What Is Gluten — And Why Did We Start Fearing It?
*The ideas in this article were originally shared by Ian Lowe in his few Instagram Live sessions. This is my attempt to write them up and preserve them.
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Gluten has been in every loaf since wheat bread existed.
For most of human history, nobody talked about it. Nobody needed to. It was simply the thing that made bread feel like bread — that slight pull when you tear a piece, that resistance when you chew. It was unremarkable because it was everywhere. Like asking why rice is sticky, or why an apple has skin.
Then, somewhere in the last few decades, it became a question. Then a concern. Then, for millions of people, a villain.
Something changed. The question worth sitting with is: what was it?
What Gluten Actually Is
Flour is mostly starch. But inside every wheat grain, there are two proteins — gliadin and glutenin — that do something unusual when water is added: they bond together and form a network.
That network is gluten.
Think of a rubber band. Stretch it, and it pulls back. That’s elasticity — what glutenin gives dough.
Pull it in one direction without resistance, and it holds its new shape. That’s extensibility — what gliadin allows.
Every flour carries a different balance of both. Which is why doughs behave so differently from one another. A cake crumbles. A baguette tears cleanly. A bagel fights back. The gluten is doing that work, invisibly, every time.
Without it, bread doesn’t hold its shape. The gas from fermentation has nothing to be trapped by. The structure collapses. What you’re left with isn’t a lighter loaf — it’s a structurally different object.
Gluten is not an additive. It’s not something that was introduced. It’s what wheat is.
How We Chose One Kind of Wheat — and Left the Rest Behind
Not all wheat is the same. It never was.
For most of agricultural history, the wheat grown in any region was shaped by the land itself. Soft wheat grew in cooler, wetter climates — lower in protein, gentler on digestion, better suited to cakes, biscuits, and flatbreads.
Harder wheat came from hot, dry conditions — denser in protein, stronger in structure, capable of making taller bread.
Ancient varieties like einkorn and spelt — grains that humans cultivated for thousands of years — carry different kinds of gluten altogether: different protein structures, more nutritionally complex, and significantly more difficult to work with at scale. They were slow to grow, lower-yielding, and resistant to the kind of uniformity that industrial production demands.
The shift accelerated in the decades following the Second World War.
Agriculture needed to feed more people, more efficiently. New wheat varieties were developed and selected specifically for traits that served industry: strong protein, high yield, and the ability to survive the mechanical stress of fast mixing and mass production. The gluten had to be strong enough to hold up under pressure — literally.
The work succeeded. Yields increased dramatically. Bread became abundant and affordable. These were genuine achievements.
But the varieties that couldn’t keep pace quietly disappeared from the fields. Einkorn. Emmer. Spelt. Not eliminated — but marginalised, reduced to niche producers and health food stores. The mainstream moved on.
By the late twentieth century, one kind of wheat — strong-protein, highly resilient gluten, primarily from North American growing regions — had become the global default. Not because anyone decided it was the best wheat for human digestion. Because it was the best wheat for industrial processing.
The Standard We Never Changed
This is where the story becomes more complicated.
When many people began moving away from industrial bread in search of something more traditional or carefully made, they often carried with them an idea of what “good bread” should look like.
Tall.
Open.
Airy.
Dramatic rise.
Strong structure.
That image was shaped, in part, by decades of industrial bread production.
The factory created the aesthetic.
And when people left the factory, they often brought the aesthetic with them.
Sourdough became the destination.
But the flour frequently remained the same: strong flour, highly elastic, capable of producing large, open loaves.
The resulting chewiness and resistance in the bite became associated with authenticity and craftsmanship.
But chewiness is not automatically a sign of quality.
It is also a sign of gluten strength.
The taller and more elastic the loaf, the stronger the gluten network generally needs to be.
Proper fermentation can meaningfully change dough structure. Acidity and enzymes help soften and modify gluten during fermentation. Many people genuinely tolerate slowly fermented bread better because of this.
But fermentation still works within the limits of the flour itself.
A very strong flour remains structurally strong even after careful fermentation.
That does not make the bread “bad.”
But it does mean that not all bread behaves the same way in texture, fermentation, or digestion — even when all of it is called sourdough.
That tension quietly sits inside much of modern artisan bread culture today.
What Bread Looked Like Before Wheat Became Universal
It is easy to forget that tall wheat loaves are not the natural endpoint of bread history. They are one outcome shaped by one set of agricultural conditions.
Before global trade made any flour available almost anywhere, people baked with what their land could reliably grow.
And every region grew differently.
In Northern Europe — Scandinavia, Germany, the Baltic regions — rye often grew more reliably than wheat. The bread it produced was darker, denser, longer-lasting, and deeply tied to cold climates and winter storage.
In the British Isles, softer wheats and oats shaped flatter breads, biscuits, and oatcakes.
In India, the climate created a stark divide in bread culture.
In the cooler northern regions, wheat could grow more reliably. Softer wheats were rolled thin into flatbreads like roti and chapati — breads designed around speed, flexibility, and daily cooking rather than large fermentation and tall structure.
But in the hotter and more arid central regions, wheat could not survive the intense heat consistently. The land instead favoured highly drought-resistant grains like sorghum (jowar) and pearl millet (bajra).
These grains evolved under entirely different environmental pressures. Their protein structures are fundamentally different from wheat — they do not form gluten networks at all.
So the breads changed too.
Instead of relying on elasticity to hold dough together, people developed entirely different physical techniques. Hot water was often used to gelatinise starches and create cohesion by hand, allowing millet and sorghum doughs to become flatbreads such as bhakri.
In southern India, rice- and lentil-based fermented foods like idli and dosa developed entirely different fermentation traditions again — long before modern sourdough became fashionable elsewhere.
The bread culture followed the climate.
Not the other way around.
Every grain culture created something different.
Not because one bread was more advanced than another.
But because people adapted to the grain, climate, and fermentation traditions available to them.
Most historical bread cultures were not trying to maximise height or volume.
They were trying to feed people well using the grain in front of them.
The Question Behind the Fear
Gluten has existed in the human diet for thousands of years.
What changed rapidly, historically speaking, was not simply the presence of gluten, but the industrial system surrounding it: wheat varieties with highly resilient gluten, faster production, compressed fermentation, and the global standardisation of a narrow range of flour characteristics.
For people with coeliac disease or medically diagnosed wheat allergies, avoiding gluten is necessary. That is not in dispute.
But for the much larger group of people who simply feel uncomfortable after eating certain breads, the more useful question may not be whether gluten exists.
It may be:
What kind of wheat was used?
How strong was the flour?
How was the bread fermented?
How much time was given to the process?
None of this means modern discomfort around bread is imaginary. Many people genuinely feel better avoiding certain breads. The question is whether we have been attributing all digestive distress to gluten, when the industrial process itself changed the biological reality of the bread.
When fermentation is drastically compressed to suit factory schedules, the dough lacks the time required to biologically degrade naturally occurring compounds in the grain that can trigger digestive distress.
A properly fermented loaf allows enzymes and bacteria the time to break these compounds down.
A highly elastic loaf made with very strong flour and rapid production methods leaves them largely intact.
Both contain gluten.
But they are not necessarily experienced by the body in the same way.
The gluten was always there.
The process surrounding it is what changed first — and what we questioned last.