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Advice to cut fat and cholesterol intake and replace the calories with whole grains that was issued by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute through its National Cholesterol Education Program in 1985 coincides precisely with the start of a sharp upward climb in body weight for men and women. Ironically, 1985 also marks the year when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began tracking body weight statistics, tidily documenting the explosion in obesity and diabetes that began that very year.
wheat is unique among modern grains in its ability to convert quickly to blood sugar.
So why has this seemingly benign plant that sustained generations of humans suddenly turned on us? For one thing, it is not the same grain our forebears ground into their daily bread. Wheat naturally evolved to only a modest degree over the centuries, but it has changed dramatically in the past fifty years under the influence of agricultural scientists. Wheat strains have been hybridized, crossbred, and introgressed to make the wheat plant resistant to environmental conditions, such as drought, or pathogens, such as fungi.
genetic changes have been induced to increase yield per acre. The
today’s bread bears little resemblance to the loaves that emerged from our forebears’ ovens.
the Fertile Crescent (now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq),
The Pillsbury’s Best XXXX flour my grandmother used to make her famous sour cream muffins in 1940 was little different from the flour of her great-grandmother sixty years earlier or, for that matter, from that of a relative two centuries before that.
changes in wheat protein structure can spell the difference between a devastating immune response to wheat protein versus no immune response
wheat of today is the product of breeding to generate greater yield
Eli bristles at the suggestion that wheat products might be unhealthy, citing instead the yield-increasing, profit-expanding agricultural practices of the past few decades as the source of adverse health effects of wheat. She views einkorn and emmer as the solution, restoring the original grasses, grown under organic conditions, to replace modern industrial wheat.
dwarf and semi-dwarf wheat now comprise more than 99 percent of all wheat grown worldwide.
no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created.
So intent were the efforts to increase yield, so confident were plant geneticists that hybridization yielded safe products for human consumption, so urgent was the cause of world hunger, that these products of agricultural research were released into the food supply without human safety concerns being part of the equation.
Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with hybridization.
Multiply these alterations by the tens of thousands of hybridizations to which wheat has been subjected and you have the potential for dramatic shifts in genetically determined traits such as gluten structure.
Modern wheat, despite all the genetic alterations to modify hundreds, if not thousands, of its genetically determined characteristics, made its way to the worldwide human food supply with nary a question surrounding its suitability for human consumption.
wheat is, in effect, an appetite stimulant.
It is therefore the D genome of modern Triticum aestivum that, having been the focus of all manner of genetic shenanigans by plant geneticists, has accumulated substantial change in genetically determined characteristics of gluten proteins. It is also potentially the source for many of the odd health phenomena experienced by consuming humans.
People who eliminate wheat from their diet typically report improved mood, fewer mood swings, improved ability to concentrate, and deeper sleep within just days
“Bread is my crack. I just can’t give it up!”
I’ve personally witnessed hundreds of people report extreme fatigue, mental fog, irritability, inability to function at work or school, even depression in the first several days to weeks after eliminating wheat.
a cause-and-effect relationship between wheat consumption and schizophrenia.
There have since even been reports of complete remission of the disease, such as the seventy-year-old schizophrenic woman described by Duke University doctors, suffering with delusions, hallucinations, and suicide attempts with sharp objects and cleaning solutions over a period of fifty-three years, who experienced complete relief from psychosis and suicidal desires within eight days of stopping wheat.
Initial small samples have demonstrated improvement in autistic behaviors with wheat gluten removal.
These polypeptides were discovered to have the peculiar ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain.
So this is your brain on wheat: Digestion yields morphine-like compounds that bind to the brain’s opiate receptors. It induces a form of reward, a mild euphoria. When the effect is blocked or no exorphin-yielding foods are consumed, some people experience a distinctly unpleasant withdrawal.
Wheat, in fact, nearly stands alone as a food with potent central nervous system effects. Outside of intoxicants such as ethanol (like that in your favorite merlot or chardonnay), wheat is one of the few foods that can alter behavior, induce pleasurable effects, and generate a withdrawal syndrome upon its removal.
wheat is an appetite stimulant: It makes you want more—more cookies, cupcakes, pretzels, candy, soft drinks. More bagels, muffins, tacos, submarine sandwiches, pizza.
Understanding that wheat, specifically exorphins from gluten, have the potential to generate euphoria, addictive behavior, and appetite stimulation means that we have a potential means of weight control: Lose the wheat, lose the weight.
foods made with or containing wheat make you fat.
wheat consumption is the main cause of the obesity and diabetes crisis in the United States.
Celeste reported that she’d gradually gained weight from her normal range of 120 to 135 pounds in her twenties and thirties.
healthy snacks such as raw nuts, flaxseed crackers, and cheese readily fit into her program.
Fourteen months after adopting the Wheat Belly diet, Celeste couldn’t stop smiling when she returned to my office at 127 pounds—a weight she’d last seen in her thirties.
Hold up a current picture of ten random Americans against a picture of ten Americans from the early twentieth century, or any preceding century where photographs are available, and you’d see the stark contrast: Americans are now fat.
wheat has undergone extensive agricultural genetics-engineered changes, and you have devised the formula for creating a nation of fat people.
“Eat more healthy whole grains” is really just the corollary of the “Cut the fat” movement embraced by the medical establishment in the sixties.
The low-fat, more-grain message also proved enormously profitable for the processed food industry. It triggered an explosion of processed food products, most requiring just a few pennies worth of basic materials. Wheat flour, cornstarch, high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and food coloring are now the main ingredients of products that fill the interior aisles of any modern supermarket.
Just as the tobacco industry created and sustained its market with the addictive property of cigarettes, so does wheat in the diet make for a helpless, hungry consumer.
From the perspective of the seller of food products, wheat is a perfect processed food ingredient: The more you eat, the more you want.
Wheat triggers a cycle of insulin-driven satiety and hunger, paralleled by the ups and downs of euphoria and withdrawal, distortions of neurological function, and addictive effects, all leading to fat
uniquely capable of triggering a universe of inflammatory phenomena. Visceral fat filling and encircling the abdomen of the wheat belly sort is a unique, twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week metabolic factory. And what it produces is inflammatory signals and abnormal cytokines, or cell-to-cell hormone signal molecules, such as leptin, resistin, and tumor necrosis factor.4, 5 The more visceral fat present, the greater the quantities of abnormal signals released into the bloodstream.
The list of other health conditions triggered by visceral fat is growing and now includes dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, and colon cancer.
waist circumference is proving to be a powerful predictor of all these conditions, as well as of mortality.
a wheat belly is not just unsightly, it’s also dreadfully unhealthy.
wheat increases blood sugar more profoundly than table sugar
whole wheat bread has a GI of 72, while plain table sugar has a GI of 59
cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, and tapioca starch. (It is worth noting that these are the very same carbohydrates often used to make “gluten-free” food. More on this later.)
Eliminate wheat in all its myriad forms and pounds melt away, often as much as a pound a day.
This means the elimination of wheat, as well as gluten-containing grains such as barley, rye, spelt, triticale, kamut, and perhaps oats.
