There are for-reals people in the world that can’t eat gluten. These are people with celiac disease, in which the common protein composite gluten causes one’s lower intestine to self-destruct. It’s terrible, I’m told. Then there are the much broader wheat allergies, caused by some combination of 27 different allergens found in said grain. Then there’s non-celiac gluten intolerance, which, if you spend much time around fashionable middle-class humans, likely affects about half of your peers. This is usually what gets called gluten insensitivity or, incorrectly, gluten allergy.The production of gluten-free food is now estimated to be a $2.5 billion industry. It’s pretty much inescapable, particularly if you’ve done much time in the restaurant industry. But what if celiac sufferers didn’t have to live gluten-free? It’s about to be a possibility. A paper out today in PNAS describes a method for growing wheat and barley crops that don’t include the bad part of gluten. These more-specific bad proteins — gluten is actually a composite of proteins — are coded for genetically, thanks to the enzymes 5-methylcytosine DNA glycosylases, which we can block.Gluten-free living is pretty hip, yeah, and then there’s its paleo cousin, but gluten-free living isn’t as desirable as it seems. For one, wheat and barley are responsible for some 20 percent of the world’s caloric intake, and it’s used as an additive in enough stuff that full-scale elimination basically requires visiting a special section in the store (the first-world store, at least). For much of the world, going gluten-free isn’t an easy or even tenable option financially. You might call it a diet of the privileged.That aside, gluten-free living isn’t totally awesome for you. From today’s paper:In addition, following a gluten-free diet has adverse influence on the gut microbiota, deteriorating gut health and also the ability of fecal residues to stimulate the immune system. Thus, finding alternative therapy is always a thrust area of research.Researchers have actually spent a fair amount of time hunting for natural wheat and barley strains that don’t include the bad stuff, to little avail. Instead, we’re just going to have to engineer it, and that means tweaking DNA. So, yes, GMOs. I probably don’t have to say much about the relationship between people that think GMOs are evil and those that think gluten is evil. Immune system-safe gluten probably isn’t going to make much of a dent in the gluten-free food market. Or maybe I’m just being cynical about the broader gluten-free food movement and its relationship to actual health.In any case, Diter von Wettstein, one of the new paper’s authors, is optimistic about this stuff actually making it onto shelves: “If work and funding proceeds as expected the wheat lines may be available for propagation in three to four years.”Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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