Davis - Wheat Belly Total Health. The Ultimate Grain-Free Health and Weight-Loss Life Plan

This book is intended as a reference volume only, not as a medical manual. The information given here is designed to help you make informed decisions about your health. It is not intended as a substitute for any treatment that may have been prescribed by your doctor. If you suspect that you have a medical problem, we urge you to seek competent medical help.

Mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities in this book does not imply endorsement by the author or publisher, nor does mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities imply that they endorse this book, its author, or the publisher.

Internet addresses and telephone numbers given in this book were accurate at the time it went to press.

Exclusive direct mail edition is being published simultaneously by Rodale Inc. as The Grain-Free Cure.

2014 by William Davis, MD

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Book design by Amy King

Photos: () by Alexis Frohnapple

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

ISBN 9781623364083
ISBN 9781623364090 ebook

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To all the readers who have the boldness, courage, and conviction to rebel against conventional dietary advice and discover what real nutrition can do for human health

WHEN SOMETHING SPARKS a phenomenon as large and revolutionary as the Wheat Belly movement, it becomes bigger than any one person. While it began as my personal effort to understand why, when patients in my office removed all things wheat from their diet, astounding transformations in health developed, it has ballooned into a collection of projects that are, I believe, changing the way we all look at food and nutrition.

As Team Wheat Belly has grown, a number of people have proven crucial players who have helped advance this cause, in particular this new book, Wheat Belly Total Health, the largest and most comprehensive book project in the Wheat Belly line to date, as well as all the projects that complement this book.

Among those whose input was crucial to this and related projects:

My agent, Rick Broadhead, who fights for this cause as if his own. A more mild-mannered but fierce defender I could have never found.

My editors at Rodale, Jennifer Levesque and Anne Egan, helped craft this message to suit the needs of an audience eager to hear and understand more about why this counterintuitive approach works. Despite the changing landscape of book publishing, they have helped deliver the Wheat Belly message to a public barraged with competing, and often contrary, dietary messages. Vice President/Publisher of Rodale Books Mary Ann Naples and Vice President/Deputy Publisher Kristin Kiser have worked in the background to advance the Wheat Belly cause, proving instrumental to projects such as the Wheat Belly special to air on public television. My publicist at Rodale, Emily Eagan Weber, dealt masterfully with the vagaries of media and managed to keep this message in the public eye, while Chris DeMarchis dealt tirelessly with many of the books logistical details.

This Total Health project did not occur in isolation but developed as part of a broad front of projects that all cross-fertilize each other, everyone involved making a contribution, direct or indirect, to the final project. Among the members of Team Wheat Belly are my longtime friend Chris Kliesmet, who has helped hone these ideas from day one; Gary and Patti Miller, who champion the food and education projects; Paul and Anne MacInnis, who manage my speaking engagements, tours, and media projects; and Cindy Ratzlaff, social media consultant, who has helped make the Wheat Belly online experience a more engaging, stimulating, and entertaining interaction.

Of course, my wife and companion, Dawn, who had to endure my endless hours of distraction of the sort that goes with writing a book, deserves many, many thank-yous for her patience and support. Now that the preoccupation of the writing process is over, there will be no more befuddled looks: You are now back in my focus.

YOUVE BEEN GRAINED.

Beaten, demoralized, discouraged, your life and health have been bankrupted by healthy whole grains. The worst of the bunch is modern wheat: the Judas of dietary wisdom, despot of the breakfast bowl, tyrant of the bakery cabinet, the semidwarf darling of agribusiness. Your eyes were sprouting cataracts, your arteries were stiffening, your skin was wrinkling and plagued with rashes, your joints were sore and arthritic, your organs were inflamed, your belly fat was expanding, your blood sugar was climbing, and man breasts may even have been sprouting. Your mind was clouded by fog, your medication list was growing, and your schedule was fouled by mad scrambles for the nearest bathroomall while you were being driven to consume more and more of the food that all official providers of nutritional advice advised you to consume... until you put an end to the whole mess as a result of the revelations made in Wheat Belly.

You boldly removed foods that enjoy the blessings of agencies in the business of dispensing dietary advice. You defied the USDA and its MyPlate and MyPyramid. You scoffed at the urgings of the Surgeon Generals office. You thumbed your nose at the advice of the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. You sniggered at the antics of the wheat lobby and wheat trade groups as they desperately launched wave after wave of damage control. You removed grains like a festering abscess that refused to heal until lanced, and you discovered that health and vigor began to reappear.

Ive experienced this personally. When I removed all healthy whole grains from my life, it reversed my diabetes until I became confidently nondiabetic, I was freed from mind fog that persisted no matter how many cups of coffee I drank, and I found relief from the annoying symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. My triglyceride level dropped from 350 to 42 mg/dl, my HDL increased from 27 to 97 mg/dl, and the dark thoughts and moods that I had struggled with for many years were simply erased. I did the opposite of widely accepted health advice and experienced a transformation in health.

Coming to the realization that conventional nutritional advice has as much value as old bubble gum stuck on the sidewalk cant help but make you skeptical about whether most sources of health advice are objective, unbiased, and based on science in the first place. At best, dietary advice was driven by incomplete or misinterpreted data, an army of dietitians and experts unwittingly doing the dirty work of distributing the information. At worst, it was advice that served the ambitions of agribusiness and other powerful interests, all working to commoditize the human dietyes,