Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 delicious wheat-free recipes for effortless weight loss and optimum health. Dr Davis William
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and emotional effects, especially sadness, hopelessness, anxiety and anger. Re-exposure reactions last from hours to days. Gastrointestinal reactions like diarrhoea tend to dissipate over a day or two, while joint pains can persist for days to weeks. You will survive, but for many of us, the experience is so unpleasant that no indulgence makes it worth the pain and hassle.
Weight Gain: Grow Your Very Own Wheat Belly
If the gliadin protein of wheat, changed by geneticists in their efforts to increase yield, stimulates appetite and increases calorie consumption by 400 or more calories per day, 365 days per year, what happens to us unsuspecting participants in this national experiment? We get fat. Given the unique properties of wheat’s amylopectin A to raise blood sugar and insulin levels, we gain the weight mostly around our middles, evidenced on the surface by what I call a wheat belly, and evidenced on CT scans and MRIs as deep visceral fat encircling the intestines and other abdominal organs.
And we don’t just get a little bit fat. Many of us get really fat, sufficient to send our body mass indexes (see ‘What Is Your Body Mass Index [BMI]?’) to 30 and above, falling into the range classified as obese, or even morbidly or super-obese with BMIs of 40 and over, the group growing the fastest. Such classifications have only become a matter of necessity in the last 25 years, since these extreme ranges of overweight were previously uncommon, rarely seen outside of circus tents and peep shows.
Recall that modern semi-dwarf strains of wheat were introduced in the mid- to late 1970s, with only a few per cent of farmers adopting this crop viewed as peculiar in 1979. As more and more farmers began to observe the startling surges in yield-per-acre of high-yield, semi-dwarf strains, this wheat was rapidly embraced in the early 1980s. By 1985, virtually every wheat product you bought – white, whole grain, organic, sprouted – came from high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat.
Oddly, data collected by the USDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 1985 also marks the year when calorie intake began to climb, increasing 440 calories per day, every day, 365 days a year. Increased calorie intake leads to weight gain, year after wheat-consuming year. It means we have obese adults, obese elderly, obese teenagers, obese children – more overweight, obese and super-obese people than ever before in the history of man.
What Is Your Body Mass Index (BMI)?
To calculate your BMI, plug your weight and height into the following equation:
BMI = [weight in pounds ÷ (height in inches)2] x 703
Alternatively, go to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s BMI calculator at www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi.
BMI is often used as an assessment of the appropriateness of weight for height, or as an index of health. It is not perfect, as it does not factor in such differences as body shape, muscle mass and other variations among us humans. Nonetheless, it is often used to compare differences in weight in populations and is often cited in clinical studies.
Classifications of BMI:
| Underweight = <18.5 | Obese = 30 or greater |
| Normal weight = 18.5–24.9 | Super-obese = 40 or greater |
| Overweight = 25–29.9 |
Recent findings in experimental models also suggest that the lectin in wheat, wheat germ agglutinin, may block the hormone leptin, meaning the body becomes unresponsive to the satiating effects of this hormone. Obese people have inappropriately high levels of this hormone when it should be low, given their overnourished state. If this holds true in future studies and wheat lectins prove to block the satiating effect of leptin, it will become clear that wheat consumption essentially equals weight gain. ‘Eat more healthy whole grains’: a perfect formula for obesity.
Diabetes: You Get What You Ask For
The ‘official’ explanation for the 30-year climb in collective weight and the diabetes that results from it? We are all lazy and gluttonous. We drink too many soft drinks and watch too much TV. If we would just exercise more and cut our calories, we would return to the age of slender Jimmy Stewarts and Donna Reeds.
Let’s consider an alternative explanation. If the amylopectin A of wheat, what dietitians call a complex carbohydrate, increases blood sugar more than simple sugars such as table sugar and many chocolate bars, then surely it must increase the likelihood of diabetes. Wheat products increase blood sugar every time you eat them. Eating more ‘healthy whole grains’ ensures high blood sugar levels, along with all the phenomena that follow, including insulin resistance that results in diabetes.
It is well-established fact that foods with a high glycaemic index promote diabetes, while foods with a low glycaemic index – or, even better, no glycaemic index – make diabetes less likely. What food has among the highest glycaemic indexes of all foods out there? Yup: Foods made of wheat. Ironically, whole wheat is worse than white (though both are bad, of course). Whole grain and multigrain products improve the situation a bit, but remain triggers of high blood sugar despite the extra fibre and B vitamins. After all, whole grain, whole wheat, white – it all comes from the same semi-dwarf wheat plant bearing the same amylopectin A.
Gain 2 stone 2 pounds, 2 stone 12 pounds, 4 stone 4 pounds or more, especially in the visceral fat of the abdomen, and most people become pre-diabetic or diabetic. And, indeed, during the mid- to late 1980s, as products made with semi-dwarf wheat flour proliferated, expanding from only breads and rolls to liquorice, instant soups, frozen dinners and nearly all other processed foods, a surge in the incidence of these conditions began, accelerating through the 1990s. The numbers reflecting the incidence of diabetes are now a vertical climb, straight upwards since 2008.
Conventional wisdom, of course, argues the opposite: Consuming more healthy whole grains is associated with reduced likelihood of diabetes. And that is true – if you compare whole grain consumption to consumption of processed white flour products. Study after study conducted over the past 30 years, including such ambitious studies as the Nurses’ Health Study of 80,000 women, or the Physicians’ Health Study of 30,000 professionals, all demonstrated the significant health benefits of consuming healthy whole grains . . . over white flour. Okay, so let’s follow the logic of these studies.
If you replace something bad with something less bad and there is an apparent health benefit, then a whole bunch of the less bad thing must be good.
If there are health benefits to consuming something less bad, what are the effects of complete removal? In other words, what happens when wheat products, white and whole grains, are completely eliminated from the diet? That, too, has indeed been studied, but the dramatic weight loss and reductions of blood sugar and HbA1c (a measure that reflects blood sugar fluctuations over the prior 2 to 3 months) are often dismissed as due to malnutrition (discussed further in the next chapter). As with many things wheat, the answers have been there all along – just not recognized for what they were.
Recall that wheat is also an opiate, due to the gliadin protein that converts to exorphins upon digestion, and that this opiate acts as an appetite stimulant. It means that consumption of modern wheat sends blood sugar higher than nearly all other foods while stimulating appetite to consume more calories. Eat more calories, desire more food, send blood sugar higher again and again, and you’ve got yourself a perfect situation to cultivate diabetes.
But you, your friends and your family are all accused of being gluttonous and lazy. You’ve gained weight, developed insulin resistance and become pre-diabetic or diabetic because of your love affair with chips, Mountain Dew and your sofa. I believe all that is true – for many 10- to 14-year-olds. But what about all the health-conscious adults who exercise, avoid junk foods and eat more ‘healthy whole grains’?
Unwinding this metabolic disaster is powerfully accomplished by eliminating all things wheat. Additional benefit is obtained, however, by restricting other carbohydrates as well, from chocolate bars to fruit. More