Hello and welcome to Zoe Shorts, the Bite Size podcast where we discuss one topic around

science and nutrition. I'm Jonathan Wolf and I'm joined by my friend Dr. Will Balsawitch

and today we're talking about gluten.

There's a lot of fear mongering out there about gluten. Gluten is bad is the message we're

getting. Everywhere from the supermarkets to social media and all this anxiety can make

it hard to get to the truth. So Will, is gluten really as bad as everyone seems to think?

There's not a good amount of science on gluten and also there's a lot of myths so I think

there's a clear answer Jonathan and we're gonna get into it.

Alright, I want to hear it.

We need to start Jonathan with what gluten actually is because there's so much misinformation.

Dr. Shef stretching out a ball of dough at your favorite pizza joint and they're tossing

it up in the air to make that perfect pizza base without gluten. The dough with terror.

So it turns out that gluten is a protein that's naturally found in certain plots such as

wheat, rye and barley and cooks have loved it for millennia because it helps food keep

its shape. Gluten actually comes from the Latin word meaning glue and humans have been

using its properties for long before even the Romans it turns out well. So apparently

the remains of flat bread baked by hunter gatherers 14,000 years ago have been found by archaeologists

in Jordan and the gluten helped combine all the grains into a bread which is presumably

a lot easier to carry around on a hunting trip than a bunch of seeds.

Especially since you have any sort of bag to carry those seeds that easily back then.

But anyway, it's quite difficult to separate gluten from the wheat barley and the rye so

anything that contains these ingredients could potentially be problematic.

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