William Davis's Blog: Dr. Davis Infinite Health Blog, page 65

The next Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Challenge begins Wed August 15th!

Through my New York Times bestseller, Wheat Belly, millions of people learned how to reverse years of chronic health problems by removing wheat from their daily diets. But, after reading the original Wheat Belly or the Wheat Belly Total Health book, or even using the recipes from the Wheat Belly Cookbook and Wheat Belly 30-Minute Cookbook, people still said: “I’ve read the books, but I’m still not sure how to get started on this lifestyle.”

That’s why I wrote the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox  and now help readers along in this Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox CHALLENGE. This is the quickest, most assured way to get started on regaining magnificent health and slenderness by adopting the Wheat Belly lifestyle.

This next CHALLENGE begins Wednesday, August 15th to give you plenty of time to fit into a new slender wardrobe and reclaim control over numerous health conditions so that you can really enjoy this summer.

We are kicking this one off on Facebook LIVE on Day 1: Wednesday August 15th, 12pm EST. Come join us on the main Wheat Belly Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialWhea.... 

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox supplies you with carefully designed meal plans and delicious recipes to fully eliminate wheat and related grains in the shortest time possible. Perfect for those who may have fallen off the wagon or for newcomers who need a jump-start for weight loss, this new addition to the Wheat Belly phenomenon guides you through the complete 10-Day Detox experience. And we will kick off this next Challenge with a live Facebook session with Dr. Davis–stay tuned for details!

In addition to this quick-start program, I’ll teach you:

How to recognize and reduce wheat-withdrawal symptoms,
How to avoid common landmines that can sabotage success
How to use nutritional supplements to further advance weight loss and health benefits

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox also includes:

Inspiring testimonials from people who have completed the program (and have now made grain-free eating a way of life)

Exciting new recipes to help get your entire family on board

To join the Detox Challenge:

Step 1

Get the book. And read it (at least the first 5 chapters).

Detox Challenge participants should be informed and active in order to get the most out of the challenge and private Facebook group. READING THE WHEAT BELLY DETOX BOOK IS REQUIRED TO PARTICIPATE. PLEASE DO NOT PARTICIPATE IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK or else the conversations will not make sense and you will not enjoy full benefit. It is a very bad idea to try and piece the program together just from our conversations. (Note that the Wheat Belly Detox program is NOT laid out in the original Wheat Belly book.)

Amazon: http://amzn.to/1JqzMea

Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/wheatbelly10daygraindetox-bn

Indiebound: http://bit.ly/1KwcFTQ

Step 2

Come join the Private Facebook Group.

http://bit.ly/WheatBelly-PrivateFBGroup

Step 3

Head back to the Private Facebook Group starting Tuesday, August 14th (the day before the official start of the Challenge) and onwards for tips, videos, and discussions to help you get through your detox and reprogram your body for rapid weight loss and health. Dr. Davis and site administrator, April Duval, will be posting video instructions and answers to your questions.

 

The post The next Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Challenge begins Wed August 15th! appeared first on Dr. William Davis.

Troubleshooting L. reuteri yogurt-making

Making yogurt to amplify counts of the bacteria Lactobacillus reuteri is really very simple. We do this because the ATCC PTA 6475 and DSM 17938 strains of L. reuteri provide a ton of health benefits that includes increased skin/dermal thickness and reduction of skin wrinkles, increased or preserved bone density, reduced appetite, increased muscle, massively accelerated healing, increased libido, and and may even prevent recurrences of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), given the organism’s potential to colonize the upper gastrointestinal tract.

But some people struggle to obtain the thick, delicious yogurt that most of us create and thereby are unable to enjoy all the spectacular health benefits of this targeted probiotic strategy. (It’s NOT about the yogurt; it’s about increasing counts of this bacterial strain—the yogurt is just the vehicle we use to accomplish this.)

If you are encountering difficulties in making the L. reuteri yogurt, consider these troubleshooting items:

Temperature—Unlike most other lactate-fermenting species used to make yogurt, L. reuteri grows best at a lower temperature of around 100 degrees F. Microbial die-off begins at 115 degrees, with virtual wipe-out of the organism at 120 degrees. Unfortunately, many heating devices, such as yogurt makers or Instant Pots, either do not specify the temperature and/or are set inaccurately and generate temperatures of 120 degrees F or higher, killing your bacteria. If you fail to see any fermentation, i .e., no thickening occurs after 12-16 hours, check the temperature with a thermometer. You may have to use another device or do as I do: Use the oven by turning onto any temperature, e.g., 300 degrees, for 60 seconds, then turn off; repeat every 4 hours or so. As imprecise as this seems, it works great and you do not need to purchase any devices. (At night, heat before bedtime, then again when you awake—no need to get up in the middle of the night.)
Not enough prebiotic fiber—We use 2 tablespoons prebiotic fiber, such as Bob’s Red Mill Raw Potato Starch or powdered inulin, per quart of liquid. Omitting this step will yield a thinner end-product with markedly lower bacterial counts and thereby not yield the benefits we are looking to obtain.
Ferment longer—Although you may have yogurt after 12 hours, this is not long enough to generate the magnitude of bacterial counts we desire in the trillions. (See the Arithmetic of Yogurt blog post.) We therefore aim to ferment for 30 to 36 hours, then refrigerate.
Use a thicker starting liquid–I like starting with (organic) half-and-half, as the 18% fat yields a cream cheese-like end-product, thick and rich. Cream also works, but yields something close to the consistency of butter, too thick for my taste. Full-fat milk (cow, A2 milk, goat, sheep) is okay, but expect a thinner end-product, similar in consistency to store-bought yogurt. Avoid use of skim, low-fat, 2%, or non-dairy almond, hemp, soy milks, as they are too thin and, of course, we never limit fat on the Wheat Belly lifestyle. Coconut milk (canned, never carton) can be used, but be sure to emulsify the milk (e.g., stick/immersion blender) prior to adding starting culture and prebiotic fiber; this prevents separation of the fat.

Recall that strain specificity is important: while there are other strains of L. reuteri available, we have no evidence to suggest they yield similar benefits. So, for assurance of full benefit, stick to the strains that we know yield these effects, the L. reuteri ATCC PTA 6475 and DSM 17938 available from BioGaia.

The post Troubleshooting L. reuteri yogurt-making appeared first on Dr. William Davis.

Jessica’s fabulous Wheat Belly experience

The post Jessica’s fabulous Wheat Belly experience appeared first on Dr. William Davis.

The Best iPhone App for the Wheat Belly Lifestyle

The Wheat Belly lifestyle is powerful for not only losing weight but for healing many, many chronic health conditions. But it can sometimes be overwhelming to begin a new style of eating.

Luckily, there is now an app that can help you on your journey with my Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox called Suggestic.

If you have struggled to adopt a grain-free lifestyle or are brand new to the Wheat Belly lifestyle, Suggestic can be a massive help in guiding you through the ups and downs of this new and healthy lifestyle. Let me explain what Suggestic is and the advantages of using it.

Going Grain-Free

I’ve seen many begin this adventure. The key is patience–total mastery of the Wheat Belly lifestyle isn’t something you do in a day or a week. Or even, for some, in a month. The Wheat Belly diet, a grain-free and low-carb, high fat nutrition plan, can take time and practice. Eating to remove the grain toxins from your body is just the first step. What comes next is the process of healing your microbiome, hormone and nutrient balances in your body, while reversing inflammation.

The Wheat Belly lifestyle has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity and reduce inflammation. It also retrains your mind and body to no longer depend on carbs and frees you from the proteins in grains that keep you feeling hungry and damage overall health. Cut out the wheat–and all grains– and you can reduce the risk of many chronic diseases as well as lose stubborn pounds and feel–and look–years younger. You dramatically slash chances of getting a long term illness like type 2 diabetes, and look and feel better in the process!

Meet Suggestic

Who hasn’t gone on a diet and wondered if they are following it correctly–even a program as straightforward as my Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox? Lots of times I hear questions like, “How will I know when I’ve hit my carb limit? Or, “Is feeling a little light-headed normal?”

Your iPhone can now support your Wheat Belly lifestyle and help make staying grain-free much easier. Suggestic is the most helpful Wheat Belly diet app that I have found and I have been using personally. I recommend that everyone give it a try.

 

Customized Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox App

As a young cardiologist, I treated people for heart conditions. Many of them were diabetic or prediabetic so I was thinking a lot about how to teach patients ways to prevent getting so sick. I myself was running 3-5 miles a day and eating well–or so I thought. I looked at my own blood sugars and saw that, even though I thought I was in peak condition, I became a type 2 diabetic! Only after I cut out all wheat and then the other grains did I see the full range of positive results. I got serious about my new approach to eating and nutrient management and have experienced incredible success ever since.

Today, I continue to follow the Wheat Belly lifestyle and enjoy the incredible benefits including improved mental function, higher energy levels, skin as well as optimal digestive health. The Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox was designed to help you experience the Wheat Belly lifestyle, to detox from grains and adapt this super-healthy lifestyle.

 

Making the Wheat Belly Lifestyle Easier

Following the Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox will be easier for you, too, with the help of Suggestic. Simply go to the Apple app store and download the Suggestic Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox diet app onto your phone. It’s free!

Once you select my Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox, a whole world is unlocked. You can learn all about the science of how detoxing from grains works, how to get started on the program, what to eat and what to avoid, and locate restaurants that have Wheat Belly grain-free options on the menu.

 

 

Experience Tracker

This Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox app is not just about eating. Suggestic has great trackers to support other aspects of your life. The team at Suggestic understands that stress, work and other challenges can sometimes derail your best intentions to follow a program. At any time during the day, you can log your mood, how you slept, how much water you’ve had. I’m always curious to look back and see how I felt if I ate something different.

I also notice that if I don’t get 7 1/2 solid hours of sleep, I am definitely more cranky and hungrier. This is a common mistake that this Suggestic app can help you pinpoint.

Stay on top of these non-food aspects and make sure you are getting what you need. On the upside, I also like to note when something was going really well and I could see that, yes, I had good sleep, drank enough water, and was generally in a great mood. Taking my Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox on Suggestic can help you log the aspects of your lifestyle that yield the most success.

My Favorite Features

There are so many amazing features on the Suggestic app that are designed specifically to make everyday eating easy while you are following the Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox. You can log the meals you’ve eaten and track your macros–net carbs are the one and only measure I emphasize in this program–so you’re never wondering how you are doing.

If you’re super busy like I am, you will especially love the grocery list feature. Just tap on the food basket icon and the shopping list for your selected recipe appears. Once you purchase the item, cross it off the list.

Or you can select the breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for your meal plan, then create shopping lists. So easy!

You can further personalize your suggestions by adding filters. Don’t like broccoli? No problem! Just select it as a food to avoid and Suggestic will filter it out for you. That means you won’t see any recipes or restaurant options with broccoli.

When you sign up for my Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox with Suggestic, the extra guidance is amazing. Each day you will receive a fresh set of reminders and supportive emails (if you wish).

You’ll also have access to exclusive recipes that are specially formulated to keep you deliciously full–remember, this detox is not about counting calories! Suggestic aims to solve many of the challenges people face when adopting a grain-free diet.

 

Getting Started

Once you download Suggestic from the Apple app store (you can download it for free here), you will be guided through each step of the process of getting started. It’s like having a personal nutritionist interview you to determine your goals. The journey for my Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox on Suggestic is a simple program that gently navigates the grain detox process. It gives you exactly what you need to reach optimal health and be successful on the lifestyle. Once you have the essentials set up—a day to begin, foods to buy, etc., then your journey is underway.

It is a comprehensive Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox app that guides you in creating the best plan for your health.

Each day, you will track how you eat and live. The goal is to have no wheat, corn, rice, oats, barley or other grains whatsoever. Also, you will sharply scale back on sugar and other selected sources of carbs. On average, your total net carbs (total carbs minus fiber) per meal should not exceed 15 grams. We NEVER count calories, so feel free to eat healthy fats and proteins. To compensate for deficiencies of modern lifestyles (not of the diet), you will need to supplement with magnesium, iodine, fish oil, salt–yes: salt–and water.

Follow my rules throughout the Detox and you will have great success.  After the first few days, with the help of this awesome diet app, the beginning stages become much more manageable.

 

Nutritional Guidance

Here’s what I love about Suggestic: Preparation is about making sure you have the foods and supplements you need to get through the Detox. And you will also purge your fridge and pantry of anything that has wheat, corn, rice, oats, barley or other grains in it.

This list may surprise you–you will need to read ingredients carefully. I’m not going to give away the complete surprise of the journey here… Every day you will be guided with task lists, emails, instructional video, and lots of food options. If you’re more independent, know that these are optional and you can always pick and choose your way through the recipes, ingredients, and other elements–it’s all meant to support you, not hinder you.

 

Recipes, Recipes, Recipes!

I also love that Suggestic has all my recipes! Need my favorite dark-chocolate dipped coconut macaroons recipe? It’s there! Craving a healthy-fat snack? Just open the app! Wondering what to make for your family for dinner? No problem!

With the meal planner feature, you can prepare for the week so much more easily. Just select meals for each time and day and you’re all set. The Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox diet app puts together your customized shopping list.

Eat Out Without Worry

I’m often asked about the best Wheat Belly friendly restaurants in the area—no matter where I am. So I open up Suggestic and tap the “Eat Out” button. Endless results appear with all sorts of great info like menu choices are grain-free, how far away, how expensive, even if it’s open at the time I’m searching. Pretty cool.

Also, when I get to a restaurant, if it’s someplace with our augmented reality feature, I can point my phone at the menu, and the app will show me items that fit into the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox lifestyle or not. I don’t have to wonder what to eat and have less educating to do with my waiter about how to prepare my meal. Such a relief.

 

Use Your Smartphone to Support Your Lifestyle!

I come to realize how helpful my iPhone actually is in keeping my lifestyle organized and on track. (And don’t worry if you don’t have an iPhone. Suggestic will have an Android version soon. In the meantime, you can get all the latest Wheat Belly lifestyle updates on my website or sign up for my newsletter.

Having Suggestic is super important because it reduces the stress of navigating through a grain-free, healthy lifestyle in a world that is packed with grains and unhealthy. I recommend getting the app and signing up for my Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox. Experience for yourself what I’m so excited about. Once you sign up and put it to work every day, you’ll never regret it.

 

The post The Best iPhone App for the Wheat Belly Lifestyle appeared first on Dr. William Davis.

Dry Eye: An Interview With Corneal Specialist Dr. Peter Polack

I met ophthalmologist and corneal specialist Dr. Peter Polack while speaking in Ocala, Florida. He told me that, by having his patients with dry eye—which has increased dramatically over the last 20 years—remove all wheat and grains, he is seeing this condition reverse within weeks, along with all the other health benefits.

Unlike other ophthalmologists, who virtually have nothing to do with diet and therefore prescribe the costly drugs Restasis and Xiidra (each cost $500-$550 per month), Dr. Polack rarely has to resort to use of these awful agents.

Here Dr. Polack speaks about his phenomenal experience.

More about Dr. Polack and Ocala Eye can be found here. Dr. Polack also invites questions about dry eye: http://bit.ly/dryeyequiz. (The personal info is not required to post questions.)

Transcript:

Dr. Davis: Thank you Doctor Polack, for agreeing to tell us about your experience. Now, I met you in Ocala., when I was there to speak, and you shared with me some of your stories about eye health. Our listeners should know that you are a practicing ophthalmologist, a very busy guy, and you told me about all the incredible experiences you are having with the kind of lifestyle that I’m advocating, that now you are advocating. Could you tell us what you told me when we first talked?

Dr. Polack: Thanks for having me on. I’m a cornea specialist and what falls under my purview are such things as cataract surgery, corneal transplants and refractive surgery like LASIK and PRK, and also what are called external diseases. So that’s anything that affects the surface or the front part of the eye. And that can be anything from allergies to severe ulcerations and perforations and pretty nasty stuff.

But the other thing that falls in that category is dry eye. Now my father was a cornea specialist. He actually was a professor of ophthalmology, and he would deal with severe dry eye cases — people who had reactions to transplants, graft-versus-host disease, things like that. But those are extremely rare.

As far as the garden-variety dry eye that I’m seeing, he didn’t see nearly the amount of dry eye that I’m seeing today. That kind of got me to wondering; what’s different? What’s different now than back then? I’m not the one who discovered this, but I started doing a lot of reading, and I found that, well, it’s the nutritional aspect of it. What’s happened in the last 20 years is this emphasis on low-fat diets.

It’s almost become a joke in my clinic now with the techs, when patients come in complaining of dry eye, one of the first things I asked them is well, tell me what you eat. You’ll hear a kind of snickering because they know what the patient’s gonna say: Well I’ll have cereal for breakfast. Then I have some toast, and then I have a sandwich — bread of course, whole wheat, you know, because my doctor said whole wheat’s good for me. And then I have, you know, another sandwich, and some cookies, and then I’ll have pasta. And I’ll explain: you’ve got to completely eliminate that. And they have this shocked look on their face like; What? That’s all I eat. What am I supposed to eat? And I say well you’re supposed to eat what humans were designed to eat.

I have this lengthy checklist of things to do. It covers a lot of things. It’s based on what we find on an exam and also in testing: lifestyle changes, turning your ceiling fan off at night, things like that; medications — over the counter. I try to stay away from prescription things as much as possible, much to the chagrin of the drug reps that come by and ask: You’re a dry eye specialist. How come you’re not pushing our drugs anymore?

Then at the bottom of the list, I’ve got all these books. I’ve got Wheat Belly on there, and we’re adding Undoctored now, and of course Paleo diet, and things like that. We emphasize cutting out the wheat, getting more healthy fats in the diet: grass-fed beef, grass-fed butter. Some of the most recalcitrant cases are people who are vegan and vegetarian. They just kind of give me a sneer when I tell them they got to get more fat in the diet.

I would say that, at least over the last 10-12 years, that I’ve been promoting that with patients, they’ll come back (the ones that stick with it), they’ll come back three months later and say: My eyes feel better, and also my joints don’t ache. My back is not stiff. I’ve lost 30 pounds, and what’s weird is like my blood sugar’s down and my blood pressure’s down. I say: Well, what did your primary care doctor say? They say: Well, they don’t know what it is. But I told them what I’m doing, and they say, well it can’t be that.

I think I joked to you when I when I saw you that have actually, this is true, I’ve gotten calls from primary care doctors, very upset with me, asking What the hell is the ophthalmologist telling my patients what to eat?, and I think, visually, I say okay, I know who that doctor is. That’s the guy who’s overweight. He’s on statins. He’s probably on Viagra. He’s you know getting on to me. These patients come back, and you know I haven’t done a formal study obviously, this is all anecdotal, it is a busy clinic, but I’ve been starting to collect stories and things. We may put together like a little dry guide or something and put some resources such as your books and things, but it’s just been way way too many patients.

I’m not trying to be immodest or anything, but our eye clinic — we’ve probably helped more people reduce their metabolic syndrome than a lot of primary care doctors have.

Dr. Davis: That’s absolutely spectacular. Despite the misgivings and push back you get from some of the primary care. Now of course this is not what most other ophthalmologists are doing, right?

Dr. Polack: No, it’s interesting. Dry eye treatment has become a big industry. It’s probably three billion dollars, and that’s not even looking at the lost productivity. There are these things popping up now called dry eye universities. Well, of course they’re sponsored by drug companies. There are a couple of prescriptions. You’ve probably seen them on TV — prescription drugs for dry eye. There is a place for those, if you’ve exhausted everything else. People have pretty well socked-in autoimmune disease; they’re following all the nutritional advice, and they still have this problem. So, we may get to the point that we do that.

But when you look at these [drugs], their symposia and things like that, where doctors go, to it’s basically how to put a dry eye clinic in your practice (which we do have, an accredited dry eye center). There’s not a problem with that. The problem is that it is sort of structured around these prescription medications.

Dr. Davis: These drugs for dry eye are pretty expensive too, aren’t they?

Dr. Polack: They’re very expensive, and they don’t really have to be. One of them, Restasis®, which has been around for a long time. It’s cyclosporine. Cyclosporine has been around for a long time. When my father had patients that had corneal transplants, that kept rejecting their grafts, they would actually mix up cyclosporine and things like peanut oil — because it has to be mixed in an oil. The patients would put that in their eye. This company found a way to emulsify the oil and put the drug in there. It’s a good drug. There’s a newer one called Xiidra®, and these work on sort of the inflammatory pathways in the eyes.

But of course, these people come in with all these autoimmune problems, and their whole body is just lit up with autoimmune and inflammatory things. You start talking to them about their diet, and it’s wheat, and pasta, and cereal, and bread and whole wheat, because “whole wheat’s good for you”. They’ll say “whole wheat’s good for you” We’ll always ask who they are when we hear “they say”. They is the commercials: the American Heart Association, I guess too, and the American Diabetic Association. We’ve talked about that before.

When we start asking them questions about what else is going on (review of systems, as we say in medicine), well My back hurts. Look at my joints; they hurt. A lot of these are young people, so they really don’t have a reason to be having these problems. They have gut problems; gut dysbiosis. They’ve got inflammatory bowel. We could probably come up with a syndrome to call this. They have dry eye and dry mouth. That’s called the Sjögren’s syndrome. But they have invariably have thyroid problems; invariably they have some type of joint issues, and invariably they have some type of GI issues.

It’s just this big ball of wax, and all this stuff stuck together. Almost without question, they’re eating wheat at every meal, or vegetarian or vegan, and no fat in the diet. It’s amazing. It’s really amazing to see also the turnaround of some of these patients just after 8-12 weeks of doing this, if they can stick with it.

Dr. Davis: Doctor Polack, thank you very much for sharing your very impressive experience

The post Dry Eye: An Interview With Corneal Specialist Dr. Peter Polack appeared first on Dr. William Davis.

Dry Eye: An Interview With Corneal Specialist Dr. Peter Polak

I met ophthalmologist and corneal specialist Dr. Peter Polak while speaking in Ocala, Florida. He told me that, by having his patients with dry eye—which has increased dramatically over the last 20 years—remove all wheat and grains, he is seeing this condition reverse within weeks, along with all the other health benefits.

Unlike other ophthalmologists, who virtually have nothing to do with diet and therefore prescribe the costly drugs Restasis and Xiidra (each cost $500-$550 per month), Dr. Polak rarely has to resort to use of these awful agents.

Here Dr. Polak speaks about his phenomenal experience.

More about Dr. Polak and Ocala Eye can be found here. Dr. Polak also invites questions about dry eye: http://bit.ly/dryeyequiz. (The personal info is not required to post questions.)

Transcript:

Dr. Davis: Thank you Doctor Polak, for agreeing to tell us about your experience. Now, I met you in Ocala., when I was there to speak, and you shared with me some of your stories about eye health. Our listeners should know that you are a practicing ophthalmologist, a very busy guy, and you told me about all the incredible experiences you are having with the kind of lifestyle that I’m advocating, that now you are advocating. Could you tell us what you told me when we first talked?

Dr. Polak: Thanks for having me on. I’m a cornea specialist and what falls under my purview are such things as cataract surgery, corneal transplants and refractive surgery like LASIK and PRK, and also what are called external diseases. So that’s anything that affects the surface or the front part of the eye. And that can be anything from allergies to severe ulcerations and perforations and pretty nasty stuff.

But the other thing that falls in that category is dry eye. Now my father was a cornea specialist. He actually was a professor of ophthalmology, and he would deal with severe dry eye cases — people who had reactions to transplants, graft-versus-host disease, things like that. But those are extremely rare.

As far as the garden-variety dry eye that I’m seeing, he didn’t see nearly the amount of dry eye that I’m seeing today. That kind of got me to wondering; what’s different? What’s different now than back then? I’m not the one who discovered this, but I started doing a lot of reading, and I found that, well, it’s the nutritional aspect of it. What’s happened in the last 20 years is this emphasis on low-fat diets.

It’s almost become a joke in my clinic now with the techs, when patients come in complaining of dry eye, one of the first things I asked them is well, tell me what you eat. You’ll hear a kind of snickering because they know what the patient’s gonna say: Well I’ll have cereal for breakfast. Then I have some toast, and then I have a sandwich — bread of course, whole wheat, you know, because my doctor said whole wheat’s good for me. And then I have, you know, another sandwich, and some cookies, and then I’ll have pasta. And I’ll explain: you’ve got to completely eliminate that. And they have this shocked look on their face like; What? That’s all I eat. What am I supposed to eat? And I say well you’re supposed to eat what humans were designed to eat.

I have this lengthy checklist of things to do. It covers a lot of things. It’s based on what we find on an exam and also in testing: lifestyle changes, turning your ceiling fan off at night, things like that; medications — over the counter. I try to stay away from prescription things as much as possible, much to the chagrin of the drug reps that come by and ask: You’re a dry eye specialist. How come you’re not pushing our drugs anymore?

Then at the bottom of the list, I’ve got all these books. I’ve got Wheat Belly on there, and we’re adding Undoctored now, and of course Paleo diet, and things like that. We emphasize cutting out the wheat, getting more healthy fats in the diet: grass-fed beef, grass-fed butter. Some of the most recalcitrant cases are people who are vegan and vegetarian. They just kind of give me a sneer when I tell them they got to get more fat in the diet.

I would say that, at least over the last 10-12 years, that I’ve been promoting that with patients, they’ll come back (the ones that stick with it), they’ll come back three months later and say: My eyes feel better, and also my joints don’t ache. My back is not stiff. I’ve lost 30 pounds, and what’s weird is like my blood sugar’s down and my blood pressure’s down. I say: Well, what did your primary care doctor say? They say: Well, they don’t know what it is. But I told them what I’m doing, and they say, well it can’t be that.

I think I joked to you when I when I saw you that have actually, this is true, I’ve gotten calls from primary care doctors, very upset with me, asking What the hell is the ophthalmologist telling my patients what to eat?, and I think, visually, I say okay, I know who that doctor is. That’s the guy who’s overweight. He’s on statins. He’s probably on Viagra. He’s you know getting on to me. These patients come back, and you know I haven’t done a formal study obviously, this is all anecdotal, it is a busy clinic, but I’ve been starting to collect stories and things. We may put together like a little dry guide or something and put some resources such as your books and things, but it’s just been way way too many patients.

I’m not trying to be immodest or anything, but our eye clinic — we’ve probably helped more people reduce their metabolic syndrome than a lot of primary care doctors have.

Dr. Davis: That’s absolutely spectacular. Despite the misgivings and push back you get from some of the primary care. Now of course this is not what most other ophthalmologists are doing, right?

Dr. Polak: No, it’s interesting. Dry eye treatment has become a big industry. It’s probably three billion dollars, and that’s not even looking at the lost productivity. There are these things popping up now called dry eye universities. Well, of course they’re sponsored by drug companies. There are a couple of prescriptions. You’ve probably seen them on TV — prescription drugs for dry eye. There is a place for those, if you’ve exhausted everything else. People have pretty well socked-in autoimmune disease; they’re following all the nutritional advice, and they still have this problem. So, we may get to the point that we do that.

But when you look at these [drugs], their symposia and things like that, where doctors go, to it’s basically how to put a dry eye clinic in your practice (which we do have, an accredited dry eye center). There’s not a problem with that. The problem is that it is sort of structured around these prescription medications.

Dr. Davis: These drugs for dry eye are pretty expensive too, aren’t they?

Dr. Polak: They’re very expensive, and they don’t really have to be. One of them, Restasis®, which has been around for a long time. It’s cyclosporine. Cyclosporine has been around for a long time. When my father had patients that had corneal transplants, that kept rejecting their grafts, they would actually mix up cyclosporine and things like peanut oil — because it has to be mixed in an oil. The patients would put that in their eye. This company found a way to emulsify the oil and put the drug in there. It’s a good drug. There’s a newer one called Xiidra®, and these work on sort of the inflammatory pathways in the eyes.

But of course, these people come in with all these autoimmune problems, and their whole body is just lit up with autoimmune and inflammatory things. You start talking to them about their diet, and it’s wheat, and pasta, and cereal, and bread and whole wheat, because “whole wheat’s good for you”. They’ll say “whole wheat’s good for you” We’ll always ask who they are when we hear “they say”. They is the commercials: the American Heart Association, I guess too, and the American Diabetic Association. We’ve talked about that before.

When we start asking them questions about what else is going on (review of systems, as we say in medicine), well My back hurts. Look at my joints; they hurt. A lot of these are young people, so they really don’t have a reason to be having these problems. They have gut problems; gut dysbiosis. They’ve got inflammatory bowel. We could probably come up with a syndrome to call this. They have dry eye and dry mouth. That’s called the Sjögren’s syndrome. But they have invariably have thyroid problems; invariably they have some type of joint issues, and invariably they have some type of GI issues.

It’s just this big ball of wax, and all this stuff stuck together. Almost without question, they’re eating wheat at every meal, or vegetarian or vegan, and no fat in the diet. It’s amazing. It’s really amazing to see also the turnaround of some of these patients just after 8-12 weeks of doing this, if they can stick with it.

Dr. Davis: Doctor Polak, thank you very much for sharing your very impressive experience

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Dirty mouth

While watching the morning news (you know, the tidbits of news aired between direct-to-consumer drug ads), a commercial came on claiming that a new mouthwash kills 99.9% of all bacteria in the mouth, good-looking young people gazing at each other with inviting smiles.

Now why would you do that? Why would you wipe clean a bodily orifice that is meant to be teeming with microorganisms?

The human gastrointestinal tract, as well as the airway, vagina, skin, and other body parts, are all meant to be colonized with microorganisms. It represents an important symbiotic relationship: we support their health and they support ours. Imagine the same kind of attitude in wiping out oral flora was applied to the gastrointestinal tract and we took potent antibiotics to wipe it clean every day: Health is not supported—we lose the intestinal healing, metabolic support, nutrients, mind and emotional effects that bowel flora provide, huge health benefits that shape human life. Even worse, after antibiotics wipe out bowel flora, various species recolonize the intestines, but often dominated by undesirable species, such as Enterobacteriaceae like E. coli, Shigella, Klebsiella, Clostridia strains, as well as fungi like Candida albicans and others that have major negative impacts on human health and lead, over time, to bloating, diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, diverticular disease, colon cancer and many other conditions.

Just as you are healthier with a healthy spectrum of bowel flora, so you have better oral health with a healthy spectrum of oral flora. Emerging insights into the oral microbiome demonstrate, for instance, that mouthwashes increase blood pressure by wiping out species that produce nitric oxide, a potent mediator of artery tone. Starches like grain amylopectin, like sucrose, promote tooth decay by encouraging cavity-causing bacterial species like Streptococcus mutans. Changes in oral flora even appear to increase risk for pancreatic cancer, perhaps by contributing to body-wide inflammation and/or altering the immune response.  The composition of oral flora and the mucous biofilm they inhabit even affect taste perception. (Could this be part of the reason why macaroni and cheese-consuming kids hate broccoli and Brussels sprouts?)

You might argue that mouthwashes are necessary for not having bad breath, a modern necessity for social and intimate settings. But a life minus all wheat, grains, and sugars is a far better answer, one that reduces/eliminates plaque, reduces potential for cavities to near zero, and is the natural way to not have bad breath while allowing microorganisms to happily recolonize your mouth. Pour that antiseptic mouthwash down the sink along with your hand sanitizers, squeaky-clean shampoo, and antibacterial soap.

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What happened to the first wheat eaters?

 

In the first Wheat Belly book, I recounted the history of wheat from its wild-growing 14-chromosome einkorn ancestor, to the 28-chromosome emmer of Biblical times, to 42-chromosome spelt and other Triticum species, and finally to high-yield semi-dwarf strains created by agricultural scientists in the 1960s now comprises 99% of all wheat products sold. The quantity of additional changes introduced since are many, including selection of strains enriched in wheat germ agglutinin and phytates for their pest-resistant properties (while increasing human toxicity), gliadin and glutenin for desirable baking characteristics (but with amplified celiac, autoimmune, and opioid properties), and genetically-altered strains obtained via chemical mutagenesis to generate herbicide resistance (introducing myriad changes in proteins, including new allergens).

Modern wheat that graces your breakfast bowl, dinner table, or snack tray is therefore completely unlike traditional or heirloom strains of even a century ago. Because the first Wheat Belly book emphasized the toxic properties of modern wheat (along with my experiment comparing bread made from einkorn wheat versus that made from modern wheat), some people interpreted this to mean that consumption of, say, emmer, Kamut, or Red Fife wheat was therefore good. Not so. It is simply less harmful. (Remember: less bad is not necessarily good.)

What happened to the first humans in the Fertile Crescent who harvested wild, then cultivated, wheat?

Human health took a nosedive even with consumption of traditional, wild strains of einkorn and emmer wheat and related grains. Consumption of traditional wheat resulted in an explosion of tooth decay and misalignment, iron deficiency, and knee arthritis, for example. (Because organs like stomachs, livers, and brains are lost, we can discern such changes from the only remnants that date back 10,000 years ago: bones and teeth and, to limited degrees, microbe composition and fecoliths or fossilized feces). Let’s consider these changes one-by-one:

Tooth decay—Before the consumption of any grains, tooth decay was uncommon (Roberts 2005). Only 1-3% of all teeth recovered showed evidence for decay, infection, abscess, or misalignment—despite the lack of fluoridated toothpaste, toothbrushes, dental floss, or dentists. The notion of dental hygiene never ventured further than applying a twig to remove the remnants of wildebeest liver from between the teeth. When humans turned to grains, tooth decay became common, affecting between 16-49% of all teeth recovered. There was also common evidence for abscess formation and tooth misalignment. (This is why modern people must pay attention to dental hygiene, get their teeth cleaned, and wear braces.) Think of all the mentions of rotted and missing teeth before the twentieth century before modern dental hygiene, largely due to grain consumption. This happened with einkorn, emmer, and other traditional wheat strains, as well as with millet first consumed in sub-Saharan Africa and teosinte and maize in Central America.

Iron deficiency—Recall that grains contain phytates that serve to deter pests like fungi and insects, i.e., phytates are pesticides. But, when humans try to consume grains, the phytates avidly bind minerals: calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium and others, binding most of these minerals to be passed out in the toilet. But it’s iron deficiency that is best preserved in the historical record, as it shows up in bones as “porotic hyperostosis” and “cribra orbitalis,” both representing hypertrophy of the bone marrow to compensate for the iron deficiency anemia that occurs in populations that consume grains, a phenomenon that leaves its mark in the skull (Cohen 2007). (The potential for iron deficiency has been made worse by selecting modern wheat strains with greater phytate content.) This is believed to be the reason why 7-8% of people of Northern European origin developed the mutation for hemochromatosis that causes hyper absorption of iron in order to counter the lack of iron caused by grain consumption, a mutation that appeared around 6,000 years ago.

Knee arthritis—Osteoarthritis of the knee(s) has doubled or tripled since hunter-gatherers chased down their prey to kill and consume (Wallace 2017)—knee arthritis was the exception, not the rule. The evidence revealing this cannot, of course, pinpoint grain consumption as the cause, but it is at the top of the list of likely explanations. (Other potential explanations: lack of use due to sedentary behavior, walking on hard pavement and concrete, migration to colder climates and wearing clothes that reduce vitamin D exposure.) But, given the explosion of knee and other joint arthritis in people with excess visceral fat, grain consumption is, I believe, among the most logical causes.

What we cannot see, of course, is the higher blood sugars, insulin resistance, fatty liver, autoimmune diseases, migraine headaches, mind fog, depression, acid reflux and other health conditions that got their start with the consumption of seeds of grasses, now common conditions among modern grain-consuming humans that promptly reverse with their elimination.

The health impairments that develop when we consume grains should come as no surprise when you understand that seeds of grasses should never have become items on the human dietary menu in the first place except in times of desperation. Imagine you and your family have had nothing to eat for the past week—you will consume almost anything, even tree bark. You stumble on a wild field of grass: Do you declare “Hallelujah! We eat tonight!” Probably not. How would hungry, desperate humans convert a field of grass into something Homo sapiens can consume? Not an easy prospect, an effort that requires isolating seeds of each stalk, drying, grinding, then somehow reconstituting, such  as heating with water and forming a gruel. (The process of leavening with yeast was not discovered for several thousand years after the initial consumption of the seeds of grasses, a process discovered by Egyptians as beer, i.e., fungal fermentation, then leavened bread.) It is testimony to the cleverness of humans, but also to the fact that near-term survival is not the same as long-term freedom from chronic disease when you make such a desperate dietary mistake.

But we are not desperate, but live in a world of plenty. Ironically, we have turned back to the food of desperation, grains, as the cornerstone of diet, a fatal mistake now evident, for instance in the $3 trillion health bill that Americans now pay. Modern wheat is a rotten, horrible thing. But traditional or heirloom wheat and grains are just not quite as awful . . . but still pretty harmful to health.

Roberts C, Manchester K. “Dental disease” in The Archaeology of Disease. New York:Cornell University Press, 2005, 63-83. 
Cohen MN, Crane-Kramer GMM, editors’ summation in Ancient Health: Skeletal Indicators of Agricultural and Economic Intensification. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007; 320-43. 
Wallace IJ, Worthington S, Felson DT et al. Knee osteoarthritis has doubled in prevalence since the mid-20th century. PNAS 2017 Aug 14, 201703856.

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Do you have a Bagel Brain?

We can link grain consumption with causing or worsening some of the most mysterious brain disorders that have eluded the medical community for years, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, bipolar disorder, and, more recently, autism and ADHD.

Are you and your kids unknowingly under the influence of opiates? Opiates come disguised in many forms.

 

Grains contain opiates. Not figuratively, but quite literally. These opiates are not too different from morphine or heroin. Yes, wheat and grains, cleverly disguised as a multigrain loaf of bread to make sandwiches or a hot, steamy plate of macaroni and cheese for the kids are mind-altering drugs. You and your kids are not oxycodone addicts, but when you consume wheat and grains, the results are not all that different.

How can this be?When you consume the gliadin protein of wheat and the closely related proteins of other grains (secalin in rye, hordein in barley, zein in corn), they break down into smaller 4- or 5- amino-acid-long peptides. These peptides penetrate your brain and bind themselves to opiate receptors.

Even selecting organic isn’t safe. This is true even if grains are organic, traditional or heirloom, or sprouted. This is because grains contain toxic components naturally, only made worse by recent genetic manipulations.

In people with conditions such as bipolar illness and schizophrenia, grains yield effects such as impulsive behavior and paranoia; in children with attention deficit disorder and autism, they cause behavioral outbursts and shorten attention spans; in people prone to bulimia and binge eating disorder, they cause 24-hour-a-day food obsessions. In those prone to depression, they cause dark moods and even suicidal thoughts.

In people without these conditions, grains only serve to trigger appetite in an irresistible, never-satisfied way. Most of us take in 400 calories (or more) per day from this appetite-increasing effect, sometimes as much as 1,000 or more calories per day. Some people even develop incapacitating and addictive relationships with food due to exposure to gliadin-derived opiates, often resulting food in obsessions in people prone to eating disorders.

Lack of concentration, inability to focus, impaired learning, impaired decision-making ability, and sleepiness are exceptionally common after consuming wheat, rye, and barley. Gliadin-derived opiates are the likely culprits behind these effects, given their known ability to affect the mind. It’s also likely that blood sugar fluctuations caused by all grains contribute. This is especially true of the low blood sugar episodes experienced by individuals dealing with hypoglycemia.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and autistic spectrum disorder. While these disorders are unrelated, they share a similar response to gliadin-derived opiates. Children and adults with these conditions experience behavioral outbursts, such as temper tantrums or emotional “storms” without reason, and they have an impaired capacity to sustain attention. Kids with these conditions already have an impaired ability to learn and pay attention for more than a few seconds or minutes; grain-derived opiates make it worse. A recent analysis demonstrated that kids with autism lack the markers for celiac disease (such as transglutaminase antibody), but they do have increased levels of antibodies to gliadin, especially if gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea are present.

Paranoid schizophrenia. The worsening of paranoia, auditory hallucinations (hearing voices and receiving warnings or commands), and social disengagement were among the first observations made when researchers started studying the effects of wheat consumption on brain health, attributable to the gliadin protein–derived opiates. This effect may be confined to schizophrenics who express an autoimmune response to the gliadin protein, the group most likely to improve with wheat, rye, and barley avoidance.

Bipolar illness. We know that people with bipolar illness express higher levels of antibodies  in response to the gliadin protein, similar to the phenomenon observed in schizophrenics. Gliadin-derived opiate peptides likely also play a role in generating distortions in judgment and reality experienced with this condition.

Depression. If there is predisposition for depression, grains—especially wheat, rye, barley, and corn—can magnify or unmask that tendency. Depression due to the gliadin- and prolamin protein–derived opiates can be mild, resulting in a pervasive feeling of unhappiness and lack of interest, or it can be incapacitating and life threatening, complete with obsessive thoughts of suicide or self-harm. Both wheat and corn are also responsible for reductions in brain serotonin that regulates mood.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder. A person who has obsessive-compulsive disorder helplessly gives in to the impulse to obsessively and compulsively perform some action or engage in some thought—behaviors that have been associated with wheat consumption. It might be compulsive hand washing, or housecleaning, or checking and rechecking (and rechecking and rechecking) figures in a ledger. Being locked into such behavioral loops can be debilitating for the sufferer. These rituals can dominate their thoughts and behaviors, as well as sabotage success at school and work.

While some of these effects are associated with an immune response against one or more grain proteins, many are not.

There is hope. If you know that grains can worsen or cause deterioration in mental conditions, it also means that you know how to undo or lessen the severity of all of these effects. Isn’t it time to kick the habit once and for all?

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The fecalization of America

I’ve been lately discussing the issue of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO, a situation in which bowel microorganisms (especially of the undesirable Enterobacteriaceae variety such as E. coli and Shigella) ascend up from the colon and colonize the ileum, jejunum, duodenum, and stomach. This has numerous health implications that are only beginning to be appreciated: irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia, psoriasis and other skin rashes, restless leg syndrome, diverticular disease, heightened body-wide inflammation, increased risk for colon cancer—SIBO is either synonymous with these conditions or at least a major contributor.

I was discussing these issues with two radiologist friends recently who told me that, when they review CT scans, they have been witnessing a dramatic increase in a finding called fecalization. Feces retained in the colon has a characteristic appearance on CT scans (with oral contrast agent given) and it should only appear in the colon. But they have been seeing an increasing number of people with fecalization appearing in the small intestine where it should not be seen. Small intestinal fecalization has a limited number of causes, such as small bowel obstruction, which is an emergency, exquisitely painful, and life-threatening. But the majority of these people in which fecalization is being observed are young (twenties and thirties) and are not acutely ill, but have chronic abdominal complaints such as urgency, diarrhea, and bloating.

Fecalization of the small bowel is a sign that SIBO is present, i.e., fecal organisms have ascended up the small intestine. The observations of my two radiologist friends that the frequency of fecalization is on the rise is consistent with the explosion of SIBO nationwide. Because it is becoming clear, for instance, that the majority, perhaps all, the people with IBS also have SIBO, then that adds around 30 million people to the list with SIBO. Throw in fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions, psoriasis, etc. and the number of Americans with SIBO is likely something like 60 million or more, an epidemic on a par with overweight/obesity and type 2 diabetes.

What is driving this apparent epidemic of fecalization/SIBO? This list of causes is long and includes:

Delivery by c-section, no or brief period of breastfeeding
Antibiotics
Antibiotic residues in dairy and meats
Pesticide and herbicide residues in produce
Bt toxin and glyphosate residues in genetically-modified foods
Acid-suppressing drugs like Prilosec and Protonix. (There are probably plenty of other drugs that disrupt bowel flora, but this is almost never explored and documentation is not required for FDA approval.)
Chlorinated/fluoridated drinking water
Change in bowel flora that allow proliferation of undesirable species
Synthetic sweeteners aspartame, sucralose, saccharine
Emulsifying agents such as polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose

It also doesn’t help that we have soaps and toiletries for every surface and orifice and consume inadequate quantities of lactate-fermented foods and prebiotic fibers.

Chronic diseases are on the rise such that nearly half of all Americans now have one, if not several, chronic diseases. While there are many reasons for this trend (e.g., sugar consumption, smoking, sedentary lifestyles, etc.), I believe that the above factors that lead to SIBO are a big contributor. As you’d expect, reversing SIBO and not allowing yourself to be fecalized is associated with reversal or improvement of many chronic health conditions. For these reasons, SIBO is a hot topic of conversation in our Undoctored Inner Circle and our Virtual Meetups (two-way video meetings).

 

 

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