Gluten Free Sourdough Bread & Gut Inflammation

For those looking to step down their intake of gluten or go gluten free, sourdough bread offers a good alternative to traditional breads that contain higher levels of gluten. The number of gluten intolerant people has risen significantly among the global population. With the rise in people with inflammatory responses to foods, such as a gluten intolerance, people are searching for more gut friendly foods they can eat.

This has also led to a heightened demand for gluten free breads and products. There has been a near 8% rise in gluten sensitivity worldwide. Some symptoms of gluten sensitivity include diarrhoea, bloating, abdominal pain and headaches. The onset of gluten sensitivity symptoms appears quite rapidly. A lot of these symptoms are shared with IBS sufferers.

Alongside this, there has also been a recent and steady rise in the number of people with Celiac disease and Crohn’s disease. The digestive tract becomes chronically inflamed in both cases.

The inflammatory reaction in celiac disease becomes so bad that individuals have to completely stop eating gluten. They become restricted to gluten free foods not containing wheat, rye, barley or oats for example. Celiac disease affects one in one hundred people, as one of the most prevalent food intolerances worldwide.

Let’s look in a little more detail about what gluten is and how gluten is causing this issue. We will cover sourdough bread and how it is different to commercial bread, also including a sourdough bread recipe.

What is Gluten?

Gluten is a protein or group of larger proteins made by plants. The levels of gluten have risen with modern plant crop breeding. This could be due to associated rises in growth responses or plant protein counts with varieties that have more gluten. Naturally gluten is used by plants as a storage protein.

Because gluten is a protein, gluten is able to cause immune system responses. With your gastrointestinal tract being one of the most important immune system response areas, it is no surprise that gluten causes such an immediate and strong response in some people. Elevated antibody counts are one method to detect gluten sensitivity responses.

Is Gluten an Anti-Nutritional Compound?

These responses in humans could technically make gluten a type of anti-nutritional compound. Anti-nutritional compounds are plant produced molecules that prevent optimal nutrient absorption and therefore overeating of certain plants.

This is a useful survival strategy for many plants and is similar to how dark chocolate contains tannins. Tannins bind to proteins in your food, preventing them being absorbed properly.

Why is Gluten Bad For Our Health?

Gluten is inflammatory on the gut. The products of gluten digestion and can lead to a breakdown in intestinal cells capable of absorbing nutrients from food, called villi. Even minor irritations and inflammation of the intestinal linings can lead to IBS symptoms as mentioned earlier. Gluten derived digestion products can enter specific intestinal cells, triggering an autoimmune and additional inflammation response too.

This is what causes immuno-inflammatory gut diseases like Celiac and Crohn’s disease, where less nutrients are then available from your diet.

With the rise in people experiencing inflammatory responses to foods in the gut, it is likely that a lot of people are also having minor inflammatory responses that go undetected every day.

Sourdough Bread & Gluten

Sourdough bread is different to your modern produced breads. Containing a far lower gluten content than industrial produced bread products.

This lowered gluten content means that as a means of reducing gut inflammation, sourdough bread is superior to other breads.

How Sourdough Bread Mixtures Reduce Gluten Levels

There are various recipes for making sourdough bread but the core ingredients remain the same. Sourdough is a mix of flour and water, fermented with traditional lactic acid bacteria and yeasts. Sourdough bread production is highly selective for these lactic acid bacteria, with very specialised microbes. Lactobacillus and Weissella are among these highly adapted bacteria.

The way that sourdough is produced means it has less gluten. Sourdough breads are fermented and baked for longer in a specific way. This method enables the break down and deterioration of harmful gluten molecules inside bread at an acidic Ph, using specialized microbes.

This hydrolysis of gluten has been well documented and studied. In the fermentation process the bigger gluten protein becomes degraded into smaller amino acids with protein digesting enzymes. Gliadins are the main allergen of gluten and the main cause of the celiac autoimmune reaction.

They get hydrolysed in sourdough fermentation by protein digesting enzymes. This stops them causing the immune reaction in gluten intolerant individuals, as the causative proteins aren’t there.

The bacteria and yeasts that are used in sourdough bread production have more complex metabolisms, being tougher to degradation too. These factors all allow sourdough bread products to have far reduced quantities of gluten in the end product.

Gluten Free Sourdough Bread Quality & Sugar Levels

Another quality of gluten free breads like sourdough is the reduced glycaemic index, influenced by the acidification process that happens with sourdough bread production. This is an improvement for people at risk of diabetes or weight gain, as the glucose or sugar absorption rate is lower. The longer fermentation process also improves the overall quality, texture, aroma and shelf life of sourdough bread.

Gluten Free Sourdough & Phytic Acid

In addition, another plant anti-nutritional compound is affected by the bread making process. Phytic acid is very prevalent in grains used to make bread. Being a massive store of phosphorus, it binds to key absorbable nutrients preventing them being absorbed.

Phytic acid can bind to calcium, iron, zinc and manganese making them unavailable to absorb in the digestive tract. Phytases present in the sourdough fermentation mix can degrade phytic acid and is heavily influenced by fermentation time, Ph and temperature. This is of importance to people suffering from nutrient deficiencies as you might from Celiac disease.

Simple Sourdough Recipe

Here is an example of a simple sourdough recipe for you to try, as referenced and amended from a study testing different sourdough mixtures.

Sourdough Starter Mixture

• A basic sourdough recipe begins with a starter mixture.
• You will need to obtain a gluten free sourdough starter culture first. The starter culture is particularly important.
• You then dissolve this is water, in a 1:5 ratio of starter culture to water, as you require, adding your chosen flour once mixed.
• You can use different types of flour so this is up to you.
• A 1:1 flour to water ratio is recommended.
• Mix well in a bowl and allow to rest for an hour.

Sourdough Stretches

• Stretch and fold the sourdough mixture a couple of times an hour. Then cover the mixture.

Fermentation Process

• Ferment the sourdough mixture at around 25°C, for up to 10 hours or so, on a kitchen counter.
• The bacteria in the starter culture help the bread mixture form through natural fermentation, so you can leave the covered mixture on your kitchen counter.
• You will need to transfer the mix to a new bigger bowl as it will rise and double in size.

Second Step Sourdough Fermentation

• After 8 to 10 hours, move the mix to the new bowl, mix with about 330ml of water.
• Then add half a kilogram of your chosen flour and allow to rest for at least one hour.
• Stretch the sourdough mixture and turn it over. Repeat that step once in 30-minute intervals.
• Then just leave the mixture to sit on your counter, covered at 25°C, for about 6 hours.

Sourdough Baking

• Next step is to shape your sourdough bread as you like before baking. Leaving to rise for a couple of hours.
• After this, use the sourdough mix to bake. Set your oven to 200°C and bake for 45 minutes using greased baking paper.

Conclusion

Gluten is a potentially harmful protein for some people to have in the digestive system. This protein can cause various immune and inflammatory responses that lead to nutrient deficiencies.

Chronic inflammation due to gluten intolerance is called celiac disease. Celiac patients must completely avoid gluten. Because of this one could class gluten as an anti-nutrient.

There may be more people than we realise who suffer from an inflamed intestinal tract, occurring because of gluten ingestion.

Gluten free products, such as sourdough breads, offer a feasible solution to people suffering from gluten reactions.

The sourdough bread production process reduces the harmful amounts of gluten through extended fermentation. This process also releases and allows absorption of more beneficial nutrients in the gastrointestinal tract. These include zinc, manganese and calcium.

Sourdough also has improved quality compared to modern produced breads, including taste, aroma and texture.

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