Is gluten bad for you? If you have celiac disease, the answer is definitely YES. Gluten does make you sick and you need to avoid it. You should avoid our products. We use the same machinery to handle and process all our products, including wheat and soybeans.
Humans have been eating wheat for thousands of years without issues. But modern wheat normally sold in this country today differs from what man has been eating in past millennia in a number of ways.
- Roundup (Glyphosate) has become the most widely used herbicide in the world. And it’s also used in small grains (wheat, oats, etc.) as a desiccant or harvest aid. Meaning it’s sprayed directly on the field just days before combining to speed the process by making sure everything is dead and dry. Since it is sprayed so close to harvest, there is no time for the glyphosate to break down in the field. It’s also sprayed directly on the seed heads, where it is easily absorbed. This increased use by the industry has left more glyphosate in our food, especially small grains like wheat and oats. Monsanto was well aware of this increased usage, asked for, and got the EPA to increase the legal levels of glyphosate allowed in food in 2013. See more thoughts about Roundup.
- Granary insects have been a problem in stored grain for thousands of years, until the past century. Today, most grains are treated with an insecticide to kill granary insects. For example, until 2023, the most common insecticide recommend in conventional agriculture was STORICIDE II. One active ingredient in this is Chlorpyrifos. A widely used organophosphate insecticide that in this case was sprayed directly on the grain you would eventually eat. It was required that farmers cover even extremely small amounts of any Chlopyrifos left exposed in their fields. (It was been responsible for large numbers of birds killed after eating just a few grains of it.) It has been linked to neurologic damage, especially in kids and to ADHD and many other disorders. And yet for years was sprayed directly on most all conventional food grains, admittedly in small amounts.
- The wheat varieties grown today differ from those grown even a century ago. During WWII, the U.S. built factories to manufacture explosives for the war, as well as factories to make the raw materials for these. One product needed to make explosives was a usable nitrogen which was produced in the form of ammonia (NH3) rather cheaply. After the war, with excess manufacturing capacity to make ammonia, agriculture started using it. For many crops, nitrogen is the limiting nutrient for growth. This new source of nutrients led to the development of crop varieties that could take advantage of this and yield more pounds of grain per acre. Many traits were changed in the wheat to allow it to tolerate higher nitrogen soil concentrations. Some intentionally and some inadvertently.
