My dark suspicion is Azodicarbonamide:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azodicarbonamide" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azodicarbonamide</a><p>It's a bread additive. It's also a highly labile chemical activating agent. It kind of blows my mind that we added this to bread; it's a VERY highly reactive compound, remeniscint of peptide coupling agents, which you can rapidly get allergic to in the lab from contact exposure, and of all the food proteins you don't want to screw around with, gluten practically screams immunogenic agent (peptide, hard to digest due to high proline and glutamine content).
I have Celiac. It took until I was in my early 20s to learn that. When I ate wheat as a kid, I would throw up. But it would happen 24-48 hours later, so no one ever figured it out. I'm shorter than my siblings, and for me it impacted me a lot more mentally than physically.<p>The reason it's increasing is that we've chosen to make wheat proteins <i>much</i> more durable to reduce the susceptability to pests (thanks, Norman Borlaug). This makes them more durable, and for most people doesn't make their body attack itself.<p>But for the 13% of people who have an anti gliadin gene, you find yourself on an autoimmune spectrum ranging from Celiac (one diagnostic criteria: flat intestinal villi) to many other things that can manifest when impossible to digest proteins are routinely consumed.<p>If you don't have the gene, it is very unlikely you're actually allergic to wheat. If you do, it's a straight line, one gene to one protein allergy, ranging in severity of presentation.<p>It's estimated that 1% of people actually have Celiac-as-diagnostic criteria, but 13% have the anti gliadin protein gene(s) (HLA-DQ2.5 and HLA-DQ8) making it bad for you.