Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 delicious wheat-free recipes for effortless weight loss and optimum health. Dr Davis William
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me say that again: No individual is entirely immune to the effects of consuming modern wheat. In other words, no matter who you are, no matter how good you look and feel, whether you are a winner on Dancing with the Stars or a champion at horseshoes, wheat works its magic on you. Nobody escapes the effects of modern wheat, whether you perceive them or not. And, given its ubiquity and incredible potential to exert so many effects on health, it is wise always to consider wheat as the culprit in just about any health condition you develop.
While most people perceive symptoms that can be blamed on consumption of wheat, some people have no symptoms at all but just have distortions of multiple metabolic phenomena beneath the surface. It might be high blood sugar or hidden inflammation from amylopectin A and gliadin; it might be increased flow of abnormal foreign substances into the bloodstream from wheat germ agglutinin – but it’s all there, smouldering away, taking its toll on long-term health.
This is why I do not advocate gluten elimination only for the gluten sensitive; I am advocating wheat elimination for everybody because we all experience undesirable effects from consuming this thing, not just the relative few with coeliac disease or blood-test-proven gluten intolerance.
So what does the unwitting wheat-eating individual experience by eating more wheat-containing ‘healthy whole grains’? Let’s pick the effects apart, one by one.
Blood Sugar Disasters
Consult any table of glycaemic index (GI) values that describes how high blood sugar ranges over the 90 to 120 minutes after consuming any food. You will see that two slices of wholemeal bread have a higher glycaemic index than nearly all other foods – higher than 6 teaspoons of table sugar, higher than a Snickers bar, higher than ice cream.
GI of wholemeal bread = 72
GI of sucrose (table sugar) = 59 to 65
(The GI of sucrose varies in different studies.)
GI of a Snickers bar: 41. Ice cream: 36.
Whole grains, such as 12-grain or multigrain breads that contain more fibre, do indeed have a somewhat lower GI, typically in the 50 to 55 range, around the same as a Milky Way bar.
Being told to ‘eat more healthy whole grains’ thereby provides advice to consume foods that send blood sugar through the roof for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. And note that the GI of foods is nearly always obtained by examining blood sugar behaviour in young, slender volunteers. The blood sugar rise is often far higher in older and overweight people. GI therefore describes the best-case scenario.
High blood sugar is unavoidably accompanied by high blood insulin, since insulin is required to clear the bloodstream of sugar and move it into muscles and organs for energy, and fat cells for storage. Just as wheat products, especially whole wheat products, increase blood sugar levels higher than nearly all other foods, wheat products also increase blood insulin levels higher than nearly all other foods, too.
Repetitive high levels of insulin set the stage for creating resistance to insulin, i.e., reduced responsiveness in muscle, the liver and other organs to the body’s own insulin. Insulin resistance is the fundamental process that leads to pre-diabetes and diabetes, situations in which the body can no longer cope with the carbohydrates driving repetitive high blood sugar, allowing blood sugars eventually to increase. Insulin resistance also causes the growth of deep abdominal fat, visceral fat, a form of fat that is highly inflammatory. Filled with white blood cells (like that in pus), visceral fat emits inflammatory proteins into the bloodstream, thereby increasing inflammation everywhere in the body, from your knees to your heart to your brain.
By the way, this metabolically messy situation of insulin resistance, pre-diabetic or diabetic blood sugar levels, and the visceral fat of a wheat belly is nearly always accompanied by having an abundant quantity of small, dense LDL particles, by far the most common cause of coronary heart disease and heart attacks today.
So high blood sugar leads to high blood insulin that, in turn, generates insulin resistance. Insulin resistance generates visceral fat that amplifies inflammation, which worsens insulin resistance and increases blood sugar and small LDL particles, starting the whole cycle over again, worse and worse and worse.
And it all started with your morning bagel.
Opiate of the Masses: Addiction and Withdrawal
The gliadins in wheat, particularly the new forms crafted by geneticists, are opiates. Wheat is therefore an opiate. Yes, wheat keeps company with Oxycontin, heroin and morphine.
It has been known for a century that opiates, when administered to laboratory animals or to humans, increase appetite. It was discovered around 30 years ago that the gliadin protein of wheat is, in effect, an opiate, as it yields digestive breakdown products that bind to the opiate receptors of the brain.
Gliadin is degraded in the gastrointestinal tract to smaller polypeptides called exorphins (exogenous morphine-like compounds), such as gluteomorphin and gliadorphin, that, once absorbed into the bloodstream, penetrate into the brain and bind to the opiate receptors, exerting effects similar to those of opiates such as morphine. Wheat opiates, however, stimulate less of a ‘high’ but are more potent stimulants of appetite.
The appetite-stimulating effect of wheat gliadin explains why people who eat more ‘healthy whole grains’ typically experience constant hunger: a 7:00 am breakfast of ‘high-fibre’ cereal followed by a growling stomach at 9:00 am with the need for a snack such as low-fat pretzels or crackers, hungry again at 11:00 am, hungry just a couple of hours after lunch, dinner at 6:00 pm followed by a need to snack at 8:00 pm Many people ‘graze’ all through the day or eat many small meals every 2 hours, a strategy endorsed by dietitians but representing nothing more than a pointless and counterproductive means of dealing with the constant cravings of the wheat-consumer.
Stop consuming wheat and appetite plummets. People report going through the day barely hungry at all. A common experience is having breakfast at 7:00 am followed by noticing that ‘It’s 1:00 pm. Perhaps I might eat something, but I’m not really that hungry.’ The after-dinner munchies that many people struggle with disappear. Total calorie intake drops by 400 or so calories per day, documented in both clinical studies and in real life. And that’s the average experience: Some people reduce calorie intake less than 400 calories per day, while others experience far greater reduction. Four hundred fewer calories per day, multiplied by 365 days per year – that’s a lot of food, 146,000 cumulative calories, and a lot of weight that can be lost effortlessly.
You can see why the failure to eliminate wheat explains why so many people struggle with weight-loss diets: because they failed to remove this appetite stimulant. Reducing calories becomes torture, like waving a syringe full of heroin at a helpless addict.
Where there’s spaghetti, there are meatballs. And where there’s addiction, there’s withdrawal. Yes, indeed: withdrawal from the opiate in wheat. Don’t believe it? Try this little experiment: Stop feeding your husband or kids wheat during a 72-hour period when you can control their diet (e.g., a long weekend), then sit back and watch the emotional fireworks. You’re likely to observe crying, yelling, nausea, incapacitating fatigue, begging for a roll or pretzel, sneaking off to the nearest convenience store for a ‘hit’. (Wheat withdrawal is such an important phenomenon that I discuss it in more detail in the next chapter.) You’ll quickly realize that you’ve been living with a family of opiate addicts, consuming their drug of choice cleverly disguised as a bran muffin, breakfast cereal or pizza.
Another caution: The longer you are wheat free, the more likely you will develop undesirable reactions when re-exposed, inadvertently or intentionally. I call these awful experiences wheat ‘re-exposure reactions’. (Readers and social media followers of Wheat Belly say they’ve been ‘wheated’.) Say you’ve been wheat free for 4 weeks, lost 1 stone 1 pound, been freed from irritable bowel syndrome symptoms and the funny rash that wouldn’t go away for 5 years. You eat a few of the crackers you let sit in your cupboard – what the heck, you’ve been so good! – and you’ve got yourself a case of diarrhoea and cramps, bloating, pain in your elbows and shoulders, and a recurrence of the rash, very common re-exposure reactions. Other common re-exposure reactions include