Spoiler: it’s not great because you Celiacs get to eat bread again. Sorry. At least, you didn’t get to eat bread right away – not until you heal your celiac.
The good news is that some stains is sourdough have what you need to heal your celiac: bacteria strains that eat 100% of the gliadan protein.
Here’s the problem, why you can’t just eat sourdough: you don’t know if the culture that they used ate 100% of the specific protein “chunk” that you’re reactive to. “Gluten” is a big, complex protein, with lots of sub-components, like gliadin-33 mer. And lots of others. Depending on how the dice rolled when your immune reaction saved you from yourself and attacked your tissue to stop you from killing yourself, different people will be fine-tuned to different parts of gluten. It may even be a gluten component + an agrotoxin (e.g. roundup, which they often spray what with in the US to ensure their fields die uniformly at harvest – and yes, I know this, talk to farmers not the internet). This is why many many celiacs can go over to Europe and eat bread to tge gills – because the higher quality-less contaminated wheat is missing whatever component(s) that their reaction is tuned to. For Sourdough strains, you don’t know that the one you’re eating will effectively digest 100% is the component(s) you react with – you’d have to guess. Don’t do that.
But here’s the deal. A 2004 study found that celiac patients could eat sourdough that used a selectively-bred strain of bacteria to culture the wheat flour.
Now, ignore the study – because you can’t do what the researchers did and compare 100+ strains of bacteria and select the one that broke down (“hydrolyzed”) gluten the best.
The reason this is great is because it suggests that yes, it can be done – bacteria can effectively eliminate ~100% of the gluten. If you can find the right strain. How hard can that be? (Maybe really hard? Hm…)
(*note: interestingly, Saccharomyces cerevisiae aka Bakers Yeast (think, Gold Star, etc) only hydrolyzed about 75% of the gluten with a 24-hour ferment)
Anyways. Once you’ve found the strain, you can culture it. And once you culture it, you can make live wine. And even live beer. Boom. If my theory is correct, this would, relatively quickly, seed your gut. Assuming you’ve been gluten-free long enough to eliminate your autoantibodies, seeding your gut with this gluten-optimized strain would be the ticket to healing celiac. Coming right up.
*my thought is to culture some raw wheat berries on high gluten flour, and do this again and again to optimize it. Presumably that would culture yeast that liked to eat gluten? Then (because you need live delivery, cooking = dead yeast) take that strain and make live wine and beer out of it.
