Wheat, another basic cereal for human nutrition, has a similar story. One of its ancestors, called spelt, is very trendy right now due to the paleo diet boom. Spelt was part of the diet in Mesopotamia (now Iran and Iraq) and with time it spread like wildfire. However, both spelt and emmer, another variety, produced extremely hard grain and their properties were not very pleasant, so farmers crossed these old strains to create better ones. These new plants were tastier but less resistant to harsh environmental conditions, so new hybrids were made, and over time they created the present-day variety, Triticum aestivum \cite{grains}.
Modern wheat is now associated with unhealthy nutrition and people are going "gluten free," meaning they are avoiding wheat from their diet. Gluten is a protein found in wheat that produces coeliac disease. The increase of industrialization and processed food favored the creation of the modern variety of wheat, which contains unusually high contents of gluten lacking nutritional quality. Most wheat dietary issues result from the fact that this product is used in countless processed foods. In short, it is a matter of poor diet. Moreover, wheat has a deleterious effect on coeliac and gluten-intolerant people, but there is no evidence that it is harmful to non-coeliac people.