William Davis's Blog: Dr. Davis Infinite Health Blog, page 47

If wheat is not a GMO, where did herbicide resistant wheat come from?

Agribusiness claims that wheat is not a genetically-modified plant–and that is true, using the confusing terminology of genetics.

But modern herbicide-resistant wheat is the product of methods that are WORSE than genetic modification.

This is part of the broad deception practiced by big agribusiness. Be wheat- and grain-free and avoid the products of their deceptive practices.

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Men’s lingerie is on the second floor

Wheat, grains, and sugars are major disrupters of male hormonal health, especially if visceral abdominal fat has accumulated.

These hormonal disruptions can be responsible for reduced testosterone, high estrogen, feminization of the hips, male breasts, as well as fatigue, low libido, depression, and low self esteem.

Correcting these awful hormonal distortions begins with wheat/grain and sugar elimination followed by the handful of basic efforts we make in the Wheat Belly lifestyle to restore normal responsiveness to insulin.

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“Am I too skinny?”

Because my Wheat Belly and Undoctored programs are so successful at helping people lose weight, I get this question regularly.

First of all, are you really too skinny, or are you comparing yourself to modern overweight people? You might just be normal. Second, we NEVER limit calories or fat. Third, consider taking steps to rebuild lost muscle.

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Can you fix a broken gut microbiome?

Modern people have dramatically altered the composition of their gut microbiome. It is showing up as colon cancer in young people, spontaneous Clostridium difficile infections, small intestinal bacterial and fungal overgrowth, inflammation, autoimmune diseases and other ways.

Here is a discussion on how to start rebuilding a broken microbiome.

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Measles, tuberculosis, and wheat

Humans have made many dietary mistakes over the years but two mistakes, in particular, stand out: close contact with animals, mostly ruminants, who conveyed their diseases to us and the adoption of the seeds of grasses as human food. These two practices not only changed the course of human history but also human disease.

Over the last several centuries, Westerners have populated North America, South America, Pacific islands and other regions. Equipped with superior tools of warfare such as swords and muskets, contact with Westerners decimated indigenous people such as the millions of native Americans, Aztecs, and Amazonian rainforest dwellers. Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs alone is estimated to have reduced the population of 30 million by 90%.

But much of the mortality suffered by indigenous peoples were not from raids, swords, or bullets, but from disease. Westerners brought diseases that indigenous people had not been exposed to, such as measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough, chicken pox, and the flu. These health conditions were common among Westerners, thereby generating partial tolerance or resistance to their effects.

Westerners acquired these diseases through the domestication of animals. When humans first invited grazing creatures–-cows, sheep, goats–-into our huts, adobe homes, or caves, often sleeping in the same room, using them for milk or food, we acquired many of their diseases: tuberculosis, smallpox, flu and a long list of other infectious diseases. These diseases were unknown in humans prior to domestication of grazing ruminants.

The practice of animal domestication therefore changed the course of human civilization, providing a source of calories from animal meat and organs to replace those obtained through hunting, while adding products made from the milk from their mammary glands, which led to the practices of fermentation and cheesemaking, as well as putting animals to work as beasts of burden. In parallel, we acquired a long list of zoonoses from the same animals.

Populations that did not practice ruminant domestication, such as the Yanomami of the Brazilian rainforest or native Americans of the southwest, had not domesticated animals and thereby never encountered such diseases and developed no individual or population resistance or tolerance to the effects. As a result, such diseases proved devastating upon exposure. A disease as pedestrian to Westerners as measles proved fatal to many indigenous people, sometimes wiping out entire villages within months after initial exposure.

Roughly coinciding with the practice of animal domestication was the adoption of the seeds of grasses, “grains”—einkorn wheat in the Middle East, millet in sub-Saharan Africa, maize in central and southwestern America—as food, something that humans had not done for the preceding 3.5 million years of life on this planet. With consumption of the seeds of grasses came an explosion in tooth decay, a doubling of knee arthritis, a marked increase in iron deficiency anemia, among other effects. And, just as populations unexposed to zoonoses arising from animal domestication were decimated by exposure, so it went also with populations that did not have any exposure to the seeds of grasses as food: explosive weight gain, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, psychiatric illnesses, heart disease, and other conditions. Once again, Westerners developed partial (never total) tolerance to the effects of the seeds of grasses, such as an increase in genes for amylase to deal with the high blood sugars of amylopectin A consumption, or the gene for hemochromatosis to compensate for reduced iron absorption from grain phytates that bind minerals and prevent absorption. But populations that never adopted grains into their diet have no such compensatory advantages, instead developing diseases at far greater rates than Westerners as illustrated by populations such as the Pima Indians of Arizona in which 70% of adults have type 2 diabetes, or native Samoans over 60% of whom are obese.

We can learn a great deal by backtracking over the course of human health over the last several hundred generations. Once you do so, so many of the causes of human disease are revealed. Understand these anthropological and sociological issues and you are provided important insights into the human dietary and health experience. We can eat the organs and flesh of grazing ruminants as replacements for wild game, but we should not sleep in the same rooms as they do. Likewise, the adoption of the seeds of grasses as food was an enormous dietary error, but one that you can easily remedy.

 

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Recognize the two different classes of nutritional supplements

It helps to understand that there are two basic categories of nutritional supplements:

1) Supplements that meet intrinsic genetically-determined needs

2) Supplements whose need is not coded into our genetics

This important distinction will help you understand how and why the Undoctored program was constructed and also make you smarter about health.

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The unique probiotic benefits of L reuteri yogurt

We make yogurt using a special process to amplify the bacterial counts of a fascinating microorganism called Lactobacillus reuteri.

The two strains we use, in addition to causing release of oxytocin from the hypothalamus that leads to effects such as reduced skin wrinkles/increased dermal collagen, acceleration of healing, and increased muscle and bone density, also exerts unique upper gastrointestinal tract colonizing effects. This may be important in preventing small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO, that is now occurring at epidemic proportions in modern people.

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Super yogurt that’s a lot better than products sold in groceries

Commercial production of yogurt involves brief-as-possible fermentation time, addition of blending/emulsifying ingredients to generate smoothness and better mouthfeel, as well as manipulations to suit consumer preference, no matter how misguided such as low- or non-fat and the addition of high-fructose corn syrup- or sugar-sweetened sweeteners and fruits.

Fermentation time is a major chokehold on commercial production. Imagine that your cookie factory requires 36 hours to manufacture a batch of cookies, rather than, say, 30 minutes—this would pose a major holdup in production. For this reason, yogurt manufacturers use as brief a fermentation time as possible, typically no more than 12 hours, stopping as soon as some level of thickness and pH of 4.5 is achieved (as lactose is fermented to lactic acid). But, given the issue of bacterial doubling time in yogurt making in which the greatest increase in probiotic bacterial counts occurs towards the end of fermentation, not the first few hours, the longer you ferment (before allowing contaminating organisms such as fungi to emerge), the higher the counts of probiotic bacteria.

Modern methods of manufacturing yogurt therefore mean that:

Fermentation time is kept as brief as possible, severely limiting probiotic bacterial counts, typically tens to hundreds of million CFUs (colony-forming units or number of bacteria)
The 10-fold less lactic acid of a 4.5 pH created via fermentation leads to less denaturation (breakdown) of casein protein
No prebiotic fibers that nourish proliferating bacterial strains are added, as this would require extended fermentation times to exhaust added fibers
Manipulations to suit modern consumer preferences are made: reduced fat, added garbage sweeteners or other ingredients, mixing and emulsifying agents added

When we make yogurt, we therefore extend fermentation time to 36 hours and feed microorganisms with prebiotic fibers, efforts that yield bacterial counts in the tens to hundreds of billions, not the few millions of conventional yogurt. We also get to pick the species and strains of bacteria used to ferment, not just the Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus acidophilus and a handful of others typically used that do indeed provide modest probiotic benefits, but not the sort of enormous outsize benefits that we can pick and choose such as through our Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938/ATCC PTA 6475 yogurt that boosts oxytocin levels and thereby yields breathtaking benefits such as accelerated healing and an explosion in dermal collagen that smooths skin wrinkles.

Our extended fermentation time also achieves a pH of 3.5 or less (10-fold more acidic than a pH of 4.5), meaning there is more complete denaturation of the immunogenic sequences of the casein beta A1 protein, while also yielding greater tartness (from increased lactic acid). Our super-duper extended fermentation times and use of prebiotic fibers means that we don’t have to add, say, carrageenan or locust bean gum to improve mixability, mouthfeel, or thickness, as our efforts yield a naturally thick and rich end-result. (You can further improve on thickness and mouthfeel by straining the end-result in cheesecloth to remove the liquid whey, also.)

In short, the yogurt you make with these added efforts, not taking fermentation shortcuts, not adding unwanted ingredients, yields an end-result that is far superior in health benefits and taste to the products you buy in groceries. If you desire the probiotic benefits of yogurt and the added benefits of choosing specific bacterial strains like L reuteri, then making it yourself is a far better way than the convenience of store-bought products made with use of shortcuts.

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Ten reasons to never eat wheat

How can conventional dietary advice gotten it so wrong?

Rather than eating plenty of “healthy whole grains,” people on the Wheat Belly lifestyle eat absolutely no grains and enjoy spectacular weight loss and reversal of hundreds of health conditions as a result. Unfortunately, many people view this as a “gluten-free” lifestyle which is incorrect.

Here are 10 reasons why no bagels, pretzels, or sandwiches made from wheat flour should ever cross human lips.

Gliadin-derived opioid peptides (from partial digestion to 4- and 5-amino acid long fragments) increase appetite substantially–as do related proteins from rye, barley, and corn. This is a big part of the reason why grains make you gain weight.

Gliadin-derived opioid peptides are mind active drugs that trigger behavioral outbursts in kids with ADHD and autism, paranoia in schizophrenics, and 24-hour-a-day food obsessions in people prone to bulimia and binge eating disorder, as well as depression, anger, anxiety, and mind “fog.”

Gliadin, when intact, initiates the processes of autoimmunity leading to rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, and 200 other conditions.

Amylopectin A raises blood sugar to high levels—higher, ounce for ounce, than table sugar.

Wheat germ agglutinin is a potent bowel toxin. One milligram—a speck—of purified wheat germ agglutinin given to a lab rat destroys its intestinal tract.

Wheat germ agglutinin blocks gallbladder and pancreatic function (via blocking the receptor for cholecystokinin). This leads to impaired digestion and changes in bowel flora.

Grain phytates block absorption of all positively-charged minerals–such as iron, zinc, calcium, and magnesium.

Multiple allergens are present–such as trypsin inhibitors, thioreductases, alpha amylase inhibitors, and gamma gliadins, responsible for asthma, skin rashes, and gastrointestinal distress.

Grains are potent endocrine disrupters explaining why women with polycystic ovary syndrome, PCOS, are much worse with grain consumption with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, increased testosterone, increased facial hair, and infertility; why men’s breasts enlarge, why male levels of testosterone drop and estrogen increases, why pituitary prolactin levels are higher, why cortisol action is blocked, and why thyroid health is disrupted by autoimmune inflammation.

Big Food and agribusiness use wheat and grains to control human buying behavior, putting their addictive appetite-stimulating effects to use to increase food consumption and keep you coming back for more.

These are among the reasons that, in the Wheat Belly lifestyle, we return to real, single-ingredient foods minus wheat and grains. Remember: grains are the seeds of grasses, added in desperation by hungry humans just a moment ago in anthropological time (less than 1/2 of 1% of our time on this planet). Because grains are the seeds of grasses and humans are not equipped (as are grazing ruminants) to consume any component of grasses, many of the problems with grains originate with indigestible or poorly-digestible proteins. Wheat germ agglutinin, for example, is entirely resistant to human digestion, but exerts all manner of odd gastrointestinal inflammatory and hormonally disruptive effects in its passage from mouth to toilet. Gliadin, if left intact, initiates the autoimmune processes described above, but can also be partially digested to peptides–not single amino acids like other proteins–that have unique amino acid sequences that allow binding to opiate receptors of the human brain. The exception to the poor digestibility of the seeds of grasses is, ironically, amylopectin A, the component that accounts for the exceptional blood sugar-raising potential of grains.

Understanding these reasons is what sets you back on the path to being in control of appetite, impulse, and health. Minus the appetite-stimulating, health-disrupting effects of the various components of grains, you are back in the driver’s seat. Now how about a trip to the nightmare of all Big Food executives, the local farmers’ market?

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Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) may not be what you thought

At least 50% of people diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, IBS, actually have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO. If SIBO is not addressed directly, it can lead to numerous other health conditions such as fibromyalgia, diverticular disease, even colon cancer.

Identify and confirm whether your IBS is really SIBO, then learn how to take action to correct it and be relieved of both IBS symptoms and the long-term consequences of SIBO.

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