I’m full . . . But I’m still hungry!

Why can you eat, say, a big bowl of pasta, fill yourself up until you experience a painfully full stomach fit to burst, yet you remain hungry?

What creates this unnatural situation and what can you do about it to reclaim control over appetite, weight, and health?

Transcript:

Hi everyone, Doctor William Davis, author of the Wheat Belly and Undoctored books. Have you ever heard this from somebody: “I’m full, but I’m still hungry”? Well, I’ve heard it many times, in people prior to engaging in the Wheat Belly lifestyle, of banishing all wheat and grains from the diet.

Why would that be? Why would it be that you had a big plate of pasta, and your stomach is so full it’s almost bursting, and it hurts, but you’re still hungry? Or why are you emptying the kids plates into the garbage, and then sneak a few bites more of the pasta? Why is that?It’s unnatural, right? If your stomach is full, all the hormones are telling you quit eating, shut it down, right?

Why are you hungry? It’s because of the protein gliadin in wheat, and related proteins in other grains like the secalin in rye, or zein in corn. Recall that these proteins are very poorly digested by humans. If you eat an egg, or a piece of hamburger, you break those proteins down into single amino acids. When you consume the seeds of grasses you don’t have the enzymes to break it down to single amino acids.

There are sequences in there you can’t break down with the digestive enzymes you have. So you break them down only into pieces, or peptides. Most of them are four or five amino acids long. These peptides, while they’re bigger than single amino acids, are small enough to cross into the brain, and bind to the opiate or opioid receptors.

Now, they don’t make you high. They stimulate appetite. They’re very potent appetite stimulants, such that people consuming grains typically take in 400 to 800 more calories — often as much as 1500 more calories per day — not because you’re weak, not because you lack resolve, but because you’re exposed to an appetite stimulant, in the form of gliadin-derived opioid peptides.

How else would you have hunger when your stomach is bursting full? The key here is, don’t eat wheat and related grains, and you’ve thereby banished the gliadin-derived opioid peptides. You are miraculously freed of that kind of unnatural hunger. It’s a very powerful phenomenon.

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