Sourdough bread mixed with lactobacilli was tolerated by patients with celiac sprue, according to researchers from the University of Bari, the University of Naples, Italy and the University College Cork, Ireland. The research offers possibilities for increasing tolerance levels of wheat flour products.
Sourdough bread mixed with lactobacilli was tolerated by patients with celiac
sprue, according to researchers from the University
of Bari, the University of Naples, Italy
and the University College Cork, Ireland. The
research, published in the February issue of Applied
and Environmental Microbiology, offers possibilities for increasing
tolerance levels of wheat flour products.
Celiac Sprue, a common food intolerance, is a digestive disease that damages
the small intestine and interferes with absorption of nutrients from foods.
Currently a gluten free diet is the only treatment option available to patients.
The researchers aim was to produce a sourdough bread that is tolerated by
celiac sprue patients. Sourdough containing wheat, nontoxic oat, millet, and
buckwheat flours mixed with baker's yeast or lactobacilli and fermented for 24
hours was used in an in vivo double-blind acute challenge of celiac
sprue patients. The researchers found that 13 of the 17 patients showed a
marked alteration of intestinal permeability after ingestion of baker's yeast
bread. When fed the sourdough bread, the same 13 patients had values for
excreted rhamnose and lactulose that did not differ significantly from baseline
values. The other 4 of the 17 patients did not respond to gluten after ingesting
the baker's yeast or sourdough bread.
'These results showed that a bread biotechnology that uses selected
lactobacilli, nontoxic flours, and a long fermentation time is a novel tool for
decreasing the level of gluten intolerance in humans,' concluded the
researchers.
The paper, 'Sourdough bread made from wheat and nontoxic flours and started
with selected lactobacilli is tolerated in celiac sprue patients,' by R. Di
Cagno, M. De Angelis, S. Auricchio, L. Greco, C. Clarke, M. De Vincenzi, C.
Giovannini, M. D'Archivio, F. Landolfo, G. Parrilli, F. Minervini, E. Arendt and
M. Gobbetti was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology
(2004) 70:1088-1096.
The abstract can be read here.
Contact: Marco Gobbetti, Dipartimento di Protezione delle Piante e
Microbiologia Applicata, Facoltà di Agraria di Bari, Via G. Amendola 156/a,
70126 Bari, Italy
Email: gobbetti@agr.uniba.it