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

by William Davis

Dr. Christine Zioudrou and her colleagues at the NIH subjected gluten, the main protein of wheat, to a simulated digestive process to mimic what happens after we eat bread or other wheat-containing products.11 Exposed to pepsin (a stomach enzyme) and hydrochloric acid (stomach acid), gluten is degraded to a mix of polypeptides. The dominant polypeptides were then isolated and administered to laboratory rats. These polypeptides were discovered to have the peculiar ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain. This barrier is there for a reason: The brain is highly sensitive to the wide variety of substances that gain entry to the blood, some of which can provoke undesirable effects should they cross into your amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex, or other brain structure. Once having gained entry into the brain, wheat polypeptides bind to the brain’s morphine receptor, the very same receptor to which opiate drugs bind.