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    I am about to leave for a week's vacation and will just make a short
reply to Joe Murray about buckwheat and say that Bill Elkus has pretty much
done it for quinoa.  I agree with everything he said. Bill had asked me to
post my grains letter, but unfortunately it had been transferred to a backup
Syquest drive some time ago and now I can't seem to find that cartridge.  I
will keep looking.

    Joe, I guess you and I have different sensory responses to buckwheat. To
me, it doesn't look like wheat, taste like wheat, or behave like wheat, but
that is obviously a subjective judgement.

    A major division of the plant kingdom is into dicots and monocots.  The
grasses, including wheat, rye, barley, oats, rice, and corn are all
monocots. So all toxic grains are grasses and these are very closely related
taxonomically, yet some relatively close relations are not toxic (rice,
corn).  When we consider species far away taxonomically, such as the dicot
species buckwheat, quinoa, and amaranth, these are so distantly related to
the toxic grains that it seems no more reasonable to ascribe toxicity in
celiac disease to them than to any other plant species.  Every plant would
become suspect. I emphasize that because we have not characterized and
sequenced all the proteins from those species (not likely to be done) and I
don't know of completely satisfactory scientific testing of the grains in
question, we cannot rule out the possibility that a quirk of evolution has
led to some identical amino acid sequences in, say, buckwheat proteins, to
those that are harmful in wheat proteins.  Seems pretty unlikely though.
Anyway, there is no possibility that buckwheat is a close relative of wheat.
Not to say that some people may not be able to tolerate buckwheat, but has
that anything to do with celiac disease?

    I think that when celiac patient groups say that something must be
avoided--white vinegar, buckwheat, quinoa, grain alcohol, whatever, they
should say why.  Is there any scienific evidence? How many people have been
polled? Is it just one of the key people in the organization who reacts? Any
controls?  Too much mere opinion flying around. Let's try to separate
individual responses from those that truly are a fundamental part of having
celiac disease.

    Bill Elkus made the very important point that many products that feature
buckwheat or quinoa and so forth in their names or labels may also have
wheat in them.  My guess is that most buckwheat products (pancake mixes, for
example) on supermarket shelves contain wheat.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Don Kasarda