sugar at the start: 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming einkorn bread: 110 mg/dl. This was more or less the expected response to eating some carbohydrate. Afterwards, though, I felt no perceptible effects – no sleepiness, no nausea, nothing hurt. In short, I felt fine. Whew!
The next day, I repeated the procedure, substituting 115 grams of conventional organic whole-wheat bread. Blood sugar at the start: 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming conventional bread: 167 mg/dl. Moreover, I soon became nauseated, nearly losing my lunch. The queasy effect persisted for thirty-six hours, accompanied by stomach cramps that started almost immediately and lasted for many hours. Sleep that night was fitful, though filled with vivid dreams. I couldn’t think straight, nor could I understand the research papers I was trying to read the next morning, having to read and reread paragraphs four or five times; I finally gave up. Only a full day and a half later did I start feeling normal again.
I survived my little wheat experiment, but I was impressed with the difference in responses to the ancient wheat and the modern wheat in my whole-wheat bread. Surely something odd was going on here.
My personal experience, of course, does not qualify as a clinical trial. But it raises some questions about the potential differences that span a distance of ten thousand years: ancient wheat that predates the changes introduced by human genetic intervention versus modern wheat.
Multiply these alterations by the tens of thousands of hybridisations to which wheat has been subjected and you have the potential for dramatic shifts in genetically determined traits such as gluten structure. And note that the genetic modifications created by hybridisation for the wheat plants themselves were essentially fatal, since the thousands of new wheat breeds were helpless when left to grow in the wild, relying on human assistance for survival.8
The new agriculture of increased wheat yield was initially met with scepticism in the Third World, with objections based mostly on the perennial ‘That’s not how we used to do it’ variety. Dr Borlaug, hero of wheat hybridisation, answered critics of high-yield wheat by blaming explosive world population growth, making high-tech agriculture a ‘necessity’. The marvellously increased yields enjoyed in hunger-plagued India, Pakistan, China, Colombia and other countries quickly quieted naysayers. Yields improved exponentially, turning shortages into surplus and making wheat products cheap and accessible.
Can you blame farmers for preferring high-yield dwarf hybrid strains? After all, many small farmers struggle financially. If they can increase yield-per-acre up to tenfold, with a shorter growing season and easier harvest, why wouldn’t they?
In the future, the science of genetic modification has the potential to change wheat even further. No longer do scientists need to breed strains, cross their fingers and hope for just the right mix of chromosomal exchange. Instead, single genes can be purposefully inserted or removed, and strains bred for disease resistance, pesticide resistance, cold or drought tolerance, or any number of other genetically determined characteristics. In particular, new strains can be genetically tailored to be compatible with specific fertilisers or pesticides. This is a financially rewarding process for big agribusiness, and seed and farm chemical producers such as Cargill, Monsanto and ADM, since specific strains of seed can be patent protected and thereby command a premium and boost sales of the compatible chemical treatments.
Genetic modification is built on the premise that a single gene can be inserted in just the right place without disrupting the genetic expression of other characteristics. While the concept seems sound, it doesn’t always work out that cleanly. In the first decade of genetic modification, no animal or safety testing was required for genetically modified plants, since the practice was considered no different than the assumed-to-be-benign practice of hybridisation. Public pressure has, more recently, caused regulatory agencies, such as the food-regulating branch of the FDA, to require testing prior to a genetically modified product’s release into the market. Critics of genetic modification, however, have cited studies that identify potential problems with genetically modified crops. Test animals fed glyphosate-tolerant soya beans (known as Roundup Ready, these beans are genetically bred to allow the farmer to freely spray the weed killer Roundup without harming the crop) show alterations in liver, pancreatic, intestinal and testicular tissue compared to animals fed conventional soya beans. The difference is believed to be due to unexpected DNA rearrangement near the gene insertion site, yielding altered proteins in food with potential toxic effects.9
It took the introduction of gene modification to finally bring the notion of safety testing for genetically altered plants to light. Public outcry has prompted the international agricultural community to develop guidelines, such as the 2003 Codex Alimentarius, a joint effort by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, to help determine what new genetically modified crops should be subjected to safety testing, what kinds of tests should be conducted and what should be measured.
But no such outcry was raised years earlier as farmers and geneticists carried out tens of thousands of hybridisation experiments. There is no question that unexpected genetic rearrangements that might generate some desirable property, such as greater drought resistance or better dough properties, can be accompanied by changes in proteins that are not evident to the eye, nose or tongue, but little effort has focused on these side effects. Hybridisation efforts continue, breeding new ‘synthetic’ wheat. While hybridisation falls short of the precision of gene modification techniques, it still possesses the potential to inadvertently ‘turn on’ or ‘turn off’ genes unrelated to the intended effect, generating unique characteristics, not all of which are presently identifiable.10
Thus, the alterations of wheat that could potentially result in undesirable effects on humans are not due to gene insertion or deletion, but are due to the hybridisation experiments that predate genetic modification. As a result, over the past fifty years, thousands of new strains have made it to the human commercial food supply without a single effort at safety testing. This is a development with such enormous implications for human health that I will repeat it: modern wheat, despite all the genetic alterations to modify hundreds, if not thousands, of its genetically determined characteristics, made its way to the worldwide human food supply with nary a question surrounding its suitability for human consumption.
Because hybridisation experiments did not require the documentation of animal or human testing, pinpointing where, when and how the precise hybrids that might have amplified the ill effects of wheat is an impossible task. Nor is it known whether only some or all of the hybrid wheat generated has potential for undesirable human health effects.
The incremental genetic variations introduced with each round of hybridisation can make a world of difference. Take human males and females. While men and women are, at their genetic core, largely the same, the differences clearly make for interesting conversation, not to mention romantic dalliances. The crucial differences between human men and women, a set of differences that originate with just a single chromosome, the diminutive male Y chromosome and its few genes, set the stage for thousands of years of human life and death, Shakespearean drama and the chasm separating Homer from Marge Simpson.
And so it goes with this human-engineered grass we still call ‘wheat’. Genetic differences generated via thousands of human-engineered hybridisations make for substantial variation in composition, appearance and qualities important not just to chefs and food processors, but also potentially to human health.
WHETHER IT’S A LOAF OF organic high-fibre multigrain bread or a mass-produced biscuit, what exactly
