William Davis - Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 Recipes to Help You Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

GLORIA STEINEM

WHEAT IS NOT the healthy whole grain it was pretending to be. Like a faithful spouse exposed as a philanderer and polygamist, wheat is not to be trusted. Held up as an icon of health, it is in reality a major contributor to the worlds worst epidemic of obesity and an astounding list of health problems, from simple annoyances like dandruff to incapacitating conditions like dementia.

This is a cataclysmic revelation for most people: Its unsettling, its upsetting, its downright inconvenient. The condemnation of wheat is as paradigm shifting, earth shattering, and life changing as the emergence of the Internet, the packaging of collateralized debt obligations and the collapse of mortgage markets, the upheavals of the Arab Spring events that shook core beliefs, upended comforting habits, and changed worldviews.

Wheat is the Enron of the food world, the tobacco industry all over againfrauds, both intentional and inadvertent, conducted on an international scale. Charming and engaging on the outside, sociopathic and destructive on the inside, it works its way into your life, wreaking havoc in every conceivable health-destroying way.

These are, for those of you unfamiliar with the arguments set forth in Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health (Rodale, 2011), undoubtedly bold assertions that fly in the face of nutritional wisdom. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued by the USDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics all agree: Healthy whole grains should make up a substantial portion of your diet.

This is colossally bad advice. Eat more healthy whole grains is among the biggest health blunders ever made in the history of nutritional advice. Modern health care, treating millions of people at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars every year for hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity, arthritis, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, depression, diabetes, various forms of neurological impairment, and on and on, is really treating wheat consumption. And the endlessly repeated advice to eat more healthy whole grains fuels this fire, much to the appreciative applause of the pharmaceutical industry. After all, the pharmaceutical industry funds a good part of the wheat lobby promoting and propagating this message. Oh, you didnt know that? Yes, a long list of drug manufacturers have close financial ties to the organizations that lobby Congress, help establish school lunch policy, and get cozy with the USDA to maintain the lofty nutritional role of healthy whole grains.

And, yes, the clinical studies documenting these arguments have already been performed, but rarely do they make the light of day in media supported by Big Food, who count wheat products among the handful of commoditized ingredients, subsidized by the US government, that serve as the basis for most processed foods.

In health, as in software, we are living examples of the principle of garbage in, garbage out. Put this stuff, the creation of geneticists from the 1960s and 1970s, into your body, and you get all manner of unanticipated health effects.

Since the release of Wheat Belly, I have become convinced that not only is this an incredibly big issue for health, the situation is worse than it first appeared. It has affected far more people than I originally anticipated and to such an extraordinary degree that it is difficult to overestimate the severity of this problem. This is no fad that will flare and then burn out, much as the misguided low-fat notion has. This is not a dietary precept like get more fiber. It is an exposure of the genetic and biochemical changes introduced into this common foodstuff, all in the name of increased yield-per-acre, but with no questions asked about its suitability for human consumption.

We are, in effect, experiencing the consequences of a grand agricultural experiment gone sour.

Remember this? According to a nationwide survey: More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette? In the mid- and latter 20th century, the national discussion went from gushing about the pleasures and health benefits of smoking, to studies documenting the health damage caused by smoking, to executives denying any wrongdoing to Congress, to uncovering concealed documents demonstrating the industrys knowledge of the adverse health effects of smoking decades earlier.

We are reliving the tobacco experience with wheat in its place. I believe that smart food scientists stumbled on the appetite-stimulating effect of the gliadin protein in wheat 25 years ago. How else do we explain why wheat is in virtually all processed foods, from tomato soup to licorice? In 1960, you would have found wheat in bread, rolls, and cakesobvious places that make sense. Go up and down the food aisles in your local supermarket in the 21st century, and you will find that nearly all canned, packaged, and frozen foods contain wheat in some form. Is wheat that necessary for taste, or for texture? I dont think so. I think its put there for one reason: to stimulate your appetite and increase sales.

The transformation of the gliadin protein in newly created strains of wheat was accompanied by an increase in calorie consumption of 440 calories per day. By putting wheat in everything, the food industry, especially Big Food, ensured that you come back for more. Just as tobacco manufacturers increased nicotine content of cigarettes to ensure addiction, so adding wheat to every processed food created addictive behavior in response to all things wheat. Eating 440 more calories per day, 365 days per yearnot only does that add up to a lot of calories and a lot more food consumed, it adds up to a lot more weight. (Using a simple calories-in calculation, this yields 160,000 calories, or 45.8 pounds gained in a year. This is an oversimplification, since calories-in, calories-out is a flawed concept, but it nonetheless illustrates how substantial this effect can be.) The introduction of the new form of gliadin was followed shortly thereafter by a nationwide increase in weight. After people gained 30, 50, 60, or more pounds, an explosive surge in diabetes followed. We are now in the midst of the worst epidemic of diabetes ever experienced by humans, such that the curve showing the number of people with diabetes is in a vertical climb straight upward, a trajectory that is likely to engulf your children and grandchildren.

The gliadin protein of wheat ensures that wheat products, such as whole grain or white breads, bagels, and muffins, are addictive: They generate a need for more and more, and more. Gliadin is an opiate, you will discover, with its own form of euphoria and its very own opiate withdrawal syndrome when wheat consumption stops that can also be provoked with opiate-blocking drugs.