Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Introduction

      Part 1: Health, Weight and Life the Wheat Belly Way

Frankengrain

Why Does My Stomach Hurt?

Welcome to the Wonderful State of Wheatlessness

       Assembling Your Wheat Belly Kitchen

       Part 2: Wheat Belly Cookbook Recipes

       Breakfasts

       Sandwiches and Salads

       Starters

       Soups and Stews

       Main Dishes

       Side Dishes

       Sauces and Salad Dressings

       The Wheat Belly Bakery

       Picture Section

       Appendix A: Wheat, Wheat Everywhere

       Appendix B: Wheat-free Resources

       References

       List of Searchable Terms

       Acknowledgements

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

      Gloria Steinem

      Wheat is not the ‘healthy whole grain’ it was pretending to be. Like a faithful spouse exposed as a philanderer and polygamist, wheat is not to be trusted. Held up as an icon of health, it is in reality a major contributor to the world’s worst epidemic of obesity and an astounding list of health problems, from simple annoyances like dandruff to incapacitating conditions like dementia.

      This is a cataclysmic revelation for most people: It’s unsettling, it’s upsetting, it’s downright inconvenient. The condemnation of wheat is as paradigm shifting, earth shattering and life changing as the emergence of the Internet, the packaging of collateralized debt obligations and the collapse of mortgage markets, the upheavals of the Arab Spring . . . events that shook core beliefs, upended comforting habits and changed worldviews.

      Wheat is the Enron of the food world, the tobacco industry all over again – frauds, both intentional and inadvertent, conducted on an international scale. Charming and engaging on the outside, sociopathic and destructive on the inside, it works its way into your life, wreaking havoc in every conceivable health-destroying way.

      These are, for those of you unfamiliar with the arguments set forth in Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health (Rodale, 2011), undoubtedly bold assertions that fly in the face of nutritional wisdom. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued by the USDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics all agree: Healthy whole grains should make up a substantial portion of your diet.

      This is colossally bad advice. ‘Eat more healthy whole grains’ is among the biggest health blunders ever made in the history of nutritional advice. Modern healthcare, treating millions of people at the cost of hundreds of billions of pounds every year for hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity, arthritis, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, depression, diabetes, various forms of neurological impairment and on and on, is really treating . . . wheat consumption. And the endlessly repeated advice to eat more ‘healthy whole grains’ fuels this fire, much to the appreciative applause of the pharmaceutical industry. After all, the pharmaceutical industry funds a good part of the wheat lobby promoting and propagating this message. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yes, a long list of drug manufacturers have close financial ties to the organizations that lobby Congress, help establish school lunch policy and get cosy with the USDA to maintain the lofty nutritional role of ‘healthy whole grains’.

      And, yes, the clinical studies documenting these arguments have already been performed, but rarely do they make the light of day in media supported by Big Food, who count wheat products among the handful of commoditized ingredients, subsidized by the US government, that serve as the basis for most processed foods.

      In health, as in software, we are living examples of the principle of garbage in, garbage out. Put this stuff, the creation of geneticists from the 1960s and 1970s, into your body, and you get all manner of unanticipated health effects.

      Since the release of Wheat Belly, I have become convinced that not only is this an incredibly big issue for health, the situation is worse than it first appeared. It has affected far more people than I originally anticipated and to such an extraordinary degree that it is difficult to overestimate the severity of this problem.