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

by William Davis

two common intestinal conditions affect many more people: irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and acid reflux (also called reflux esophagitis when esophageal inflammation is documented). Both may represent lesser forms of celiac disease, what I call celiac disease “lite.”

Acid reflux occurs when stomach acid is permitted to climb back up the esophagus due to a lax gastroesophageal sphincter, the circular valve meant to confine acid to the stomach. Because the esophagus is not equipped to tolerate acidic stomach contents, acid in the esophagus does the same thing that acid would do to your car’s paint

job: It dissolves it. Acid reflux is often experienced as common heartburn, accompanied by a bitter taste in the back of the mouth.

People

with acid reflux have a 10 percent chance of having positive celiac markers.

Eliminate wheat, acid reflux improves, symptoms of IBS improve.

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.

But you could remove wheat and an entire domino

effect of changes develop: less triggering of blood sugar rises, no exorphins to drive the impulse to consume more, no initiation of the glucose-insulin cycle of appetite. And if there’s no glucose-insulin cycle, there’s little to drive appetite except genuine physiologic need for sustenance, not overindulgence.

It inadvertently led to a thirty-year experiment in what can happen to people who reduce fats but replace lost fat calories with “healthy whole grains” such as wheat. The result: weight gain, obesity, bulging abdomens of visceral fat, prediabetes and diabetes on a scale never before witnessed, affecting males and females alike, rich and poor, herbivores and carnivores, reaching across all races and ages, all “passing water like a siphon that tastes like honey.”

The number of Americans with diabetes is growing faster than any other disease condition with the exception of obesity (if you call obesity a disease).

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.

Carbohydrates trigger insulin release from the pancreas, causing growth of visceral fat; visceral fat causes insulin resistance and inflammation.

Part of the prevailing standard of care to prevent and treat diabetes, a disease caused in large part by carbohydrate consumption . . . is to advise increased consumption of carbohydrates.

I watched patients gain weight, experience

deteriorating blood glucose control and increased need for medication, and develop diabetic complications such as kidney disease and neuropathy.

ignoring ADA diet advice and cutting carbohydrate intake leads to improved blood sugar control, reduced HbA1c, dramatic weight loss, and improvement in all the

metabolic messiness of diabetes such as high blood pressure and triglycerides.

Let’s rewind the entire grainy, shakily filmed show: Remove carbohydrates, especially those from “healthy whole grains,” and an entire constellation of modern conditions reverse themselves.

The studies to date have achieved proof of concept: Reduction of carbohydrates improves blood sugar behavior, reducing the diabetic tendency. If taken to extremes, it is possible to eliminate diabetes medications in as little as six months.

Though I disagree with many of the policies of the American Diabetes Association, on this point we agree: Children

diagnosed with type 1 diabetes should be tested for celiac disease. I would add that they should be retested every few years to determine whether celiac disease develops later in childhood, even adulthood. Although no official agency advises it, I don’t believe it would be a stretch to suggest that parents of children with diabetes should strongly consider wheat gluten elimination, along with other gluten sources.

There are obvious dietary sources of acid such as carbonated sodas that contain carbonic acid. Some sodas, such as Coca-Cola, also contain phosphoric acid. The extreme acid loads of carbonated sodas stretch your body’s acid-neutralizing capacity to its limits. The constant draw on calcium from bones, for instance, is associated with fivefold increased fractures in high school girls who consume the most carbonated colas.1

Acids yielded by meats, such

as uric acid and sulfuric acid (the same as in your car’s battery and acid rain), need to be buffered by the body.

Wheat is among the most potent sources of sulfuric acid, yielding more sulfuric acid per gram than any meat.13 (Wheat is surpassed only by oats in quantity of sulfuric acid produced.) Sulfuric acid is dangerous stuff. Put it on your hand and it will cause a severe burn. Get it in your eyes and you can go blind.

Grains such as wheat account for 38 percent of the average American’s acid load, more than enough to tip the balance into the acid range. Even in a diet limited to 35 percent of calories from animal products, adding wheat shifts the diet from net alkaline to strongly net acid.

My suspicion is that yes, wheat exerts direct and indirect bone- and joint-destructive effects in any wheat-consuming human, just expressed more vigorously in celiac- or gluten antibody–positive people.

“Healthy whole grains” such as wheat are the cause for much of the acid-heavy nature of the modern diet. Beyond bone health, emerging experiences suggest that crafting a diet that favors alkaline foods has the potential to reduce age-related muscle wasting, kidney stones, salt-sensitive hypertension, infertility, and kidney disease. Remove wheat and experience reduced joint inflammation and fewer blood sugar “highs” that glycate cartilage, and shift the pH balance to alkaline. It sure beats taking Vioxx.

Atherosclerosis—Oral administration of AGEs in both animals and humans causes constriction of arteries, the abnormal excessive tone (endothelial dysfunction) of arteries associated with the fundamental injury that lays the groundwork for

atherosclerosis.6 AGEs also modify LDL cholesterol particles, blocking their normal uptake by the liver and routing them for uptake by inflammatory cells in artery walls, the process that grows atherosclerotic plaque.7 AGEs can be recovered from tissues and correlated with plaque severity: The higher the AGE content of various tissues, the more severe the atherosclerosis in arteries will be.8

Eye health—AGEs damage eye tissue, from the lens (cataracts) to the retina (retinopathy) to the lacrimal glands (dry eyes).14 Many of the damaging effects of AGEs work through increased oxidative stress and inflammation,

two processes underlying numerous disease processes.15 On the other hand, recent studies have shown that reduced AGE exposure leads to reduced expression of inflammatory markers such as c-reactive protein (CRP) and tumor necrosis factor.16

Here’s another complex term you’re going

to be hearing a lot about in the coming years: AGE. Advanced glycation end products, appropriately acronymed AGE, is the name given to the stuff that stiffens arteries (atherosclerosis), clouds the lenses of the eyes (cataracts), and mucks up the neuronal connections of the brain (dementia), all found in abundance in older people.1 The older we get, the more AGEs can be recovered in kidneys, eyes, liver, skin, and other organs.

accumulated AGEs also mean loss of the kidneys’ ability to filter blood to remove waste and retain protein, stiffening and atherosclerotic plaque accumulation in arteries, stiffness and deterioration of cartilage in joints such as the knee and hip, and loss of functional brain cells with clumps of AGE debris taking their place.

The sequence of events leading to formation of AGEs goes like this: Ingest foods that increase blood glucose. The greater availability of glucose to the body’s tissues permits the glucose molecule to react with any protein, creating a combined glucose-protein molecule.

Diabetics, for instance, are two to five times more likely to have coronary artery disease and heart attacks, 44 percent will develop atherosclerosis of the carotid arteries or other arteries outside of the heart, and 20 to 25 percent will develop impaired kidney function or kidney failure an average of eleven years following diagnosis.

In fact, high blood sugars sustained over several years virtually guarantee development of complications.

AGEs that result from high blood sugars are responsible for most of the complications of diabetes, from neuropathy (damaged nerves leading to loss of sensation in the feet) to retinopathy (vision defects and blindness) to nephropathy (kidney disease and kidney failure). The higher the blood sugar and the longer blood sugars stay high, the more AGE products will accumulate and the more organ damage results.

Thus, the complications of diabetes, such as atherosclerosis, kidney disease, and neuropathy, are also the diseases of aging, common in people in their sixth,

seventh, and eighth decades, uncommon in younger people in their second and third decades.

From an endogenous AGE viewpoint, a Snickers bar triggers AGE formation only modestly, while whole wheat bread triggers AGEs vigorously, given the greater blood glucose–increasing effect of whole wheat bread.

An impressive demonstration of the power of exogenous AGEs to impair arterial function was demonstrated when identical diets of chicken breast, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, and vegetable oil were consumed by two groups of diabetic volunteers. The only difference: The first group’s meal was cooked for ten minutes by steaming or boiling, while the second group’s meal was cooked by frying or broiling at 450°F for twenty minutes. The group given food cooked longer and at a higher temperature showed 67 percent reduced capacity for arterial relaxation, along with higher AGE and oxidative markers in the blood.22

Whenever possible, avoid well-done and choose meats cooked rare or medium. (Is sashimi the perfect meat?)

Thankfully, a simple blood test can be used to gauge the ongoing rate of AGE formation: hemoglobin A1c, or HbA1c. HbA1c is a common blood test that, while usually used for the purpose of diabetes control, can also serve as a simple index of glycation.

A slender person with a normal insulin response

who consumes a limited amount of carbohydrates will have approximately 4.0 to 4.8 percent of all hemoglobin glycated (i.e., an HbA1c of 4.0 to 4.8 percent), reflecting the unavoidable low-grade, normal rate of glycation. Diabetics commonly have 8, 9, even 12 percent or more glycated hemoglobin—twice or more the normal rate. The majority of nondiabetic Americans are somewhere in between, most living in the range of 5.0 to 6.4 percent,

The higher your HbA1c, the more you are also glycating the proteins in the lenses of your eyes, in kidney tissue, arteries, skin, etc.32 In effect, HbA1c provides an ongoing index of aging rate: The higher your HbA1c, the faster you are aging.