Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 delicious wheat-free recipes for effortless weight loss and optimum health. Dr Davis William
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of modern wheat overlaps with that of alpha amylase inhibitors of ancient strains by 90 per cent, meaning that 10 per cent of the genetic code and alpha amylase inhibitor structure are different. As any allergist will tell you, just a few different amino acids can spell the difference between no allergic reaction and a severe allergic reaction, even anaphylaxis (shock). When it comes to allergy, little changes can have big consequences.
Unfortunately, with the numerous protean changes introduced into the 25,000 strains of modern wheat, it is a virtual impossibility to track which strain contains which form of alpha amylase inhibitor. The loaf of bread you bought at the supermarket, the Cinnabon from the shopping centre, the bagel from the bagel shop – none are labelled, of course, with the strain of wheat they are sourced from. You can begin to appreciate the difficulty in tracking which strain of wheat might be associated with a specific individual’s allergic reaction. But one thing is certain: Modern forms of wheat, thanks to busy geneticists, are associated with increased potential for allergy, some of which are due to changes introduced into alpha amylase inhibitor genes.
There are other forms of wheat allergy as well, with people in the baking industry who develop a condition called Baker’s asthma. There is also the peculiar condition called wheat-derived exercise-induced anaphylaxis (WDEIA). a severe and life-threatening allergy induced by exercise after eating wheat. Both conditions are likely due to allergy to a gliadin protein fraction.
In addition, many other proteins – such as lipid transfer proteins, Ω-gliadins, α-gliadins, serpins and low-molecular-weight glutenins – have also been shown to trigger IgE-mediated allergic reactions to wheat. It is unclear whether the changes introduced in modern wheat have been associated with increased allergy to any of these wheat proteins, but clearly the potential is there.
It’s Alive!
‘Come on! Wheat can’t be that bad! If it’s so bad, how come my mum ate bread every day and lived until she was 85 years old in perfect health?’
What we are being sold today is so far removed from the wheat of even 50 years ago that I challenge that it should even be called wheat any longer.
Let me weave you a scary tale that helps illustrate what has been done to this thing called wheat. This story might freak you out. So put the kids to bed, close the door and make sure no nosy neighbours are watching.
Okay. Imagine you and I are evil scientists. We want to know what happens when we mate a 4-foot-7 Mbenga pygmy tribeswoman from the Congo with a 6-foot-4 blond Swedish male. We obtain the offspring, a child somewhere in between the Pygmy mom and Swedish dad. Once it reaches sexual maturity, we mate this Swede-Pygmy with yet another Pygmy, but this time chosen for the shortest stature among this short race. We repeat this process several more times over several generations. We also introduce mates that have other characteristics, such as hairlessness or resistance to malaria. We also ignore some of the unexpected genetic characteristics that emerge, such as peculiar facial features, missing limbs or other body parts, or unique metabolic derangements.
Then the really creepy part starts. We mate our Swede-Pygmy descendant with some non-human primates, such as an orangutan, because we’d like to see whether our creature can be made to ably climb trees. The offspring are not always viable, but that’s not our concern. We just keep our creations alive with whatever artificial means are required. It might require surgical correction, antibiotics or artificial nutrition. We also take pregnant mothers and expose them to chemicals that induce mutations in the developing fetus in utero, and use gamma radiation and high doses of x-rays, also to induce mutations. Most of the mutations are grotesque and non-viable. But every so often, we’re lucky and the mutant survives. It may be really weird looking, with odd facial features, deranged teeth and deformed bones, as well as peculiar health problems, but that’s also not our concern.
At the end of this process, repeated over and over again over many years, what do we call the creatures we’ve created? We can’t call them Swedish humans. We can’t call them Pygmies. They are artificially created things that bear no name, no resemblance to anything that occurs in nature because we used unnatural methods to create them. Maybe they’re 3-foot-tall creatures that, permitted some mix of synthetic food for sustenance, provide a unique service that we’ve sought, e.g., climbing trees to harvest coconuts.
Thankfully, nobody outside of Nazi Germany conducts such horrific practices in humans and our close primate relatives. But such practices are commonplace in plant genetics.
Apply something similar to wheat of the early 20th century: repeated crossings to select for specific characteristics such as short stature, ease of release of the seeds, extreme oil production to discourage birds, resistance to mould and fungi; occasionally mate with non-wheat grains to introduce entirely unique genetic characteristics; salvage otherwise fatal mutants by embryo ‘rescue’; and expose the seed or embryo to the process of chemical or radiation mutagenesis to induce random mutations that occasionally are useful – well, those are the techniques that agribusiness and geneticists like to call traditional breeding methods. These are the methods that lobbyists for the wheat industry don’t talk about, choosing instead to say things like ‘modern wheat is not genetically modified’, meaning gene-splicing techniques have not been used to insert or delete a gene.
So the truth of it is that ‘traditional breeding methods’ used to create modern semi-dwarf, high-yield strains of wheat were cruder, less controllable, much less predictable and prone to produce consequences outside of the intended characteristic. In short, they were far worse than genetic engineering, yet these products made it to your supermarket shelf, dinner table and gastrointestinal tract . . . no questions asked.
The result: what I call a Frankengrain, the result of extensive genetic changes, unable to survive without artificial chemical support, genetically stitched together with parts from various sources, like the creature created using the pieces from cadavers and charnel houses by Dr Victor Frankenstein.
Except this Frankengrain isn’t terrifying the countryside – we willingly invite it onto our dinner tables, package it in clever eye-catching ways and feed it to our children.
This raises a fundamental question that has not yet been answered in agriculture or agricultural genetics: How much genetic and biochemical change can a plant like wheat undergo, after being subjected to extensive efforts to change its genetics, yet still be called wheat?
At the very least, we should be informed of the degree of change introduced into our foods, but even that modest concession is vigorously opposed. For instance, witness the intense lobbying agribusiness has waged to block the Truth in Labeling Act that would require food companies to declare whether a genetically modified ingredient is contained in a product. Nobody is asking them to stop generating genetically modified crops, but just to tell us if they did it. But even this modest disclosure is vigorously opposed.
No, the extreme changes introduced into the genetics of food crops like wheat are a well-kept secret, not divulged on labels, certainly not discussed in advice to ‘eat more healthy whole grains’.
So we have increasing allergy to modern strains of wheat, occurring most commonly among children. Surely, such a substantial increase in allergic reactions in children would sound the alarm among geneticists and prompt some serious questions, perhaps even a moratorium on any additional changes? Nope. Changes introduced into wheat continue unabated, allergy or no.
Products made from wheat flour are delicious, smell great and make for all sorts of clever variations, from pitta bread to wedding cake. But wheat flour is a delivery vehicle for all manner of compounds that exert undesirable effects on the human body, including new forms of gliadin, new and unexplored glutenin sequences, new forms of lectins, new alpha amylase inhibitor sequences and many other new forms of proteins never before consumed by humans.
Surely, regulatory agencies like the USDA or FDA scrutinize each new change, study the biochemical changes introduced, examine the evidence of safety for every genetic alteration, look at animal safety testing and then ask for human safety data when necessary? Nope. No such thing. Geneticists