Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health

by William Davis

1) Modern wheat has undergone change in several crucial components, such as the gliadin protein and others; 2) These changes have been associated with various effects in humans, such as intestinal inflammation outside of celiac disease and an astounding array of mind effects; 3) Direct connections between wheat consumption and conditions such as diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, had been conclusively made . . . but virtually nobody had collected the data into one place nor dared question conventional advice that advocates essentially unrestrained consumption of the new modern strains of wheat.

Documented peculiar effects of wheat on humans include appetite stimulation, exposure to brain-active exorphins (the counterpart of internally derived endorphins), exaggerated blood sugar surges that trigger cycles of satiety alternating with heightened appetite, the process of glycation that underlies disease and aging, inflammatory and pH effects that erode cartilage and damage bone, and activation of disordered immune responses. A complex range of diseases results from consumption of wheat, from celiac disease—the devastating intestinal disease that develops from exposure to wheat gluten—to an assortment of neurological disorders, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, curious rashes, and the paralyzing delusions of schizophrenia.

A wheat belly represents the accumulation of fat that results from years of consuming foods that trigger insulin, the hormone of fat storage.

While some people store fat in their buttocks and thighs, most people collect ungainly fat around the middle. This “central” or “visceral” fat is unique: Unlike fat in other body areas, it provokes inflammatory phenomena, distorts insulin responses, and issues abnormal metabolic signals to the rest of the body. In the unwitting wheat-bellied male, visceral fat also produces estrogen, creating “man breasts.”

Genetic modification is built on the premise that a single gene can be inserted in just the right place without disrupting the genetic expression of other characteristics.

While hybridization falls short of the precision of gene modification techniques, it still possesses the potential to inadvertently “turn on” or “turn off” genes unrelated to the intended effect, generating unique characteristics, not all of which are presently identifiable.

Thus, the alterations of wheat that could potentially result in undesirable effects on humans are not due to gene insertion or deletion, but are due to the hybridization experiments that predate genetic modification. As a result, over the past fifty years, thousands of new strains have made it to the human commercial food supply without a single effort at safety testing.

Modern Triticum aestivum wheat flour is, on average, 70 percent carbohydrate by weight, with protein and indigestible fiber each comprising 10 to 15 percent. The small remaining weight of Triticum wheat flour is fat, mostly phospholipids and polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Of the complex carbohydrate in wheat, 75 percent is the chain of branching glucose units, amylopectin, and 25 percent is the linear chain of glucose units, amylose. In the human gastrointestinal tract, both amylopectin and amylose are digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme amylase. Amylopectin is efficiently digested by amylase to glucose, while amylose is much less efficiently digested, some of it making its way to the colon undigested. Thus, the complex carbohydrate amylopectin is rapidly converted to glucose and absorbed into the bloodstream and, because it is most efficiently digested, is mainly responsible for wheat’s blood-sugar-increasing effect.

Other carbohydrate foods also contain amylopectin, but not the same kind of amylopectin as wheat. The branching structure of amylopectin varies depending on its source.3 Amylopectin from legumes, so-called amylopectin C, is the least digestible—hence the schoolkid’s chant, “Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart, the more you eat ’em, the more you. . . .” Undigested amylopectin makes its way to the colon, whereupon the symbiotic bacteria happily dwelling there feast on the undigested starches and generate gases such as nitrogen and hydrogen, making the sugars unavailable for you to digest.

Amylopectin B is the form found in bananas and potatoes and, while more digestible than bean amylopectin C, still resists digestion to some degree. The most digestible form of amylopectin, amylopectin A, is the form found in wheat. Because it is the most digestible, it is the form that most enthusiastically increases blood sugar. This explains why, gram for gram, wheat increases blood sugar to a greater degree than, say, kidney beans or potato chips. The amylopectin A of wheat products, complex or no, might be regarded as a supercarbohydrate, a form o...

People are usually shocked when I tell them that whole wheat bread increases blood sugar to a higher level than sucrose.4 Aside from some extra fiber, eating two slices of whole wheat bread is really little different, and often worse, than drinking a can of sugar-sweetened soda or eating a sugary candy bar.

Therefore, wheat products elevate blood sugar levels more than virtually any other carbohydrate, from beans to candy bars. This has important implications for body weight, since glucose is unavoidably accompanied by insulin, the hormone that allows entry of glucose into the cells of the body, converting the glucose to fat. The higher the blood glucose after consumption of food, the greater the insulin level, the more fat is deposited. This is why, say, eating a three-egg omelet that triggers no increase in glucose does not add to body fat, while two slices of whole wheat bread increases blood glucose to high levels, triggering insulin and growth of fat, particularly abdominal or deep visceral fat.

The distinctive doughy quality of the simple mix of wheat flour and water, properties food scientists call viscoelasticity and cohesiveness, are due to gluten. While wheat is mostly carbohydrate and only 10 to 15 percent protein, 80 percent of that protein is gluten. Wheat without gluten would lose the unique qualities that transform dough into bagels, pizza, or focaccia.

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.

The extremes of blood sugar and insulin are responsible for growth of fat specifically in the visceral organs. Experienced over and over again, visceral fat accumulates, creating a fat liver, two fat kidneys, a fat pancreas, fat large and small intestines, as well as its familiar surface manifestation, a wheat belly. (Even your heart gets fat, but you can’t see this through the semi-rigid ribs.)

growth of the wheat belly in motion is high blood sugar (glucose). High blood sugar, in turn, provokes high blood insulin. (Insulin is released by the pancreas in response to the blood sugar: The higher the blood sugar, the more insulin must be released to move the sugar into the body’s cells, such as those of the muscle and liver.) When the pancreas’ ability to produce insulin in response to blood sugar rises is exceeded, diabetes develops. But you don’t have to be diabetic to experience high blood sugar and high insulin:

Until menopause, adult females have high levels of estrogen. Surplus estrogen, however, produced by visceral fat adds considerably to breast cancer risk, since estrogen at high levels stimulates breast tissue.11 Thus, increased visceral fat on a female has been associated with an increased risk for breast cancer as high as fourfold. Breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women with the visceral fat of a wheat belly is double that of slender, non-wheat-belly-bearing postmenopausal females.

The bigger the wheat belly in males, the more estrogen that is produced by visceral fat tissue. Since estrogen stimulates growth of breast tissue, elevated estrogen levels can cause men to develop larger breasts—those dreaded “man boobs,” “man cans,” or, for you professional types, gynecomastia.

However, many gluten-free foods are made by replacing wheat flour with cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, or tapioca starch (starch extracted from the root of the cassava plant). This is especially hazardous for anybody looking to drop twenty, thirty, or more pounds, since gluten-free foods, though they do not trigger the immune or neurological response of wheat gluten, still trigger the glucose-insulin response that causes you to gain weight. Wheat products increase blood sugar and insulin more than most other foods. But remember: Foods made with cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, and tapioca starch are among the few foods that increase blood sugar even more than wheat products.

So what happens if various obnoxious compounds mistakenly gain entry into the bloodstream? One of the undesirable effects is autoimmunity—i.e., the body’s immune response is “tricked” into activation and attacks normal organs such as the thyroid gland or joint tissue. This can lead to autoimmune conditions such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Because of wheat’s incredible capacity to send blood sugar levels straight up, initiate the glucose-insulin roller coaster ride that drives appetite, generate addictive brain-active exorphins, and grow visceral fat, it is the one essential food to eliminate in a serious effort to prevent, reduce, or eliminate diabetes.

Child diabetics experience damage to the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, impairing its ability to make insulin. Unchecked, blood glucose climbs to dangerous levels, acting as a diuretic (causing urinary water loss). Metabolism is impaired, since glucose is unable to enter the body’s cells due to lack of insulin. Unless insulin is administered, a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis develops, followed by coma and death.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the explosion of diabetes and prediabetes has been in large part caused by the explosion in overweight and obesity, since weight gain leads to impaired insulin sensitivity and greater likelihood that excess visceral fat accumulates, the fundamental conditions required to create diabetes.

In short, carbohydrates, especially those such as wheat products that increase blood sugar and insulin most dramatically, initiate a series of metabolic phenomena that ultimately lead to irreversible loss of the pancreas’s ability to manufacture insulin: diabetes.

As we’ve discussed, foods that increase blood sugar the most also cause diabetes. The sequence is simple: Carbohydrates trigger insulin release from the pancreas, causing growth of visceral fat; visceral fat causes insulin resistance and inflammation. High blood sugars, triglycerides, and fatty acids damage the pancreas. After years of overwork, the pancreas succumbs to the thrashing it has taken from glucotoxicity, lipotoxicity, and inflammation, essentially “burning out,” leaving a deficiency of insulin and an increase in blood glucose—diabetes.

Dr. Volek and his team have repeatedly demonstrated, in both humans and animals, that sharp reduction in carbohydrates reverses insulin resistance, postprandial distortions, and visceral fat.

It also suggests that prevention of diabetes, rather than reversal of diabetes, can be achieved with less intensive dietary efforts. After all, some carbohydrate sources, such as blueberries, raspberries, peaches, and sweet potatoes, provide important nutrients and don’t increase blood glucose to the same extent that more “obnoxious” carbohydrates can. (You know who I’m talking about.)

Vegetables and fruits, on the other hand, are the dominant alkaline foods in the diet. Virtually everything in your produce department will drive pH toward the alkaline direction. From kale to kohlrabi, generous consumption of vegetables and fruits serve to neutralize the acidic burden from animal products.

The cartilage in joints is uniquely susceptible to glycation, since cartilage cells are extremely long-lived and are incapable of reproducing. Once damaged, they do not recover. The very same cartilage cells residing in your knee at age twenty-five will (we hope) be there when you are eighty; therefore, these cells are susceptible to all the biochemical ups and downs of your life, including your blood sugar adventures. If cartilage proteins, such as collagen and aggrecan, become glycated, they become abnormally stiff. The damage of glycation is cumulative, making cartilage brittle and unyielding, eventually crumbling.26 Joint inflammation, pain, and destruction results, the hallmarks of arthritis. So high blood sugars that encourage growth of a wheat belly, coupled with inflammatory activity in visceral fat cells and glycation of cartilage, lead to destruction of bone and cartilage tissue in joints. Over years, it results in the familiar pain and swelling of the hips, knees, and hands. That baguette may look innocent, but it’s a lot harder on the joints than you think.

For LDL particles, size of course does not make the difference between eating or being eaten. It determines whether LDL particles will accumulate in the walls of arteries, such as those of your heart (coronary arteries) or neck and brain (carotid and cerebral arteries)—or not. In short, LDL size determines to a large degree whether you will have a heart attack or stroke at age fifty-seven or whether you’ll continue to pull the handle on casino slot machines at age eighty-seven.

For years, this simple fact eluded nutrition scientists. After all, dietary fats, maligned and feared, are composed of triglycerides. Logically, increased intake of fatty foods, such as greasy meats and butter, should increase blood levels of triglycerides. This proved true—but only transiently and to a small degree. More recently, it has become clear that, while increased intake of fats does indeed deliver greater quantities of triglycerides into the liver and bloodstream, it also shuts down the body’s own production of triglycerides. Because the body is able to produce large quantities of triglycerides that handily overwhelm the modest amount taken in during a meal, the net effect of high fat intake is little or no change in triglyceride levels.15 Carbohydrates, on the other hand, contain virtually no triglycerides. Two slices of whole grain bread, an onion bagel, or sourdough pretzel contain negligible triglycerides. But carbohydrates possess the unique capacity to stimulate insulin, which in turn triggers fatty acid synthesis in the liver, a process that floods the bloodstream with triglycerides.16 Depending on genetic susceptibility to the effect, carbohydrates can send triglycerides into the hundreds or even thousands of mg/dl range. The body is so efficient at producing triglycerides that high levels, e.g., 300 mg/dl, 500 mg/dl, even 1,000 mg/dl or more, can be sustained twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for years—provided the flow of carbohydrates continues.

High insulin levels stimulate the machinery for de novo lipogenesis in the liver, efficiently transforming carbohydrates into triglycerides, which are then packaged into VLDL particles.

Carbohydrates are the foods that encourage fat storage, a means of preserving the bounty from times of plenty. If you were a primitive human, satiated from your meal of freshly killed boar topped off with some wild berries and fruit, you would store the excess calories in case you failed to catch another boar or other prey in the coming days or even weeks. Insulin helps store the excess energy as fat, transforming it into triglycerides that pack the liver and spill over into the bloodstream, energy stores to be drawn from when the hunt fails. But in our bountiful modern times, the flow of calories, especially those from carbohydrates such as grains, never stops, but flows endlessly.

Foods that increase blood glucose to a greater degree therefore trigger VLDL production by the liver. Greater VLDL availability, through interaction with LDL particles, favors formation of small LDL particles that linger for longer periods of time in the bloodstream. High blood glucose encourages glycation of LDL particles, particularly those that are already oxidized.

Gluten is the component of wheat confidently linked with triggering destructive immune phenomena, whether expressed as celiac disease, cerebellar ataxia, or dementia. However, many health effects of wheat, including those on the brain and nervous system, have nothing to do with immune phenomena triggered by gluten. The addictive properties of wheat, for instance, expressed as overwhelming temptation and obsession, obstructed by opiate-blocking drugs, are not directly due to gluten, but to exorphins, the breakdown product of gluten.

The means by which insulin triggers acne formation is beginning to yield to the light of day. Insulin stimulates the release of a hormone called insulin-like growth factor-I, or IGF-I, within the skin. IGF-1, in turn, stimulates tissue growth in hair follicles and in the dermis, the layer of skin just beneath the surface.9 Insulin and IGF-1 also stimulate the production of sebum, the oily protective film produced by the sebaceous glands.10 Overproduction of sebum, along with skin tissue growth, leads to the characteristic upward-growing reddened pimple.

Big Food also pays for much of the “research” conducted by dietitians and nutrition scientists, they endow faculty positions at universities and colleges, and they influence the content of media. In short, they are everywhere. And they are extremely effective. The great majority of Americans have fallen for their marketing hook, line, and sinker. It’s made even more difficult to ignore when the American Heart Association and other health organizations endorse their products. (The American Heart Association’s heart-check mark stamp of approval, for instance, has been bestowed on more than 800 foods, including Honey Nut Cheerios and, until recently, Cocoa Puffs.)

B vitamins, such as B6, B12, folic acid, and thiamine, are added to baked, processed wheat products; dietitians therefore warn us that forgoing these products will yield vitamin B deficiencies. Also untrue. B vitamins are present in more than ample quantities in meats, vegetables, and nuts. While bread and other wheat products are required by law to have added folic acid, you’ll exceed the folic acid content of wheat products several times over just by eating a handful of sunflower seeds or asparagus. A quarter cup of spinach or four asparagus spears, for instance, matches the quantity of folic acid in most breakfast cereals.

After a 7:00 a.m. breakfast of two scrambled eggs with vegetables, peppers, and olive oil, for instance, you likely won’t be hungry until noon or 1 p.m. Compare this to the 90- to 120-minute cycle of insatiable hunger most people experience after a 7:00 a.m. bowl of high-fiber breakfast cereal, necessitating a 9 o’clock snack and another 11 o’clock snack or early lunch. You can see how easy it becomes to cut the 350 to 400 calories per day from your overall consumption that results naturally and unconsciously from wheat elimination. You will also avoid the afternoon slump that many people experience at about 2:00 or 3:00 p.m., the sleepy, sluggish fog that follows a lunch of a sandwich on whole wheat bread, the mental shutdown that occurs because of the glucose high followed by the low. A lunch, for instance, of tuna (without bread) mixed with mayonnaise or olive oil–based dressing, along with zucchini slices and a handful (or several handfuls) of walnuts will not trigger the glucose-insulin high-low at all, just a seamless normal blood sugar that has no sleep- or fog-provoking effect.

What causes wheat withdrawal? It is likely that years of high-carbohydrate eating makes the metabolism reliant on a constant supply of readily absorbed sugars such as those in wheat. Removing sugar sources forces the body to adapt to mobilizing and burning fatty acids instead of more readily accessed sugars, a process that requires several days to kick in.

Berries (blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, cranberries, cherries) are at the top of the list with the greatest nutrient content and the least sugars, while bananas, pineapple, mango, and papaya need to be especially limited due to high sugar content.

Oatmeal, for instance, whether “stone-ground,” Irish, or slow-cooked, will cause blood sugar to skyrocket. No diet should be dominated by any of these grains, nor do you need them. But most people can do fine by ingesting these grains in modest quantities (e.g., ¼ to ½ cup). The exception: If you have proven gluten sensitivity, then you must meticulously avoid rye, barley, bulgur, triticale, kamut, and perhaps oats.

In the world of grains, one grain stands apart, since it consists entirely of protein, fiber, and oils: flaxseed. Because it is essentially free of carbohydrates that increase blood sugar, ground flaxseed is the one grain that fits nicely into this approach (the unground grain is indigestible). Use ground flaxseed as a hot cereal (heated, for instance, with milk, unsweetened almond milk, coconut milk or coconut water, or soymilk, with added walnuts or blueberries) or add it to foods such as cottage cheese or chilis. You can also use it to make a breading for chicken and fish.