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Actually, there need not be a divide at all!
research reveals that the dramatic increase in celiac disease and other wheat-related disorders took place when new wheat varieties were introduced into our diet. The ‘wheat’ we eat today is so different from its ancestor plants that it’s not surprising our gut reaction to it is so different from that of our forefathers’! We are also eating new varieties of other crops, from corn to soya. hybrid varieties are ubiquitous in the food chain—and their effects on our digestive and other systems are not yet fully understood.

Take wheat, because it is used in food products across cultures. The game changer has been changes in the plant variety itself. sophisticated hybridization techniques (called transgene hybrid systems) were used to produce new strains of modern, transgenic wheat. While these were supposed to be high in yield and disease-resistant, some strains have also had the undesirable effect of promoting ill health.3 It is possible that tampering with a known allergen potentiated its immunogenicity.

These variants were introduced by importing wheat supplies in the 1960s. The number of varieties has also grown exponentially since then, from a few kinds of wild grass to over 20,000 varieties! What we get on our tables also bears little resemblance to the traditional varieties in their genetic make-up. We can easily see that since these new varieties came in, there has been an exponential increase in the incidence of heart disease, diabetes and obesity, cancer and other autoimmune diseases, and the numbers have continued to grow, despite increased use of medical and lifestyle interventions.

I’ll try and explain. Wheat was first cultivated about 10,000 years ago, in the ‘Neolithic revolution’, as humans transitioned from hunter–gatherers to agriculturists. The first wild wheat, called ‘einkorn’, the great ancestor plant, has the simplest genetic code of all wheat, containing only fourteen chromosomes. Not long after the einkorn variety began to be cultivated, another variety, ‘emmer’, developed. Emmer was a combination of einkorn and an unrelated wild grass, and the genetic make-up became a little more complex, with twenty-eight chromosomes.

To be continued....