Wheat Belly Total Health: The effortless grain-free health and weight-loss plan. Dr Davis William
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and high-fructose corn syrup became dominant, a popular source for sugar. Until the early 20th century, sorghum syrup was poured over pancakes and used to make sweets. Like all grains, sorghum is largely carbohydrate, with approximately 75 per cent of its calories coming from starch, triggering glycation as enthusiastically as the starchy seed of any other grass. It remains popular as fodder for livestock because it’s as useful for rapid fattening as wheat and corn are.
Sorghum is an especially interesting grass, as it is toxic, and even fatal, when consumed before it’s fully mature; its high cyanide content has been known to decimate herds of livestock, causing death by cardiac arrest. This grass grows wild in much of Africa and is believed to have been first domesticated in the savannahs around 4,000 years ago. While it is a ‘true grass’ from the family Poaceae, sorghum is less closely related to the grasses discussed above. The gliadin protein counterpart in sorghum, kafirin, is only distantly related and therefore does not trigger coeliac or other undesirable gliadin responses. Despite the more benign nature of kafirin proteins, sorghum is still the seed of a grass and is therefore largely indigestible. Accordingly, the proteins in sorghum are poorly digested; about half of them pass right through the human gastrointestinal tract undisturbed.52 This has prompted manipulations to increase digestibility, including mutating the plant’s genetics with gamma radiation and chemicals, genetically modifying it by inserting genes for more digestible proteins, and mechanically or enzymatically processing the flour, all to enhance digestibility.
It is not clear what would happen to humans who relied too much on sorghum as a calorie source. But given its problematic indigestible proteins and high starch content, it is worth minimizing exposure, as with rice and oats.
There’s a Snake in the Grass
To complete our discussion of the seeds of grasses, I should mention that bulgur is simply a combination of different strains of wheat, though often of the durum variety, such as that used in pasta. But it is still wheat, with virtually all the same problems. Triticale is the result of mating wheat with rye; as you would predict, it also shares all of the same issues due to its parentage.
Millet, teff and amaranth, all added to our diets over the last few thousand years, are among several other less-common seeds of grasses that humans consume. None cause the range of health difficulties that wheat, rye, barley, corn, bulgur, triticale or sorghum are responsible for, nor have they been the recipients of enthusiastic genetic modification. However, they’re still high in carbohydrates given their amylopectin content. In France, ortolan songbirds made morbidly obese on a diet of millet and oats, then drowned in Armagnac, set on fire, and consumed whole were considered a delicacy that was savoured for its rich, dripping fat. (This is now outlawed.) Just like corn and wheat, grains whose only known problem is their amylopectin starch are still quite effective at fattening up pigs, cows, songbirds and humans.
Some people feel that they can consume a small quantity of these glycaemically challenging grains now and then without paying a health price, but bear in mind that each time you consume these starchy seeds you invite greater and greater health compromises, just as you do when you eat a bag of jelly beans.
The Human Diet: A Grass-Free Zone
You may want your beef to be grass-fed, but you shouldn’t be that way.
You may have come to recognize that the deeper we dig into this thing called grains or, more properly, the seeds of grasses, the worse it gets. We uncover more and more reasons why non-ruminant Homo sapiens is just not equipped to handle the components of these plants: lectins in wheat, rye, barley and rice; the prolamin proteins gliadin, secalin, hordein, zein and kafirin; acrylamides; cyanide; and arsenic – not to mention that we suffer deficiencies like pellagra and beriberi when we come to overrely on these seeds. Ironically, the world’s calories are most concentrated in the calories of the most destructive grains – wheat and corn – and some serious questions have now been raised about the safety of rice.
Funny how this just doesn’t happen with broccoli, celery, walnuts, olives, eggs or salmon – foods we can consume ad lib and digest easily, without triggering blood sugar, glycation, autoimmunity, dementia or other disease-related effects. As you might predict from the stories I’ve related so far, eliminating the seeds of grasses that were not on the instinctive menu for Homo sapiens frees us of many of the health conditions that plague modern humans, including rampant tooth decay, hypertension, diabetes, depression, and a wide range of neurological and gastrointestinal disorders – conditions notably absent or rare in humans following traditional diets. So I urge you to release your inner ruminant; recognize grains for the indigestible, often toxic seeds of grasses that they are; and allow your struggling Homo sapiens to fully express itself. I predict that you will rediscover health at a level you may not have known was possible.
In the next chapter, we consider just why – beyond desperation, beyond convenience, beyond appeal – grains have managed to dominate the human diet over a relatively short period of time. Why have grains gone from an occasional food of hungry, desperate humans, to the dominant food supply for mankind?
It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it. Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
‘Healthy whole grains’.
It’s the dietary battle cry of the 21st century, echoed by all official providers of nutritional advice, the dietary community and a trillion-pound food industry. It’s the guiding principle of academic curricula in nutrition, embraced by makers of processed food who produce, along with sugar, mind-boggling quantities of foods from wheat, corn and rice. Is it all based on the purported health benefits of grains – or are there other motivations at work?
Remember family farms, those places idealized or satirized by TV shows such as The Big Valley, The Waltons and Green Acres? It was only 60 years ago that, in the United States, we had more than 6 million of them, mostly near small towns like Walton’s Mountain or Hooterville. These were places where a family typically owned a few dozen acres to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, along with some chickens, pigs and a cow or two. They grew food for themselves and sold the surplus. Today, small family farms, along with John-Boy and Arnold Ziffel, are largely relics of the past, with the few that remain run by ageing part-time farmers whose primary jobs are off the farm. The food on your table is much more likely to come from a large operation of thousands of acres growing huge tracts of single crops (a farming method called monoculture) like wheat and corn. Parallel transformations from small farm to big business have occurred in the dairy and meat industries.
Farmers, family and otherwise, are stepping up to meet the demands of a worldwide public that has made grains 50 per cent of their calories. That’s direct human consumption of grains. Grains, now favoured in place of forage and grass, are also the preferred feed for livestock. This trend began in the 1960s, and livestock now consume the bulk of the grain produced in the world, outstripping human consumption sevenfold. And we haven’t even discussed how much corn is cultivated for ethanol.1 Grains are, by anyone’s definition, big business.
Whenever there’s a peculiar situation, we have to ask: Who benefits? Is agribusiness simply responding to consumer demand by providing, for instance, £200 billion in snacks worldwide? Or are there forces at work that quietly cultivate this situation for other reasons? Answering these questions takes us a bit off course from the discussion of why and how forgoing grains gets you closer to total health. But I’m going to ask you to indulge this digression, as understanding this irksome situation will arm you better in the fight against reliance on the seeds of grasses for nutrition.
So let us digress.
The Art of the Commodity
Pretend you are a businessman with ambitions to create a system that will generate millions, or perhaps billions, of pounds. And say you’d like to accomplish it through the world of