess its adequate.
The biggest problem we had/have is pretty much all prepared frozen convenience foods are stuffed with wheat, soy, corn syrup, basically bad stuff. There's almost no convenience foods we can eat, and the substitute clone products are usually 4x the cost and taste/texture/smell is awful. There are no "normal" out of the box convenience foods that aren't full of allergen type stuff. Unless you really broaden your mind to "an apple" or "a carrot". Those are pretty convenient and everything free. Grapes are a nice snack. And nuts. You can buy "airline packages" of nuts on Amazon, like 48 little single oz servings of almonds or whatever. I keep those in my desk drawer. Supposedly a diet high in nuts is non-optimal for teeth. Then again my carb intake is low which probably balances out tooth decay issues.
I find we make a lot of spicy mexican-ish stuff. Tex-mex I guess. If purchased prepared or at restaurant (taco bell, ugh), its all sawdust and wheat and soy and corn syrup crap but homemade, todays slow cooked pulled chicken southwest style with a pile of chili/taco type spices and some chipotle and a little hot sauce and it tasted pretty awesome. Have a side dish helping of that with a big ole salad. Tomorrow I'm grilling some 100% beef (no soy filler) burgers. Just eat it on the plate like a meatloaf. Next day is beef taco meat (probably slow cooker and probably as a side to a salad again) Early next week some fish will be steamed and some weird baked chicken / olives / wine thing is on the horizon (wife has recipe, donno exact details, quite tasty, apparently the specific kind of wine is important, has to be merlot, or can't be merlot, don't remember).
For years I've never given up on "lettuce wrap" techniques, although it never really seems to work. Bummer.
You can get strange gadgets that slice vegetables into really strange shapes including noodle-ish shapes although they are mechanical nightmares and traditionally require blood sacrifice to clean (stitches often required). The time vs texture ratio never really works out long term, although in the short term its novel to eat "pasta" with noodle shapes made out of cauliflower. Speaking of cauliflower, I still don't understand why when I prepare it, it tastes pretty awesome to my older palette, but when my mom prepared it, I always thought it was like licking a 9 volt battery after it was dipped in dog shit and instant tea. Tastes do change as you grow up. You can use a food mill to make something like rice outta cauliflower. My wife seems to specialize in all the gadgets so I'm a little fuzzy on what she ground up to make those noodles.
You really want to freak people out, cook yer meat, then chop it chill it and throw it on a salad. With the sole exception of chicken caesar salad, people will flip. I made small homemade italian spiced meatballs, cooked and chilled them, threw them on a nice salad base with an italian vinagrette, it tasted pretty good but my older relatives thought I was insane. Well, more insane than usual.
Another paleo-ish GF-ish food that pisses off old people is middle eastern. Like Moroccan Chicken. Old people freaked about that when I made it for Christmas one year. I was sick of bland dry turkey and pasty pale mashed potatoes and soggy overcooked green beans and wonder bread, so I was all F that whole scene, and made moroccan chicken and beef fajitas and home made guacamole and homemade fiery salsa and margaritas and those stuffed chille things (spicy stuffed peppers) and pretty much freaked out everyone in my family over age 50 or so. I mean really freaked them out, and you know how old people like to complain, so I was "family famous" for like six months for ruining christmas (LOL).
I also went thru a phase of sushi. That also really pisses old people off who are fixated that any round thing covered in rice must contain raw fish and maybe I didn't know that because I'm just a dumb kid being only several decades old unlike my war of 1812 veteran relatives, because I've only been making rolls for a couple years at that point so they're sure I never heard that sushi is sometimes made with raw fish (although not by me). I'm not really good at it despite the attempts and the rice isn't all that healthy so I quit that. Also getting the rice correct is a PITA. Still for awhile maybe 15 yrs ago everything I ate seemed to be hand rolled by me. It's kind of fun, even if mostly frustrating.
I'm beginning to see a theme here, that food that results in health and long life and minimal medical problems and sensible weights tends to really piss off old people who have none of the above. If it would piss off or freak out my M-I-L or uncle-in-law, as a general rule its probably healthy and good to eat.
Kabobs are pretty good. Just don't use a soy (teriyaki) sauce. You can put anything on a stick and grill it and it'll taste good.
(Score: 1) by jcm on Sunday November 02 2014, @11:38AM
About chinese food, I finished 2 times at the hospital after eating prawns in different chinese restaurants, and this was before I found that I was intolerant to gluten.
So I'm now very suspicious about chinese food.
I'm from France, the land of bread and pastries.
When I explain that I cannot absorb wheat, everybody thinks that I'm joking (to tell you the truth, even my wife believes that it's all "in my head").
But I have the symptoms 30 minutes after ingesting even a small quantity of wheat.
For Halloween, I tried tasting gummy candies, and my gas belly returned for 4 days :-(
(Score: 2) by clone141166 on Saturday November 01 2014, @03:31AM
That is what I did. I started having digestive problems around the age of 22. I used to have a terrible diet back then; I was quite skinny, I didn't really eat lots of food, but I never really ate any foods that were good for me either (ie. very low fibre diet of mostly breads and milk-based products). I started having abdominal cramping/pains and mild diarrhea. Went in for a colonoscopy+endoscopy and had some biopsies taken as the doctors suspected it might be Celiacs. But it wasn't, and they couldn't figure out what it was so they just declared it was IBS.
A couple of months later I went to another doctor who prescribed a blood test to check for food allergies (I can't remember the specific name of the test) and it came back with a host of different allergies, the primary one being an allergy to yeast (which is actually a bacteria whose only real purpose in bread is to eat the sugar in the dough and produce gas as a bi-product that makes the bread rise).
Ever since I realigned my diet to avoid the foods I was allergic to and eat much healthier in general, most of my symptoms have been greatly reduced. I still have the occasional issue for reasons unknown to me. But I really think a lot of health/digestive issues are a case of you are what you eat. It might sound a bit silly, but changing what you eat really can have a profound impact on your health and even how you feel in general. I challenge anyone who disagrees with this to try eating strictly fruits/vegetables/meats/generally healthy foods only for 2-3 months and see how different you feel at the end.
For anyone who didn't read TFA, it talks about how fibre is digested by bacteria in the intestines to produce the fatty acid butyrate which in turn is consumed by the cells that line the intestines to produce energy. More fibre in your diet => more butyrate produced => more productive/active epithelial cells in your intestinal walls. So as well as changing the process of bread production, it also seems to justify what everyone basically already knew which is that eating a high fibre diet is very important!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 31 2014, @09:27PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday November 01 2014, @06:06AM
When the cooling fails, you may have a large amount of finely chopped, air-borne flour approaching its combustible temperature. From here, a phenomena akin to a fuel/air bomb [wikipedia.org] occurs.
1702845791×2
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @11:01AM
Drip some candle wax in the bottom of the can, then stick the candle in the melted wax.
Pour in one or two handfuls of flour.
Put the hose of the bike pump down into the bottom of the can.
Loosely cover the top of the can with the plastic top that came with it.
Press the pump handle down sharply.
WHOOMP! Flames billow out and throw the lid up in the air.
I was actually taught how to do this by a U of Idaho chemistry professor! His reason for doing so was to demonstrate the danger of grain silo explosions.
Mike Crawford
who can't be bothered to reset his password.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @11:05AM
We thought for a while that my ex had Celiac's Disease (Gluten Intolerance).
If you have it, eating wheat or anything that's got gluten in it will tear the lining out of your small intestine. I was assured of this by a close friend who is a nutritionist (not a dietician - she's a sort of research biologist, who specializes in digestion and the like).
While cutting the gluten out of her diet helped, it didn't eliminate her digestive problems. Ultimately it turned out that she had an ulcer, which she was able to cure with powerful (sickening, temporarily) antibiotics.
The reason she gave for why cutting out gluten would help her ulcer, is that gluten is difficult for anyone to digest, it's just that healthy people have strong enough digestive systems that it does not cause them trouble.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday November 01 2014, @11:50AM
Since IBS got brought up: Look for Heather Van Vorous if you have IBS and the doctors can't help you. (I've been told the absolute wrong things by gastrointestinal doctors.) She uses a combination of science and plenty of anecdotal evidence (both personal and stories from others) to back up her claims. She even suggested sourdough as part of the diet back in 2001. (For those here who don't like the phrase "anecdotal evidence": there isn't a lot of science to explain how to best deal with IBS.) In her book The First Year IBS [amazon.com], she says:
She emphasizes that each person will have different needs, but what she said made sense and because of her insight, I found a methodology that worked for me. As a matter of fact, she covers a wide variety of topics including quick solutions for the short term, how the GI tract should work, the foods you should eat (and which order to eat them in), foods to avoid, exercise, stress management (including heat therapy, tai chi, yoga, and meditation), doctors, medication, and alternative therapies (like acupuncture and hypnotherapy). She also covers going out to restaurants and being out with friends. (IBS can get ugly even leading to social isolation and job loss if its bad enough.)
I highly recommend that book if you or someone you know has trouble controlling IBS issues.