You have seen the fresh milled flour posts. Women who could not touch gluten for years, eating sandwich bread again, and you have wondered if that could be you. You many have even searched three different Facebook groups for “freshly milled flour and Hashimoto’s” and read the stories.

You have read enough testimonials to know that some people get their bread back, and not one of those testimonials is about your body.

There is no test that tells you which group you are in. You have to run it yourself.

Why I went gluten free in the first place

Dr. Izabella Wentz, the thyroid pharmacist, did a study and found that about 80% of people who have Hashimoto’s are better off gluten free.

That number gets quoted constantly. Nobody tells you the harder part. There is no test that says you are in the 80% or the 20%.

You have to try it.

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I didn’t go gluten free willingly

I did not start because my own thyroid. I started because of my baby.

My infant son was covered head to toe with eczema. His forehead was a patch of red, inflamed, itchy, nasty skin, and it was on his chest, his back, his belly, all the way down to his toes.

I had to put socks on his hands to keep him from scratching himself bloody every day.

He was exclusively breastfed, and we were at home. Whatever was causing it, I was responsible for it. It was either my diet or the detergent or the smells or something in our house.

So I did a huge elimination diet. I would not have done that for myself. For my child, I would do anything.

You try the big things first. Gluten. Dairy.

Coconut was way down the line of foods to introduce, and coconut turned out to be his problem. It took a long time to get there. (Sidenote: did you know that many soaps are made with coconut oil?)

In that process, we found out that my son could tolerate gluten and I could not.

For me, gluten lowered my migraine threshold. It took less to set one off.

I was mostly gluten free for the next five years or so. However, every year during “birthday season,” I ate normal.

Birthday season in our family is four birthdays inside 30 days. For those 30 days I ate gluten, and at the end of it I went back to being gluten free.

Gluten is an all or nothing thing. When I was gluten free, I was 100% gluten free.

That worked, sort of. Every time I brought it back, it was a little more unmanageable. More symptoms each round.

The sourdough that ended it

Then came Covid, and everybody was home, and everybody started doing sourdough.

I learned that the long ferment changes the wheat and changes the gluten. Some people who react to gluten can eat sourdough bread.

Of course I tried it. I am always willing to experiment on myself.

I missed real bread. If you have had gluten free bread, you know it is not the same. Some are better than others and some are really, really bad, but there is nothing quite like a nice gluten sandwich bread.

I worked hard to make sure I would not have a placebo effect. I tried not to sway my thoughts one way or the other.

I made the batch. I ate it for lunch. That afternoon I was flat on my bed.

I was not in pain. I was so depressed, and I was confused about it.

I had a moment of clarity where I was reflecting on what I was feeling, kind of like outside myself, observing my emotions.

Why am I so down? All of a sudden this afternoon, I just feel like I am worthless. I feel like life is just no good. Why am I even here?

That is not normal for me. I am not a depressed person. I do not struggle with depression.

Last winter my TSH was going up and my thyroid was not doing awesome. My mood flattened a little bit. I told my nurse practitioner and we checked labs and got me on some Synthroid.

Even then I was not depressed. I was flat. At my worst, my mood goes flat.

So when I had crazy out of the blue depression and down thoughts after lunch, I knew.

It was the gluten.

That was the only thing that changed.

I went for a walk. I needed fresh air, sunlight, movement, anything to help my body process what I ate.

I did not feel like going outside. I went anyway, for about two hours.

That was the last time I ate gluten for five years.

What freshly milled flour is and why people think it is different

About a month ago I was listening to a podcast called The Culture Apothecary. The interview from April 3, 2025 caught my attention because the host and the guest both have Hashimoto’s, and they were talking about eating gluten and freshly milled flour.

The guest was Sue Becker of Bread Becker. She is a food scientist and she has been teaching this for years.

Everything in this section is what Sue said in that interview. I have not fact checked it. I trust what she says, and you can go listen to it and fact check it yourself.

According to Sue, wheat itself is different today than it was 100 or 200 years ago. The pre-1950s wheat was different, and a lot has changed since then. Plant breeding, GMO work, pesticides and herbicides like Roundup.

Then there is the milling. When industrial mills started turning wheat into packaged white flour and even whole wheat flour, they took out the germ and the endosperm.

Those are the parts that make flour spoil. They are also where the B vitamins, the minerals, and the antioxidants live.

Sue said there was a rash of health problems in the US after that change. Researchers figured out those nutrients had to go back in.

She said the mills were told to put them back. The mills said they were already reselling that material to animal food companies and were not going to stop, but they would enrich the flour instead.

That, according to Sue, is why we have enriched flour.

Sue Becker and those who talk about American wheat/gluten/baked goods vs. European versions believe that a lot of people react to is the processed wheat rather than the gluten itself. Therefore, freshly milled wheat, especially non-GMO wheat, can be tolerated.

I was very curious. I wondered if it would work for me.

I spent a weekend milling wheat by hand

One of my Instagram friends had been posting about getting heritage wheat, meaning pre-1950s varieties, from a mill about an hour and a half from me. It is called Sunrise Flour Mill and they ship all over the country.

I ordered their pancake mix, some pre-milled wheat, and some wheat berries. Let’s be honest, I am not going to mill flour myself every single time I need it.

I also ordered one of their sourdough starters. Theirs is over 100 years old and came from Italy. I did not want to start my own from scratch this time.

Sue Becker keeps an electric mill right on her counter. Wheat berries in the top, flip it on, freshly milled flour comes out into whatever she is baking.

I do not have an electric mill. My mom has a manual one.

My 11 year old wanted in on this, so we scheduled time at my parents’ house to mill the wheat. I thought it would be easy.

It was not. We ground wheat by hand for about two and a half hours.

It was a morning workout, and it was kind of fun at the start. You watch the wheat berries go in and the flour come out. Like I said, fun at first. Two hours in? Not so much.

It came out a little coarse, so we ran a second grind to make it finer.

We came home with enough flour to make sourdough bread. Milling took so long that I put the dough in the fridge Saturday and baked it Sunday morning before church.

I tried it at lunch. It was really good.

What happened when I ate freshly milled flour with Hashimoto’s

I was nervously optimistic going in.

I had read so many testimonials. I cannot do normal flour, but I can eat this. I cannot have gluten, but I can eat this.

I read them on purpose. I did not want a negative placebo effect where I talked myself into a reaction before I even took a bite.

So. Did it work? Can I have gluten again as long as it is heritage wheat, freshly milled, and sourdough?

No.

A couple of hours after eating it, I definitely felt more inflamed. I had a low grade headache, maybe a one or two on the pain scale. A dull one.

It was not a migraine. There was no depression this time.

I just felt thicker. My head felt heavier and thicker.

That is probably my body saying it is not worth it.

Gluten is an all or nothing thing, so I am finishing the loaf. One slice a day, maybe two. I am not overdoing it and I am not binging on gluten.

It is not causing severe symptoms right now, so I might as well enjoy what I already made.

Something about heritage wheat and sourdough does not hit my body as hard as other wheat does. That is real, and it is still not a green light.

Was this a “detox” reaction?

Note from one year later: I posted this on my YouTube channel when it aired. One year later it had 75 comments. The majority told me that this was a “detox reaction” and I didn’t try it long enough. No. I know my body. I was not “detoxing” and I did not need to force my body to tolerate. Instead, I listened to my body and honored its “no.” Then I focused on my gut health (intensively) for over six months then tried again. (See post 196)

The next most common critique in my comments was that I didn’t use the flour fast enough. I also reject this as a reason for my symptoms. I used the flour within 24 hours of milling it. 

People don’t want to hear this (especially people who have been able to adopt freshly milled flour into their diet), but freshly milled flour does not work for everyone who reacts to gluten. 

Head over to post 196 for the follow-up experiment. (Spoiler: I can tolerate the most ancient form of wheat, Einkorn, but not even the next variety down on the wheat family tree and certainly not red/white wheat.)

Write down your symptoms

I did this one wrong. I was confident, but wrong.

You think you will always remember what is going on. You think you will always remember how bad you feel, or how bad something makes you feel.

That is false. Your brain wants to forget it.

I didn’t write down my experience from when my son was a baby. I cannot tell you exactly what gluten did to me during that first elimination diet. I remember the migraine threshold. I do not remember the rest, and I lived it.

One of my clients came to me trapped in her house. She had to stay close to a bathroom at all times.

She could not go anywhere unless she knew where every bathroom was along the road and every bathroom at her destination. It was torture for her.

We worked together for a while. Later she mentioned that she had gone somewhere, and I reminded her of what she had told me at the start–that she had to stay very near a toilet including planning any trips (even to the grocery store) knowing where all available bathrooms were.

She said, “I forgot all about that!”

That is how fast it goes. Write it down while you are in it.

Screenshot this graphic if you want to track things on your phone.

How to run this experiment on yourself

Why not try it?

If you have been gluten free and you know that helps you, and you are willing to do the work, why not find out what your body does with this version?

Even setting the gluten question aside, there were reasons I wanted this to work. My family gets the bioavailable forms of the B vitamins. I get the antioxidants and the fiber.

Fresh food. No bleached flour.

That last one matters more than it sounds. One of the triggers for Hashimoto’s sits on the periodic table, in the relationship between iodine and the bromine and bromide used to bleach flour.

So if I can do this for my family, why not?

Now for the caveats, because “why not” has limits.

Know your own triggers. Know your root causes. Know what you have the time and space for.

Do not stress yourself out about trying something new or restricting something. Stress is its own trigger, and trading one for another is not a win.

Maybe the why nots are big. Maybe you do not have time for sourdough, or a mill, or access to a fresh milled option. I get it.

What works for your friend might not work for you.

You see the ads. You see what people say online. This works for me, you have to try this, I know this is going to work for you.

You are an individual. What works for your friend might work for you, and it might not.

There are some things research tells us work for 100% of people. If a study says 100% of mammals react a certain way, and you are a mammal, then it applies to you. This is not one of those cases.

You still are not going to know what a heritage wheat sourdough does in your body until you eat one and write down what happens.

I did the experiment and got a no. That no is worth more to me than five years of wondering.

If you want to hear what happened the second time I tried it, that’s in episode 196: Hashimoto’s and fresh milled flour. And if food reactions are where you are stuck generally, creating a customized diet covers how to build one that fits your body instead of somebody else’s.

You already have what you need to run this test

You know your history. You know what gluten has done to you before. You know how much time and space you actually have this month.

That is enough to run one clean experiment on one food, and get an answer that belongs to you instead of somebody on Instagram.

Start with the symptom log. Write down how you feel for three days before you change anything, so you have something to compare against.

Gluten is an immune system question, not a thyroid hormone question, and that distinction changes which experiments are even worth your time. If nobody has explained those two systems to you yet, that is where Hashimoto’s Decoded: Thyroid or Immune starts, for $27.