In fact, FODMAPs seem more likely than gluten to cause widespread intestinal distress, since bacteria regularly ferment carbohydrates but ferment protein less frequently. Although a FODMAP-free diet is complicated, it permits people to eliminate individual foods temporarily and then reintroduce them systematically to determine which, if any, are responsible for their stomach problems. FODMAPs are not as trendy as gluten and not as easy to understand. But, biologically, their role makes more sense, Murray says.

“That first paper, in 2011, blew our minds,” Murray told me. “Essentially, it said that people are intolerant of gluten, and it was based on a well-designed, double-blind study. When people were challenged with gluten, by eating the muffins, they got sick. We just couldn’t figure it out. But then came the second study. By then, it was almost too late to put the genie back in the bottle. You have millions of people out there completely convinced that they feel better when they don’t eat gluten—and they don’t want to hear anything different.”

The FODMAP research, while influential and highly regarded, involved fewer than a hundred people, not enough to account definitively for the number of people who have abandoned foods that contain gluten. Several groups are trying to repeat those results. But studies like that take time. At present, there are no blood tests, biopsies, genetic markers, or antibodies that can confirm a diagnosis of non-celiac gluten sensitivity. There have been a few studies suggesting that people without celiac disease have a reason to eliminate gluten from their diet. But most of the data are unclear or preliminary. Doctors rarely diagnose non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and many don’t believe that it exists. Few people seem to have been deterred by the lack of evidence. “Everyone is trying to figure out what is going on, but nobody in medicine, at least not in my field, thinks this adds up to anything like the number of people who say they feel better when they take gluten out of their diet,” Murray said. “It’s hard to put a number on these things, but I would have to say that at least seventy per cent of it is hype and desire. There is just nothing obviously related to gluten that is wrong with most of these people.’’

About a month ago, in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the role that gluten plays in our diet, I flew to Seattle, then drove north for an hour, to Mount Vernon, where Washington State University’s Bread Lab is situated. The lab is part of the university’s wheat-breeding program; by studying the diversity of the grains grown in the Pacific Northwest, researchers there hope to determine which are most suitable for baking, brewing, and making pasta. Dan Barber, a chef and the co-owner of the Blue Hill restaurants, in Manhattan and in Pocantico Hills, had suggested that I visit Stephen Jones, a molecular cytogeneticist and the lab’s director. Barber, in his recent book “The Third Plate,” describes Jones as a savior of traditional wheat in a world that has transformed most crops into bland industrial commodities. I was more eager to hear what he had to say about the implications of adding extra gluten to bread dough, which has become routine in industrial bakeries.

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Jones, a strapping man with an aw-shucks manner, has spent the past twenty-five years trying to figure out the best way to make a loaf of bread. The amount of gluten added to industrially made bread keeps increasing, and Jones has become acutely interested in whether that extra gluten may be at least partly responsible for the gastrointestinal distress reported by so many people. “My Ph.D. was on the genetics of loaf volume—looking at chromosomes and relating them to the strength of the dough in bread,’’ Jones said, as he greeted me at the entrance to the research center. The inviting, if somewhat incongruous, aroma of freshly baked bread filled the building. Jones’s lab is unique; few bakeries have Brabender farinographs, which Jones and his team use in their search for the ideal ratio of gluten to water in dough, and to measure the strength of flour. Nor can there be many labs with a Matador deck baking oven, which can accommodate more than a dozen loaves at a time, and which circulates heat uniformly, at hot enough temperatures, to insure a voluminous loaf and the strongest possible crust.

For all the high-tech gadgets on display in the Bread Lab, the operation is decidedly old-fashioned, relying on stone mills of a type that have not been used for more than a century and on a philosophy that all it takes to make genuine and delicious whole-wheat bread is time, talent, flour, a little salt, and lots of water. There are essentially two ways to turn flour into bread. The first is the way it was done for most of human history: let the flour absorb as much water as possible and give it time to ferment, a process that allows yeast and bacteria to activate the dough. Kneading then binds the two proteins that come together to form gluten. Most of the bread consumed in the United States is made the other way: in place of hydration, fermentation, and kneading, manufacturers save time by relying on artificial additives and huge industrial mixers to ram together the essential proteins that form gluten.

Until the late nineteenth century, when steel rollers and industrial mills came into use, wheat was ground on stones, a slow and imprecise process. Steel was fast, efficient, and easy to maintain, and it permitted millers to discard the germ and the bran in the wheat kernel and then rapidly process the starchy endosperm. This made white flour. Almost nobody seemed to notice, or care, that by tossing out the rest of the kernel industrial bakers were stripping bread of its vitamins, its fibre, and most of its healthy fats. White bread was seen as an affordable luxury. Like many Jews arriving from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, my great-grandfather had never seen white bread before, but when he did he immediately made what was referred to, at least in my family, as an “American sandwich”: he took two pieces of the black bread that he had always eaten, and carefully placed a piece of industrially made white bread between them. He is said to have been delighted.

The Bread Lab team, which includes the patient, inventive baker Jonathan Bethony, uses whole grains, water, salt, and yeast. Nothing else. Whole-wheat bread, even when it’s good, is usually dense and chewy, and rarely moist; Bethony’s bread was remarkably airy and light. It contains only the natural gluten formed by kneading the flour. Most bakers, even those who would never go near an industrial mixing machine, include an additive called vital wheat gluten to strengthen the dough and to help the loaf rise. (In general, the higher the protein content of wheat, the more gluten it contains.)

Vital wheat gluten is a powdered, concentrated form of the gluten that is found naturally in all bread. It is made by washing wheat flour with water until the starches dissolve. Bakers add extra gluten to their dough to provide the strength and elasticity necessary for it to endure the often brutal process of commercial mixing. Vital wheat gluten increases shelf life and acts as a binder; because it’s so versatile, food companies have added it not only to bread but to pastas, snacks, cereals, and crackers, and as a thickener in hundreds of foods and even in some cosmetics. Chemically, vital wheat gluten is identical to regular gluten, and no more likely to cause harm. But the fact that it is added to the protein already in the flour worries Jones. “Vital wheat gluten is a crutch,’’ he said. “It’s all storage and functionality. No flavor. People act as if it were magic. But there is no magic to food.”

Jones is a careful scientist, and he said more than once that he had no evidence that a growing reliance on any single additive could explain why celiac disease has become more common, or why so many people say that they have trouble digesting gluten. But he and his colleagues are certain that vital wheat gluten makes bread taste like mush. “Flour that is sliced and packed into plastic wrapping in less than three hours—that’s not bread,’’ Jones said. He and Bethany Econopouly, one of his doctoral students, recently published an essay in the Huffington Post in which they argue that the legal definition of the word “bread” has become meaningless and ought to be changed: “FDA regulations state that for bread to be labeled as ‘bread,’ it must be made of flour, yeast, and a moistening ingredient, usually water. When bleached flour is used, chemicals like acetone peroxide, chlorine, and benzoyl peroxide (yes, the one used to treat acne) can be included in the recipe and are masked under the term ‘bleached.’ Optional ingredients are also permissible in products called bread: shortening, sweeteners, ground dehulled soybeans, coloring, potassium bromate . . . and other dough strengtheners (such as bleaching agents and vital gluten).”