William Davis M.D. - Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

Dr. Frankenstein: You know, I dont mean to embarrass you, but Im a rather brilliant surgeon. Perhaps I can help you with that hump.

Igor: What hump?

Young Frankenstein, 1974

I n Mary Shelleys tale of Frankenstein , through bumbling experiments and a crude stitching together of body parts electrified to life, Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates a monster, unnatural and not entirely human, a creature terrible to behold who escapes to terrorize the countryside.

Nobody here is stitching loose heads and arms to torsos or passing 220 volts through organs to bring them back to life. Instead, a peculiar alchemy of human health has been occurring these last fifty years or so, creating modern health horrors all during a timemost of us have believedof unprecedented medical advancement. So its all the more surprising that a universe of primitive creatures dwelling directly below our diaphragm, behind our belly button, but beneath our conscious awarenessand that of our doctorsis only now coming to light as a hugely important phenomenon in human health.

Eleven years ago, in the first of my series of Wheat Belly books, I described how agricultural scientists and farmers had changed this plant called wheat, transforming a traditional five-foot-tall plant into an eighteen-inch-tall, thick-stalked, large-seeded crop, a change that required thousands of genetic experiments. The final genetically altered result did indeed produce a high-yield crop, enabling farmers to harvest several-fold more bushels per acre than of traditional strains, a boom in yield that helped feed the hungry in starvation-plagued underdeveloped countries. But this new crop also inflicted a collection of unexpected effects on the humans who consumed it, effects ranging from appetite stimulation to temporal lobe seizures, seborrhea to a 400 percent increase in celiac disease. Formerly rare type 1 and type 2 diabetes became mainstream conditions, and humans who used to eat to live were transformed into a population with insatiable all-you-can-eat appetites. The health consequences of consuming modern wheat are so destructive, so unnatural, that I labeled it Frankengrain.

I found that removing Frankengrains from the diet yielded substantial, often life-changing, health benefits. Thousands of people experienced effortless weight loss and transformations in their health, restoring them to 1950s-like flat tummies and freeing them of numerous modern health conditions. And yet, a substantial proportion also reported something like this: I lost forty-seven pounds without even trying, and Im no longer hungry all the time. I am no longer prediabetic and Im off two blood pressure pills. My rheumatoid arthritis is about 70 percent better and I was able to stop the several-thousand-dollar-per-month injectable drug. But I still have some flare-ups and had to resume the steroids and naproxen. In other words, removing Frankengrains from the diet and adding in the handful of nutritional supplements I recommended, which reversed health phenomena such as insulin resistance, did not fully address all of peoples health issues. Some people reported losing, say, seventy pounds, with only another thirty pounds to gobut their weight loss stalled despite doing everything right. The Wheat Belly lifestyle includes basic efforts to recultivate healthy microbial species dwelling in the gastrointestinal tract, that is, the intestinal microbiome, but something was still missing.

The Wheat Belly community, large, international, and enthusiastically engaged, was also (and remains) a collaborative community, all of us sharing experiences and looking for better answers on how to achieve 100 percent success and finally conquer residual health issues. This community, in effect, is an enormous crowdsourcing of wisdom, with hundreds of thousands of people all seeking answers to similar questions. (Dont worry: if you are unfamiliar with the strategies of the Wheat Belly lifestyle, which, despite its shortfalls, is still quite powerful, I articulate its tenets later in the book in addition to introducing new and powerful strategies you can use to build a Super Gut.)