these manufacturing steps of a product that could explain certain symptoms

More than 12 million French people regularly buy gluten-free, wheat-free, barley-free, oat-free or rye-free products. Gluten is a set of proteins naturally present in certain cereals, and some are intolerant to it: 1 to 2% of French people are affected by celiac disease. They are forced to banish these products from their diet. And other consumers, without being intolerant, say they are hypersensitive to gluten. They digest it badly, except sometimes when it is contained in artisanal products.

To try to understand why, researchers from the Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRA) conducted laboratory work for five years. They bought artisanal and industrial pastas and breads to get an idea of ​​what happens during digestion. They placed these samples in test tubes and attempted to extract the gluten proteins from them with solvents.

In the test tubes, the researchers observed that there was twice as much easy-to-extract gluten protein in artisanal foods and therefore twice as much more digestible protein than in industrial foods. Because the least digestible proteins are generally long-chain proteins that are rolled up on themselves. However, certain methods of preparation freeze the gluten in this configuration. For example, when pasta is drying too quickly or bread is fermenting too quickly.

Conversely, these researchers also found that these long undigested proteins were present in smaller quantities in the test tubes, lwhen the baker uses leaven and not yeast, and when they let the dough rise slowly in the cold, when the kneading is gentle.

This could therefore explain why some people sensitive to gluten can sometimes consume traditional preparations. These researchers will now go further and would like to move on to clinical trials. They will therefore soon recruit people sensitive to gluten to better understand the mechanisms.