All About Gluten

Charlotte is a Nutritional Therapist with over 10 years’ experience, Yoga Teacher with nearly 20 years’ practice and has been teaching since 2006. She is also an author of books such as The De-Stress Effect and 100 Foods to Stay Young. She has lectured for top UK nutritional colleges and writes regularly for the national press. Charlotte helps people that she understands – those with busy lives and quick brains who often find it difficult to switch off.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Charlotte Watts.

This podcast was recorded at one of my live events,

So either at a workshop retreat or course that I was running.

You can see details of these at my website charlottewattshealth.

Com or join my Facebook group charlottewattscalm.

I hope it's helpful to you.

Do I have anything to say about gluten?

So gluten is a sticky protein.

It is found in wheat,

Rye,

Barley.

It often gets confused as being an oats because you can buy gluten free oats.

The reason for that is most oats are processed in factories where there will be gluten.

It's at much higher levels in wheat than in rye or barley.

And it's yes,

It's a sticky protein,

It's glutenous,

Like glue.

It actually can be part of glue,

It can make glue like a wallpaper paste used to be made out of it.

It's very difficult for us to digest,

So it doesn't break down easily in the human gut.

Also,

A lot of the cereal grains that we eat have been genetically modified and bred to have much higher levels of it.

So it can be incredibly prevalent in the modern diet.

Is that why you spelt so much better because it doesn't have a wack process?

Yeah,

It's supposed to be an ancient variety grain,

But to perfectly be honest,

For me,

I react with spelt much worse than wheat.

So it's not necessarily just the gluten that you might be responding to.

So a lot of people will also respond to the galactose,

Which is the type of fiber within the holes,

But there are lots of other types of fiber.

So for instance,

I handle dead wheat,

White flour and a croissant much easily than I would handle,

Particularly like a sprouted wheat bread.

I just wouldn't even go near,

But I can handle a croissant because one's kind of dead and the other is sprouting.

And when things are sprouting in the plant kingdom,

They are giving off the most of that plant's immune capacity,

Most lectins,

The most phytic acid.

So I used to years ago eat loads of sprouting seeds,

Loads of alfalfa,

I was wondering why my acne was still awful,

Why my inflammatory stuff was really terrible.

And then I saw it's Leo Primmboom,

Who's a lecturer in PNI,

Psychoneuroimmunology,

And he was just saying,

Yeah,

You don't really want to be eating sprouting stuff because that's when the plant,

Insects don't eat sprouting seeds because they've got no anus.

They cannot shit out the lectins and the phytic acid that can cause that pronounced immune reaction.

But we can,

But along the way,

There's potential for that to have a pretty inflammatory response in the gut.

So yeah,

I would tend to avoid kind of,

For me personally,

This is not the same for everybody.

And certainly these are conversations I have with clients.

It's not just like something is good,

Something is bad.

I handle these days,

Because I had so much rye in place of wheat when I was healing my gut that actually rye for me saddens me beyond end because I love those thin,

Crisp crackers.

You know the ones?

Oh God.

I have to save those for every so often.

I can handle some of them every so often,

But if I have them,

This is the trouble of living alone and buying a whole box,

Is that you end up having them for more than three,

Four days,

Which is when you often tend to get an intolerant reaction to stuff.

So I would say gluten is inherently difficult for humans.

It tends to,

You know,

There's varying research studies out there about what it can do.

It can lower serotonin on the gut wall,

That it's inflammatory.

But again,

It boils back to what I was talking before about variety.

And also this is part of the reason that people are really going back to slow artisanal traditional methods of cooking is that we've only been farmers for 10,

000 years.

It's a really,

Really short amount of time.

We've been cooking food for about 290,

000 years.

So we've been outsourcing energy to digest outside of the gut in cooking pots with the energy of fire for 300,

000 years,

More or less.

So that's part of the evolution of the human gut,

Which is very small in relation to our large brains than any other primates.

Very different,

Huge brain,

Small gut.

And that's because a lot of the digestive process,

That energy we have outsourced to cooking.

So,

And that cooking would have been long and slow because you cannot cook at high heat in the open air on an open fire.

It's just not possible.

A lot of our cooking would have been on bowls and soups and stews.

So crockery,

And a lot of this pottery was found in Japan,

Originally shown to be more ceremonial and then into cooking pots and different size shapes to have bowls of soups and stews,

Which really,

Really breaks stuff down if you cook things long and slow.

And it's a really good delivery system for hydration,

For minerals to the gut wall.

Part of the reason I will always go back to soups and stews with people,

Particularly if there's confusion around what they can,

You know,

If intolerance,

What they're responding to,

What they've become sensitive to,

It's a really good kind of dialling things back to default.

And bone broths,

It's part of the reason bone broths have come more and more into popularity because they're delivering glutamine to the gut wall.

So they're delivering and the things that make up collagen and collagen itself,

They're delivering them to the gut wall immediately for that restoration at the gut wall.

And because we've only been farming for 10,

000 years,

When we did become farmers,

And that was really because of population growth,

Because you cannot sustain more than six hunter gatherers on land the size of the island of New York.

So that could only take six hunter gatherer lifestyles.

Soon as our population started getting loaded,

You have to start creating more and you have to start eating more plant stuff.

It's the only way to survive.

So actually,

The farming is much more about feeding all the people rather than being about any way of health.

At that point you stop being nomadic because the wheat domesticates you.

Those who've read Sapiens,

And if you're interested in this,

I will send the book list through of anything that I mentioned and Sapiens is right up there on the top,

Because I think it's an incredibly important book to understand our nature.

So very soon,

This is the basis of copaleolithic hunter gatherer type diets,

Very soon when we became farmers,

There was this recognition that actually the foodstuffs that we were having to eat,

The beans,

The pulses,

The grains,

Are inherently difficult to digest.

And they're very,

Very nutritionally low.

Like the amount of B vitamins in a grain and a pulse compared to animal is very small percentage.

And I used to teach a lecture for a nutrition college.

That was one of the things we used to get students to do,

Is make a spreadsheet of the comparing B vitamins and iron and zinc in plant foods to animal sources.

And it's very,

Very different.

So there's this recognition that this is lower nutritionally,

Really difficult to derive the nutrition from those plant sources where we need to chew.

We're not chimpanzees.

We do not chew 14 hours a day with very flat teeth.

We do not have a colon that is a fermentation chamber.

And so from huge amounts of plant matter,

Particularly raw,

We can get quite gaseous response,

Which really changes the quality of the microbiome,

The environment,

The bacterial environment within our gut.

So early on,

Farmers found lots of ways to process,

Which would be fermenting,

Soaking,

And sourdough processes.

So for instance,

With grains,

This is back to the gluten,

The sourdough bread,

And part of the reason it's really come back into popularity is it takes a bloody long time to make a sourdough ferment.

You can force it,

You can make it quicker,

But it is not,

It doesn't break the grains down in the same way.

It doesn't lower the levels of phytic acid and the levels of gluten.

But actually a really traditional sourdough process really breaks gluten down.

And it also,

They're not really sure how,

But it changes,

It allows the gut wall to handle gluten a lot better.

So if you are going to eat bread,

Then a sourdough is really the way to do it.

And if you look across the world in terms of cultures,

Then there's this innate wisdom in traditional cooking across the world that allows people to handle pulses and beans.

So if you look across most traditional bean dishes across the world,

They cook long and slow with garlic and onions.

And garlic and onions break down phytic acid and lectins in the beans.

And they also help to break down really difficult fibres to digest like raffinos and staccios,

I think,

But I often mix up all those consonants.

So it all comes back again to cooking long and slow in really traditional methods.

So things like,

You know,

A dhal.

But what you also see across cultures is that people will add acidifiers.

So fruits into places where people might be cooking meats or even cooking grains and things that acidify.

So birch and muesli,

For instance,

Is a soaking of the oats,

Soaking of the grains that include traditionally apple juice and or yogurt.

So that's an acidifier that breaks down the phytic acid,

The lectins that are problematic in those grains to render them more digestible.

So loads of different ways to do this.

All of them are slow.

And this is the trouble way,

You know,

Modern convenience food is fast,

Quick,

It expects things to be done quickly and all the breads are forced.

A lot of fermentation processes even are forced with extra sugar or extra chemical stuff.

Reviews

Very informative talk! I am quite surprised to learn that sprouted grains contain the most antinutrients. I made the switch to One Degree’s oats for my family as they are organic, certified gluten-free and sprouted as I had read that sprouting is a good method of preparation for grains that makes them easier to digest... What type of oatmeal would you recommend then, that I would be sure would be gluten-free? Especially for my toddler.

Good talk about gluten .

very interesting as an IBS sufferer would like to explore further.

Very interesting. Thank you Charlotte 💜 x

Wow! I learned a lot from this talk. Very helpful.
Thank you.

In this world of emotional vegetarianism it was refreshing to hear you acknowledge the nutritional benefits of animal foods and the inherent difficulties of plant foods sources. People need to know that they may be seriously affecting their health with a plant based diet which is not consistent with the evolutional and physiological facts that abound, no matter the feel good aspects. Good work!

Thank you for making this so clear and easy to understand. 🤲🏻❤️🤲🏻

So interesting thanks

Thank you most informative, do you have any tips in dealing with IBS, in particular suspected SIBO?
I've tried the FODMAP diet relaxation and natural antibiotics.
Thanks