Davis - Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 delicious wheat-free recipes for effortless weight loss and optimum health

The Release of the original Wheat Belly created a huge and largely unmet need for practical solutions and, yes, recipes to successfully follow this new path for health. The clamouring for better wheat-free food ideas and recipes therefore led to this cookbook. In fact, the demand was so great that we completed this project in record time. I am therefore deeply grateful to all the people who came together to create this project.

No one person could have accomplished what is contained herein without plenty of help. My editor at Rodale, Anne Egan, took this cookbook project head-on, acting as coach and quarterback, helping me organize the considerable effort required to create, modify and test all these unique recipes. Anne brought her extensive experience of having helped to create dozens of cookbooks and thousands of recipes over her career, offering suggestions to better craft these unique creations sans wheat. This finished cookbook project is largely due to Annes skilful guidance. Thank you, Anne!

I could not have completed this cookbook project on such an ambitious timeline without the tireless assistance of the wonderful professionals in the Rodale Test Kitchen. My grateful thanks therefore go to Annie De Walt, Jennifer Kushnier and Test Kitchen Director JoAnn Brader, who tested and re-tested these recipes until we got them right. This was no small matter! As readers can readily see, weve re-created familiar dishes by removing unhealthy ingredients and putting new ingredients to work, disrupting many of the basic rules of cooking and baking that food professionals are accustomed to following. Because these changes modify the performance of the overall recipe more or less liquid, gain some new ingredients, lose some old, novel techniques required to generate rise and visco-elasticity in breads, changes in cooking time, etc. all of them had to be tested to ensure proper recipe performance. Nonetheless, we tackled this cookbook project and accomplished it faster than I thought possible. I could never have gotten this project done in such an ambitiously short time without their help. Thank you!

My agent and friend, Rick Broadhead, has seen me through the entire Wheat Belly effort. Rick has proven to be a valuable ally with his unfailing support and incredible eye for detail. Rick is a professional in every sense, bringing his deep experience as author as well as agent. My gratitude for Ricks support and guidance is boundless.

Besides owing her many thanks for bearing all the home and family burdens that I neglected during this project, I owe my wife, Dawn, an additional thank you for allowing me to bring a tsunami of cooking activity into our kitchen while she continued to prepare our everyday meals. And her discerning palate helped me refine many of these recipes, as she, better than anyone else I know, is one of those people who can identify all the individual flavours amidst the clamour of tastes and scents in a dish. And thanks, too, for helping me eat both my successes and my failures!

All the followers of Wheat Belly social media and online discussions at the Wheat Belly Blog (www.wheatbellyblog.com) and elsewhere deserve a big thank you, because they provided the stories and discussions that revealed the tremendous demand for recipes consistent with the Wheat Belly approach. These discussions reflect how the Wheat Belly message is being received and put to work worldwide. These are the people showing us how to accomplish wheatlessness in unique and faraway places, as well as in neighbourhoods throughout North America. They are also the people who remind me every day just how far-reaching and important this message is to the health of billions of people. This project would never have gotten its start without the wonderful support of readers and viewers worldwide.

Wheat, Wheat Everywhere

The Most Confident way to minimize your exposure to the Evil Grain is to focus on single-ingredient, natural foods. This includes vegetables such as spinach, kale, radicchio and green peppers. It also includes fruits, poultry, beef, pork, fish, nuts, seeds and dairy (preferably organic, unsweetened, unflavoured). Single-ingredient natural foods have nothing to do with wheat or gluten unless, of course, somebody added it.

When you venture outside of single-ingredient natural foods, or eat in social situations, go to restaurants or purchase prepared meals, then there is always going to be potential for inadvertent wheat and gluten exposure.

Inadvertent wheat and gluten exposure has real-world implications. Someone with coeliac disease, for instance, may have to endure days to weeks of abdominal cramping, diarrhoea, even intestinal bleeding from an inadvertent encounter with some wheat gluten on an unwashed knife used to cut her pork fillet. Even after the nasty rash of dermatitis herpetiformis heals, it can flare with just a dash of wheat-containing soy sauce. Or someone who experiences inflammatory neurological symptoms can experience abrupt decline in coordination for weeks because the gluten-free beer really wasnt. For many others who dont have coeliac disease or gluten sensitivity, accidental exposure to wheat can bring on ravenous hunger, diarrhoea, asthma, mental fog, joint pains or swelling, leg oedema, emotional outbursts, the high of bipolar illness or the paranoia of schizophrenia.

Many people therefore have to be vigilant about exposure to wheat. Those with coeliac disease and its equivalents, including dermatitis herpetiformis, cerebellar ataxia, and peripheral neuropathy attributable to gluten exposure, as well as those with gluten sensitivity, also need to avoid other gluten-containing grains: rye, barley, spelt, triticale, kamut, bulgur and oats. In addition, they need to be aware of the potential for cross-contamination, that is, potential gluten contamination from utensils, airborne particles or liquids. If a food is labelled gluten free, then it should have been prepared in a facility where cross-contamination should not have occurred. Cross-contamination is especially tricky when you order at restaurants; very few establishments have the ability to avoid cross-contamination, though this is just beginning to become available in some progressive restaurants.

In the list that follows, you will see that wheat and gluten come in an incredible variety of forms, often hidden away in the form of some additive, thickener or coating. Couscous, matzo, orzo, digestives and bran are all wheat. So are faro, panko and rusk. Names and packet appearances can be misleading. For instance, the majority of breakfast cereals contain wheat flour, wheat-derived ingredients or gluten, despite names such as Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies.

Oats remain a topic of controversy, since oat products contain a gluten-like protein called avenin to which only a minority of people with coeliac react (a phenomenon that is not currently testable outside research settings). Oat products are also often processed on the same equipment or in the same facility as wheat products, providing potential for cross-contamination. Most coeliac sufferers therefore avoid oats as well. (Note that the absence of intestinal symptoms after consuming a food such as oats is not a reliable method of assessing safety; intestinal damage and other effects may not be perceived.) Anyway, oat products make your blood sugar skyrocket and, in my view, are awful for health. Heart healthy they are not.

To qualify as gluten free by FDA criteria, manufactured products (not restaurant-produced products) must be both free of gluten and produced in a gluten-free facility to prevent cross-contamination. The FDAs proposed cutoff for qualifying as gluten free is no more than 20 parts per million (ppm), the threshold for detection and the standard used in many other countries.