That phrase is actually in the article.
"Black Plague almost annihilated FIFA 2026 final" is closer historical range than this usage.
Description of ancient grains, meanwhile, reach back into Egyptian and other empires that precede the bible.
Here's one that I learned about via their YouTube channel
https://mtranchrescue.com/products/7-s-true-whole-wheat-flou...
That's obviously an oversimplification.
Whilst having a high amount of gluten forming amino acids might sound good in prinicple, in fact breads do not rise as well when too much is present (the gluten is too strong, fighting the expansion of the dough from the leavening agent).
Cakes require flours to have less gluten forming amino acids again.
I'm not sure about pastry though, a bottom pastry for a pie I would guess needs to be quite strong, but I have no idea if there is an upper limit.
The point here is, flours can be as strong as they like, but too much is actually bad for breadmakers - meaning - gluten levels in the diet aren't changing that much.
Edit: I forgot to mention, some parts of China have a pure gluten dish - where they hydrate the gluten forming amino acids, then "wash" the starch out, leaving only the gluten, which they then cook and eat - so 100% Gluten
Vague digestion issues, maybe that has an effect.
For celiac there's not much evidence that the difference would change whether someone develops it, and once they do develop it even minuscule amounts are very bad for them.
[1]https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/10/11/1763
[2]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6769531/
I use every week these ancient grains because they give a different flavor to the bread (and not only in bread). I also, sometimes, replace 20-30% of wheat with oat, buckwheat, quinoa, barley flours etc.
People who do not have Celiac and say they are gluten sensitive usually are not. They are either experiencing a nocebo effect or have gas from other components of wheat rather than gluten. Actual non Celiac reactions to gluten are minor if they exist at all. So when someone says they are gluten sensitive it is overwhelmingly likely they either have Celiac and even a very very tiny amount of gluten will cause them horrible consequences, or they are incorrect and they are not sensitive to gluten at all.
So people on the low-FODMAPs diet end up using "gluten free" as a convenient shorthand for "doesn't contain these particular grains".
Pardon?
I find it hard to imagine how. Carrots don't seem to be especially popular last I checked; and to my understanding, produce generally has become more nutrient poor in recent times due to soil quality issues.
Statistically there is still room for there to be some unexplained physical reaction to gluten that is not explained by Celiac. However, nonexistence of such a reaction is also compatible with the studies. What is not compatible with the studies is more than a single digit percentage of non Celiac having people, as a % of people who claim to be gluten sensitive, being able to even detect whether they are fed gluten vs a placebo, despite it being very trendy to claim that you are 'gluten sensitive'.
Italy recently started screening kids nation wide. Initial results are showing that of 4.4% of kids are affected. [1]
Celiac disease is massively under-diagnosed and GPs knowledge about the disease is limited. Also, celiac disease might cause issues which are not directly gut related: one might end up with a B12 or iron deficiency, one might get migraines, fatigue, gluten induced ataxia and many many more.
[1] https://celiac.org/2025/09/24/how-research-is-shaping-italys...
There's also things found alongside gluten like arabinoxylan which promotes the growth of certain bacteria like prevotella. At this I should mention that a possibly helpful daily breakfast to address digestion issues (with both prebiotics and probiotics) is greek yogurt + frozen blueberries + chopped walnuts. Source: https://www.northwell.edu/news/insights/are-blueberries-good... (see also doi:10.3390/nu10020244, doi:10.1016/j.jnutbio.2017.07.001, doi:10.1002/mnfr.202300096)
“We don’t know any (other) mechanism by which gluten could hurt them, hence their lived experience is invalid.”
I _suspect_ gluten can contribute to my brain fog. The problem is, there are so many variables it is next to impossible to change only one in daily life. In fact, when you dig into it, so much literature is just trash as experiments don’t control for all variables.
Hence, I don’t claim that it does. But pasta reliably makes me a zombie and something like potato doesn’t, so glucose can’t be the mechanism.
Body is a complex system and pretending we understand it is hurting people.
Double blind? The only thing I can think of would be huge amounts of capsules, and even then there’s no guarantee a burp would not disclose what was eaten.
Designing a good experiment for this is seriously tough.
There are already things like gluten free wheat starch if you want wheat without gluten, but you still have to work around not having the gluten. Like the article alluded to, it is needed for breads to rise.
A slighly taller variety of grass hardly matters.
Based on the name I think ur (ancient) Dinkel (spelt) is even older than regular spelt but I'm not sure. All I know is that it makes great crackers but terrible pasta and ok bread but not great.
Maybe you mean it gets more sticky if you cook it too long? But al dente I think it's amazing. It has a nutty taste that works very well with tomatoes if you ask me.
It is really different from usual spelt, which was crossed with wheat and has shorter straws.
Edit: maybe this is interesting to some so I'll write a short paragraph about older varieties. There is also Einkorn and Emmer. Einkorn is considered the ultimate ancestor of all modern wheat varieties. It has been grown 10k years ago and is diploid with only two chromosome sets. Then there is Emmer, which is also ancient and appeared shortly after Einkorn. It is tetraploid and yields two corns per spikelet. If you want to eat like an Egyptian Pharao you can eat bread made out of Emmer ;-)
Rye is entirely different. It is very hardy and frost resistant and can't be baked without sourdough because of the amylase.
Nonetheless, these minor varieties of wheat have remained important due to their ability to grow in soil or climate conditions where the more productive modern varieties of wheat fail.
So they were frequently used as "backup" crops, for the cases when bad weather or pests destroyed the main wheat crops.
As said in the parent article, they may become again more important where soil has been made worse by modern agricultural practices.
Why is that? I thought nitrogen is taken in through the roots, then distributed as other ground-based nutrition, regardless of the height.
The main thrust of modern crop breeding has been to create crops that you can successfully get to harvest under high-nutrition environments, without it literally falling over or succumbing to disease due to the turgid, fleshy growth. Even then, if you're applying more than maybe 150kgN/ha, you will be relying on plant growth regulators that inhibit auxin/gibberellin response to keep the plant under control.
Oat however is from the tribe Aveneae.
In the article it describes the crops as more drought resistant etc.
As in all things commercialized, the tempting easy path weakens in the long term. Mono crops are easier to grow and then the soil gets depleted beyond all recognition. White bread probably outsells whole wheat in America but it is basically devoid of nutritional value.
“Old” means things were scarce because people had to work by hand and oxen. So a failed crop meant a dead family.
White bread is also one of the cheapest sources of energy, though depending on the geographical location either maize or rice may be slightly cheaper sources of energy, but which provide much less protein.
Among cereal products, wheat bread has the highest protein content, except for oats, but oats are much more expensive per protein content.
If you eat white bread in preference to any other starchy products, like those based on rice, maize or potatoes, this ensures a higher protein intake per a given calories content, which enables a lower consumption of more expensive sources of proteins, like those based on legumes or on meat.
White bread cannot be the only food that one eats, because other kinds of foods must provide other nutrients, but it can provide at a minimum cost major fractions of the daily intake of proteins and energy.
After experimenting with many different healthy diets, I have settled on a variant that I consider optimal, where wheat bread that I bake myself at home typically provides about a third of my daily protein intake, so its nutritional value is quite important (and the fact that it is very tasty is a welcome bonus).
The reason for the price difference is unlikely to be due to a more expensive processing technology, but mostly from the economies of large scale processing, because the production of white flour is much greater.
Whole wheat flour has slightly higher amounts of the more valuable nutrients, but due to its high price it is an inefficient way to get those nutrients. A both cheaper and healthier diet can include white bread and larger amounts of other vegetables that are better sources of fiber, vitamins and minerals than whole wheat flour. (E.g. the food that I cook usually includes ingredients like lentils, carrots, parsnips, onions or garlic, broccoli or cauliflower, bell peppers, parsley or dill etc. Spending less on those in order to make more expensive whole wheat bread would provide much less desirable nutrients, so it would be a bad allocation of funds.)
Grains contain both starch and oil and when you mill the grains, the oil goes rancid much faster than the starch.
If you remove the oil you have a nutritionally worse product but it lasts longer on the shelves.
The bags of 13.5% protein whole wheat flour and 16% (!) protein whole khorasan flour in my pantry are not convinced this is a generally true statement.
What you mean is that modern wheat was selected for high production per area, which can be attained only when the seeds contain smaller amounts of micronutrients, so that their limited availability will not inhibit growth.
On the other hand, all plant seeds, including wheat seeds, in their dry form consist almost only of nutrients, unlike the other plant parts, which usually have very little nutrient content.
So wheat seeds and also the white flour made of them are very rich in nutrients, but only in 2 kinds of nutrients, starch and protein.
Animals, including humans, need a great number of essential nutrients in order to survive, around 50 different chemical substances.
White bread provides energy and protein that has a good amino-acid profile, except for low amounts of the amino acid lysine.
For complementary proteins and for the very small amounts of micronutrients that are required for a complete food, one must eat something else.
There exists no natural food that has a perfect composition that would allow humans to live eating only that (except mother milk for small babies).
So anyone must eat a combination of different kinds of foods. People who are rich might choose to eat some paleo diet or some keto diet and it is possible to conceive such diets that are healthy.
However most of the humans must allocate a limited budget for food, and within these constraints there are large areas in various places of the Earth, including Europe, where any healthy diet of optimum cost must include a non-negligible fraction of wheat.
For those who unfortunately suffer of celiac disease, a higher cost of food is unavoidable.
But it is processed food, which means it has indeed lost some nutritional value. Moreover, the way white flour is processed by our body is different from the way wheat or oats is - in very simplistic terms, the reduction of fibre content in white flour means that when it is consumed and processed, glucose / sugar from it is released very quickly into our body. Our body can handle that, once in a while. But repeated sugar spikes (and falls) isn't good for the health. And that is why doctors today (especially in India) advise you to eschew white flour in favour of others (wheat, oats, millets etc.). But yeah, the way you consume it, with other foods, matters too (and from your other comment, it does appear you follow a reasonably good diet, with a healthy outlook - without unduly obsessing over it).
This seems like a trivially false assumption.
If processing grains into bread represented a loss of nutritional value, why would every civilization have invested their extraordinarily scarce time and resources into milling and baking instead of just eating the raw grains?
At the start of the Neolithic, besides barley, 2 species of wheat were domesticated separately and they evolved through domestication into einkorn wheat and emmer wheat.
Einkorn wheat has always remained a minor crop, while either barley or emmer was the major crop, depending on soil and climate. For instance in the early Ancient Greece barley was the most important, while in the early Roman Republic emmer was the more important. Later, emmer ("far" in Latin) was mostly replaced by durum wheat ("triticum" in Latin), and even later durum wheat was mostly replaced by the hexaploid bread wheat ("siligo" in Latin).
Besides the original emmer and einkorn, other wheat subspecies have appeared many thousands of years later after domestication, either through mutations, like the tetraploid durum wheat (pasta wheat) or through hybridization, like the hexaploid bread wheat (and also the hexaploid spelt wheat).
Also larger things like figs and grapes - only after you spend a few years here do you learn that dona olema has one particular fig tree that tastes like melon, and senor rodrigo has a grape vine that makes gigantic (billiard ball sized) ridiculously sweet grapes. This knowledge doesn’t travel to the next valley over, even. Oh, and then you find another vine, the same, climbing a tree in a forest that was a vineyard 70 years ago.
Kinda amazes me how much genetic diversity for crop cultivars there still is, smack under our noses, across Europe.
The roads were, well, challenging. We followed Google Maps directions to one destination, but it's not very good. It led us through a medieval town made of stone where the roads were just a centimetre or so wider than our tiny subcompact rental car and then up a steep hill from which we could actually see our destination on the other side of the village. After letting the scent of overheated clutch and burning transmission oil dissipate, we did a 3-point turn with a sheer drop on either side and no guardrails and then back through the village, hoping the breaks were good and holding our breaths passing between the houses. Locals just stared and pointed the right direction without saying a word (I guess we were not the first strangers to be misled by the Googs). Anyways the roads are harrowing but make for great stories.
Also, we found an old abandoned quinta for sale that we'd love to buy (even has paleolithic rock art on the property) but they're asking 3.5 million euros, which is about 3.5 million euros more than I have for such things.
So I'm not surprised if there are local agricultural treasures. Isn't that the part of Portugal where they speak the country's official second language Mirandese?
Yeah, Miranda is south of us, and pretty metropolitan compared to our particular corner - and here we encounter words and pronunciations we encounter nowhere else in Portugal - not even 30km down the road.
I love it here, but living in the backwater of backwaters has its pros and cons.
PS Even better with great bread.
My kingdom for even a tiny bit of scientific literacy amongst people who are reporting on science.
Not only is this absurd ("children" need all amino acids to grow...as does anyone else), arginine isn’t even one of the essential amino acids. Your body makes it unless something is seriously wrong.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07533...
In any case, I seriously doubt the author is talking about this, given the imprecision of the language. Also, eating this wheat specifically for arginine supplementation is goofy gym-science. Arginine is trivial to supplement.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
Preterm infants are unable to synthesize arginine internally, making the amino acid nutritionally essential for them. Most healthy people do not need to supplement with arginine because it is a component of all protein-containing foods and can be synthesized in the body from glutamine via citrulline.
Your body is one hell of a lab.
The need for arginine may exist during some illnesses and not for children in general, but for very young babies, especially for those born prematurely.
Thanks for sharing the story about this ancient wheat but I recall reading about this highly productive type of grains not in agriculture books but in holy books.
Fun facts, this type of miracle grain is mentioned in Abrahamic religions holy books namely Bible (Old Testament) and Quran.
In Surah Al-Baqarah (2:261), "The example of those who spend their wealth in the cause of Allah is that of a grain that sprouts into seven ears, each bearing one hundred grains. And Allah multiplies ˹the reward even more˺ to whoever He wills. For Allah is All-Bountiful, All-Knowing."
In the Book of Genesis (Genesis 41:5), "He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk."
This exact multiplication of deeds described in the Quran demonstrates the 700-to-1 ratio represents the actual biological maximum yield for that specific ancient wheat variety under optimal conditions.
All this while I thought the description is metaphorical allegory, but it seems originated from real grains of wheat phenomenon.
The scriptures specifically mentioned "sanabila" a type of grain with multiple ears branching out from a single stalk unlike rice paddy that's grow ears differently.
Another fun facts, in Arabic the word "sabil" meaning providing freely flowing water to travellers, and sanabila share the same root word, most probably derived from this very verse, because charity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is sadaqa.
Please note the only Quran in Chapter of Al- Baqarah (Female Cow) mentioned the analogy of multiplications for doing good deeds [1].
The other verses, one verse inside Bible in Chapter Genesis and two verses inside Quran in Chapter Yusuf (Joseph) refer to Egypt Pharaoh's or King's dream, respectively. This led to the introduction of the brilliant economic policy that saved Egypt kingdom from the severe famine that effect other sorrounding kingdoms at the time as per Yusuf's advice based on the correct interpretation of the King's dream [2],[3],[4]. Yusuf later become one of the appointed ministers of Egypt from the very humble beginning of a slave boy, and brought along other Jews to start migrating to Egypt.
Apparently Quran is more accurate since during prophet Yusuf time Egyptian rulers are called King not Pharaoh yet. Only later stage of Egyption Kingdom during Musa (Moses) time, Quran correctly refer to Pharaoh (meaning owner or king of great house) not King.
[1] Quran, Al-Baqarah 2:261:
https://quran.com/en/al-baqarah/261
[2] Bible, Genesis 41:5:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2041%3A...
[3] Quran, Yusuf, 12:43:
[4] Quran, Yusuf, 12:46:
If I think of any food and taste from the 70's, I feel suffocated now. It's disgusting to see all processed, sugar-loaded, gene-modified, beautiful foods in the stores.
The economy planners gave you cars, roads, food stores, supply chains and took away your time to grow your own food. You are just forced to take 5x amount of food in your car and consume it like biological pump with inputs and outputs. You became fat and ill and the economy tells you to believe it as a norm and call it growth. They even show in TV how all this is normal so that you don't feel bad about it.
You are turned into a country full of workers with everything streamlined to make you focus on the work. Your short working years are good enough. It has machinery to dump you in nursing home and not let your younger family care for you. Small kids? You got care centers. Don't waste your time in caring for others or yourself. Just get into the commute circus.
> GM foods, with a goal of high yields, lost all nutritional value
sounds like unmitigated total bullshit.
If GM grains have zero "nutritional value" then why do tests show otherwise and why do people not die when they spend a year eating GM grain ?
Ag scientists measure nutritional value for all crops, GM and not GM, - how is possible they haven't noticed "zero nutritional value" results for GM grains?
https://www.incitecpivotfertilisers.com.au/resources/agronom...
Further:
these data support the conclusion that GM events are nutritionally similar to conventional varieties of wheat, corn, and tomato on the market today.
Again, why do people on exclusive GM grain diets not die due to zero nutritional value then?
Living or dying is a bit coarse a metric, don’t you think?
> There’s people that die on a Twinkie diet.
This literally has nothing to do with GM corn V non GM corn nutrition levels.
Living V dying is a spectrum with various grades of malnutrition in between - is there _any_ actual evidence of less nutrition from 100 tonne of GM grain v 100 tonne of the same grain sans the GM mod that increases weed killer resistance?
Recall the claim above is that GM grains have zero ( 0 , nada , nothing ) nutritional value.
I've seen that kind of thing expressed before and it bugs me because there's zero reason anyone would ever think that science is omniscient. Science is based on the best evidence we currently have, the models that are most useful to us, and all of it is subject to change as soon as newer better evidence/models are discovered which contradicts or improves on what we currently have. There are countless unknowns in science and that should surprise no one.
If you told me there were no elephants in your bedroom and I countered with "Consider the possibility that there are four microscopic elephants in your bedroom you did NOT notice. We should accept that you are not… omniscient." you probably wouldn't be convinced that you should stop saying there there are no elephants in your bedroom. It might be more accurate to say that you don't think that there are elephants and that you can never be certain, but since it's obvious that you never can be certain it's not a very useful point. It's perfectly fine to just say that your bedroom is elephant free. The "as far as I know right now" is implied and understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
Quote: [The term has been adopted] as a pejorative term with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)"
Scientism is very much in vogue, especially in the "rationalist" community which is often tangent with the HN populace. It's "science, the religion."
Again, is there any evidence that actual people are actually suffering a nutritional deficiency solely on the basis of eating GM Vs non GM equivalents?
The second best time is when you recover his stash of seeds.
"Triticum turgidum" is ambiguous, because this wheat species has many different subspecies, with very different characteristics.
There are 2 important subspecies of "Triticum turgidum", emmer wheat, which was 1 of the 3 cereals domesticated at the beginning of the Neolithic (barley, einkorn wheat and emmer wheat), and durum wheat (a.k.a. pasta wheat or macaroni wheat), which was produced from emmer wheat by a genetic mutation, several thousand years after domestication.
From the article, it is not clear if the discussed wheat is just some cultivar of emmer wheat or it belongs to a more exotic subspecies of "Triticum turgidum".
Any references from the Bible are unlikely to describe anything else but some variety of emmer wheat.
While most wheat-based food is nowadays produced from either hexaploid bread wheat or tetraploid durum wheat, there are on the market various niche products (e.g. some kinds of biscuits) made from spelt wheat, emmer wheat or einkorn wheat (though the product labels frequently confuse the hexaploid spelt wheat with the tetraploid emmer wheat).
> "Triticum turgidum" is ambiguous, because this wheat species has many different subspecies, with very different characteristics.
Is it not T. turgidum var. 'grano del miracolo'? Any previous name being, at least as far as we/the author knows, lost to time?
Generally, the yield of old wheat varieties was nothing compared to modern versions, required to feed today's population.
According to an article I found from 1951[0], it used to be popular in the Mediterranean, and the seeds can germinate after long periods of storage.
I also tried to look at the wheat in the picture, but not the highest resolution, and it looks like it might be more than one variety, which he did mention. But at least some of the heads resemble the mirabile variety.
Aurion, a mill with a web shop: https://www.aurion.dk/
Kornetshus, a knowledge center on seeds: https://kornetshus.dk/
Both are highly recommended.
Clearly this site is a breeding ground for experts, so the genetics of the wheat will be explained in other posts.
The food industry in the US is pretty much messed up. We try to only buy fresh produce and fresh fish, staying away from processed food - but it is difficult. I read something about the composition of the modern Butter Finger candy bar (fake chocolate, lots is chemically processed seed oils) compared to the almost wholesome ingredients used 30 or 40 years ago.
According to the NOVA classification method, baking bread or churning butter is sufficient to turn a food into "processed".
Generally laypeople are fearful of "ultra-processed foods" which use industrial distillation, stabilization, additives from petrochemical derivatives, synthetic sugars, etc.
My complaint is that some of these "processing" techniques are likely orders of magnitude more harmful than others, so we shouldn't blindly treat them all as equal.
Always with the justification of the 9 scariest words in the English language.