It happened again. I talked to a customer today who told me that Abigail’s Oven bread is the only bread she can eat without gaining weight. Which made me want to study up a bit more.

I’ve written a little about this before—how lactobacilli gobble up those carbohydrates that spike our blood sugar and, well, basically turn into sugar when we eat the non-fermented version.

And I’ve also mentioned that long-fermentation with wild yeast in sourdough breaks down gluten proteins that cause distress to the gluten intolerant, meaning that many people who can’t eat other bread can often eat a true sourdough.

But I’ve done a little more digging and ran into gliadin. Unfortunately, the best information I can find on the subject of the big G is in mind-numbingly difficult scientific articles, but here goes.

Gliadin, though it sounds like an elf in The Lord of the Rings, is actually a protein found in bread. It’s always been there, but around 1960 they started messing with the hybridization of wheat and gliadin went dark.

It now has opiate-like properties which make the gluten-intolerant sick and make the rest of us hungry with its appetite-stimulating effects. (Yes, it does sound like the plotting of criminal masterminds, but I think we have to assume this was all accidental.)  People who consume gliadin-containing wheat eat about 400 more calories a day than those who don’t. So it’s not just the sugars doing us harm.

Good news: fermentation breaks down the gliadin protein, which seems to be a major reason we can eat sourdough and not gain weight—so it’s not just the gobbled up sugars in the flour.

How much the protein is metabolized seems to depend on the strain of lactobacilli used in the sourdough, and it sounds like the powers-that-be are still performing their studies and figuring all this out.

But hey, fermentation sounds like the way to go. We still have a lot to learn, but the rest may be just fine-tuning.

Other good news? Abigail’s Oven uses non-dwarf wheat, which means we’re not even using the new strain which has the mutated gliadin. 

Hooray for old-fashioned wheat!

But I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather gliadin was an elf. Or a suitably decent dwarf.

Here’s a painfully difficult article if you’d like to learn more.

Michelle Hubbard is a graduate of Brigham Young University with an English degree and an editing minor. She won Leading Edge’s “Best First Chapter” award and later joined the publication as a slush reader and editor. After attending the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference in Sandy, Utah, she became a volunteer and this June will be her ninth year as an assistant. She is also a writing officer for Misha Collin’s charity Random Acts. A draft of her middle-grade novel, Oscar and the Ghosts of Paris, placed second with the Utah Arts Council. She lives in Pleasant Grove with her husband, sister, two children, and far too many pets