The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

What I've learned from eating abroad.

I've been lucky enough to travel to interesting places.

The trips I've taken in the last 10 to 15 years during my primal period

have been the most meaningful, rewarding, and downright enjoyable

because I've been able to view other cultures and customs

through a prism of health, nutrition, and human evolution.

I bring something back every trip,

a tip, an insight, an alteration of an existing conviction. Travel abroad isn't just a good time.

It's educational. Here are seven of the things I've learned. Number one, there's something uniquely terrible about wheat in the U.S. I have the perfect level

of sensitivity to wheat. I'm not celiac, but I'm sensitive enough that it affects me. If my sleep is

bad or I've had alcohol or my stress is high, wheat reliably produces symptoms. But even

those symptoms are manageable, mostly superficial bathroom stuff.

This means I'm quite attuned to the quality of wheat. Wheat simply doesn't affect me to the same

degree in other countries. When I was in Greece, a couple times I had some baklava after dinner,

or pita dipped in hummus or olive oil. Pita is unlovened. It certainly isn't

fermented. It's about as unaltered as you can get, and it didn't affect me. Granted, I wasn't

eating more than a piece in a single day, but a single slice of bread back home is usually

enough to produce at least a few niggling symptoms. I've noticed similar null responses to bread in France and pasta in Italy.

I'm not sure what it is exactly.

Maybe it's the ubiquity of dwarf wheat in the U.S.,

...