What you say is true, but the hybrid wheat rich in gluten has already existed for a few millennia and during all this time it has been the main staple food for hundreds of millions or even for billions of people, who have suffered no undesirable consequences from it.
Nowadays it seems that there are more and more people that are affected negatively by gluten consumption. Because this was much less frequent in the past, there must be an additional unidentified factor that causes gluten sensitivity and which has not existed formerly.
> who have suffered no undesirable consequences from it.
Is that really the case? I suspect it was more that people who had IBS or gluten sensitivity in the past just...died. If there was no understanding of the problem, then those suffering from it probably appeared to have something like dysentery, and would like just be lumped in with everyone else that had similar symptoms from various causes.
Unlike today, in Europe until relatively recently (before the use of maize or rice became common) there was no such thing as gluten-free food.
So absolutely everybody was continuously exposed to gluten, especially the poor majority of the population, for whom bread was the main source of proteins.
Anyone with gluten intolerance would have had very severe symptoms with no chance of recovery.
Nonetheless deaths with such symptoms were very rare.
> Anyone with gluten intolerance would have had very severe symptoms with no chance of recovery.
Exactly, anyone born with such intolerances likely didn't survive the early childhood, and anyone developing them later in life were probably not attributed to the gluten themselves. Anyone that made the connection between wheat-based products and their problems would also find themselves lacking nutrition most likely, which also leads to a whole host of problems.
What I'm saying is that we likely can never be sure what the 'baseline' prevalence was because the records do not have enough details to make that distinction. We can only really determine if its recently increasing. It may very well have also been a problem in past history too, but wasn't noticed as one, or was attributed to other causes.
What you say is certainly possible, but nonetheless I find it hard to believe that this has happened in reality.
The reason is that the non-existence of gluten-free food was not restricted to the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but in many places it remained true e.g. a half century ago.
Where I was born, in Eastern Europe, among the millions of citizens, there was no normal human who would not ingest a lot of gluten every day, but child mortality was very low and the incidence of celiac and similar diseases was low enough that the general public was completely unaware that such diseases even exist.
Moreover, there are published studies that conclude that at least during the last few decades the frequency of gluten-caused illness has been increasing.
AFAIU most people negatively affected by gluten are unaware of it, because the incomplete digestion of gluten yields morphine-like peptides which can mask the bowel symptoms.
Nowadays it seems that there are more and more people that are affected negatively by gluten consumption. Because this was much less frequent in the past, there must be an additional unidentified factor that causes gluten sensitivity and which has not existed formerly.