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> The straws are longer, which is why they cannot be fertilized with nitrogen.

Why is that? I thought nitrogen is taken in through the roots, then distributed as other ground-based nutrition, regardless of the height.

But what is the actual benefit of Urdinkel? Honestly it sounds a bit like a fad to me, along the lines of "older = better".

So the second two but not the first is technically "wheat" along with Rye ?

I tried both Emmer and Einkorn, but don't remember anything special about the end result. One of the flours/doughs was pretty yellow, but that's about it. It was a while ago and I only tried about a kg of each so my memory is fuzzy.

I think there is also good evidence that dough in general which is given 24 hrs to rest - like what was traditional pre-industrial - is much better digestible for most people then the additive-loaded dough which only needs hours to minutes, which is a stark time -> quality tradeoff.

Dinkelpasta..is...a..acquired taste.. lol

Not my area of expertise, but my understanding is that this is an extremely limited claim (i.e. unborn babies / neonatal supplementation, or children with genetic defects), and not something you can even remotely generalize to "children" as a whole. The way we teach this in biochem 101 is "arginine is conditionally essential", with the "conditional" being "periods of stress or sickness".

In any case, I seriously doubt the author is talking about this, given the imprecision of the language. Also, eating this wheat specifically for arginine supplementation is goofy gym-science. Arginine is trivial to supplement.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

https://www.biochemical-pathways.org/metabolic-pathways.pdf

Your body is one hell of a lab.

Don't worry too much. If you follow basic food recommendations, even those given out 60 years ago, your child can grow up fine. Even if you only follow it just half the time. Basically, all those articles have to be taken with a grain of salt. What kills you is: smoking, drinking, tanning, long periods of only junk food. And those seem to affect you mainly after age 25. Children are remarkably sturdy.

More on the "other components" issue -- a lot of people have issues with some of the fermentable carbohydrates (e.g. fructans) in wheat, which also happen to be present in the other gluten-containing grains. "Have gas" is a bit of an understatement. For some people this can lead to cramps, vomiting, and other fairly severe digestive problems.

So people on the low-FODMAPs diet end up using "gluten free" as a convenient shorthand for "doesn't contain these particular grains".

Probably also caused by other aspects of American wheat (many "sensitive" people notice they can eat bread in Europe just fine), such as higher glyphosate content, fortification with nasty stuff like vitamin A, possibly others.

To be fair, the people with psychogenic gluten intolerance have massively increased the availability and variety of gluten-free foods for people with real Celiac disease. They seem to be doing more good than harm on balance.

The "relatively rare" in numbers: so far, it's been assumed that about 1% of the population is celiac.

Italy recently started screening kids nation wide. Initial results are showing that of 4.4% of kids are affected. [1]

Celiac disease is massively under-diagnosed and GPs knowledge about the disease is limited. Also, celiac disease might cause issues which are not directly gut related: one might end up with a B12 or iron deficiency, one might get migraines, fatigue, gluten induced ataxia and many many more.

[1] https://celiac.org/2025/09/24/how-research-is-shaping-italys...

20 years ago I was "that guy" who went "uhm, actually, you almost certainly don't have celiac". Alas, my efforts did not stop the trend, and today the nocebo effect for gluten has become a multi-billion dollar racket.

These studies are far less certain than you are. Also, gluten sensitivity is not just gas.

This still contains gluten. It can't be consumed by celiacs.

There are US-based sellers of ancient wheat (both berries and milled flour) as well.

Here's one that I learned about via their YouTube channel

https://mtranchrescue.com/products/7-s-true-whole-wheat-flou...

More likely GMOs or at least GMO related. Thanks to the rise of GMOs glyphosate has left everything drenched in it, including non-GMO crops. Wheat/cereals are particularly relevant because it's often used right before harvest as a desiccant, or as a 'pre-harvest herbicide' in jurisdictions where using it as a desiccant is outlawed.

Glyphosate wrecks the gut biome, and it seems reasonable to expect that the consequences of such could be attributed as some sort of sensitivity to something which correlates with the highest sources of direct concentration; in this case - gluten.

What gluten issues do you have in mind here?

Vague digestion issues, maybe that has an effect.

For celiac there's not much evidence that the difference would change whether someone develops it, and once they do develop it even minuscule amounts are very bad for them.

American Red wheat is, as far as I know, the "hardest" wheat on the planet - breadmakers use it to "fortify" flours from Europe that do not have enough gluten (... forming amino acids).

Whilst having a high amount of gluten forming amino acids might sound good in prinicple, in fact breads do not rise as well when too much is present (the gluten is too strong, fighting the expansion of the dough from the leavening agent).

Cakes require flours to have less gluten forming amino acids again.

I'm not sure about pastry though, a bottom pastry for a pie I would guess needs to be quite strong, but I have no idea if there is an upper limit.

The point here is, flours can be as strong as they like, but too much is actually bad for breadmakers - meaning - gluten levels in the diet aren't changing that much.

Edit: I forgot to mention, some parts of China have a pure gluten dish - where they hydrate the gluten forming amino acids, then "wash" the starch out, leaving only the gluten, which they then cook and eat - so 100% Gluten

It's hand curated verbatim extracts designed to encourage HN members to read the full article. The clickbait title does not provide accurate context for the article which details events from 1990.

Reasonable people may differ and your mileage may vary. What were your key takeaways from the article?

I left out the points about shortcomings of Bourlag's wheat and the value of genetic diversity in a population. But my focus was to encourage people to read an article I found significant.

On a side note I don't use AI to craft HN comments beyond sometimes using Grammarly to check them for basic errors.

What’s the thinking on pointing out everything that could maybe but probably not be “AI Slop”?

I wasn’t going to click on the click-bait headline without understanding the topic better, so the length of the original was unknown and irrelevant to me. The above comment tersely explains it enough to satisfy my prerequisite.

The comment, “slop” or not, was useful. When slop fills comments with junk and fake commentary, it’s far more annoying and detrimental than a basic summary. Slop-policing is exhausting to read - just downvote or flag trash instead of adding more noise that takes away from the actual content.

A lot of submissions have comments about how the article is "AI slop" or that a comment comes from an LLM. What is the point of repeatedly pointing this out? One person's AI slop is another person's useful and intriguing submission. In this case someone points out a comment is LLM generated and it turns out it isn't. So what if it was? It was a useful comment either way, and your ability to correctly identify LLM generated content is not perfect, and is likely to become less accurate over time.

What do you mean “what’s the thinking?”

Height is a solvable problem today. Chemical growth regulators

Or you do what Claudio Grossi did, and you mix the ancient grain with short growing grains that add stability. Sometimes the solution is simpler then just throwing chemicals at the problem.

various woody fibers, indeed, sir!

> but it is more or less worthless for farmers as anything other than a novelty

This is clearly not true, considering it has already been successful as a niche specialty product. So you're obviously wrong.

You could become right by weakening your claim. The wheat will remain a niche specialty product, and will not overtake other wheats in the mass market.

Specialty products made on a smaller scale can be plenty valuable and successful. They are not "novelty" products.

The article mentions other benefits, such as many Italian farmers lost their harvest in the drought of 2024, while many traditional grains fared better in the dry climate and could be harvested.

It's not really just a storm risk. The higher yeilding your wheat the higher risk of lodging, so growing tall wheat in poorer conditions is fine, but the higher the grain weight the higher the risk of lodging.

Thanks, I probably skipped the subsequent paragraphs while browsing and reading due to multiple ads intersperse in between the articles. Anyway great finding of the ancient wheat species, and the mention of this miracle seven grains ears in Quran are more profound with several occurances in different contexts and analogies.

You're likely basing this on the (better) updated title.. the original included "almost biblical" in the title. Shame mods didn't document the change.

This is pretty classy.

I also found it interesting, and the title pretty much describe what happened? I don’t see the problem

did they copy the Times of India? https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/science/discovery/italia...

Consider the possibility that there are nutritional values that are NOT being measured. We should accept that science is not… omniscient.