COPYRIGHT

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

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First published in the US by Rodale Books, 2011, 2019

First published in the UK by Thorsons 2014

This revised UK edition published by Thorsons 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Dr William Davis 2011, 2014, 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008367466

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Version 2019-12-04

DEDICATION

For all the readers who have had the courage

to try on this new and unconventional lifestyle,

only to be surprised by its power.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

WHEAT: THE UNHEALTHY WHOLE GRAIN

1. WHAT BELLY?

2. NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S MUFFINS: THE CREATION OF MODERN WHEAT

3. WHEAT DECONSTRUCTED

PART TWO

WHEAT AND ITS HEAD-TO-TOE DESTRUCTION OF HEALTH

4. HEY, MAN, WANNA BUY SOME EXORPHINS? THE ADDICTIVE PROPERTIES OF WHEAT

5. YOUR WHEAT BELLY IS SHOWING: THE WHEAT/OBESITY CONNECTION

6. HELLO, INTESTINE. IT’S ME, WHEAT. WHEAT AND CELIAC DISEASE

7. SWALLOW: IT CAN’T BE ALL THAT BAD … OR CAN IT?

8. DIABETES NATION: WHEAT AND INSULIN RESISTANCE

9. CATARACTS, WRINKLES, AND DOWAGER’S HUMPS: WHEAT AND THE AGING PROCESS

10. MY PARTICLES ARE BIGGER THAN YOURS: WHEAT AND HEART DISEASE

11. IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD: WHEAT AND THE BRAIN

12. BAGEL FACE: WHEAT’S DESTRUCTIVE EFFECT ON SKIN

13. DROPPING ACID: WHEAT AS THE GREAT pH DISRUPTER

PART THREE

SAY GOOD-BYE TO WHEAT

14. GOOD-BYE, WHEAT: CREATE A HEALTHY, DELICIOUS, WHEAT-FREE LIFE

15. LIFE WITHOUT WHEAT GETS EVEN BETTER

16. MR. AND MRS. WHEAT BELLY

17. WHEAT BELLY–SHRINKING RECIPES

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX A Looking for Wheat in All the Wrong Places

APPENDIX B A Beginner’s Guide to Fermentation

References

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

HAVE YOU EVER come home from the grocery store with a fresh container of milk, opened it and immediately realized that it was bad—sour-smelling, curdled, unfit to drink?

Feed it to the cat? Probably not. Lighten your coffee? I don’t think so. Pour it down the drain—yeah, that’s the ticket. Or maybe go back to the store with some of the curdled remains and ask for your money back.

That is what your reaction to conventional dietary advice should be. You should wrinkle your nose at the bad smell that emanates from advice that creates an astonishingly long list of health problems—from eczema to obesity, from Plantar fasciitis to colon cancer. Blessed by food manufacturers, extolled by dietitians, positioned on the most visible eye-level shelves in grocery stores, wheat is elevated to top of the list of foods to include in every meal by most doctors. Consensus dietary opinion has gotten us into a heap of trouble, creating an epidemic of bulging bellies and a market for insulin injections and toxic drugs designed to address the autoimmune conditions of people who waddle, limp, or ride scooters in XXL pants and dresses. This situation is unprecedented in human history.

Should we accept the common judgment that the largest epidemic of chronic health issues in history is due to laziness, sloth, moral weakness, failure to tally calories in and calories out, mysterious and unidentified viral infections, as is often done by the medical community? Or might official dietary advice itself be the cause?

Something big—really big—was sparked with the publication of Wheat Belly. I believe it helped restore a sense of smell to the public, helping many to realize that there indeed was something wrong in our diets that, despite long-term blessings from “official” sources of dietary wisdom, created a stink you couldn’t block out, no matter how many times you plugged your nose. The wheat might have been seven-grain, organic, and rich in fiber, but there was so much wrong with following the dictates of conventional advice, even when followed to a T. It prompted people to quote Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” after doctors admonished them for gaining weight, experiencing higher blood sugars, and feeling awful while following a diet low in fat and rich in “healthy whole grains.” “You need to try harder,” they’d be told. If not insanity, this was at least blatant irrationality.

Several years after the initial publication of Wheat Belly and millions of readers later, it has become clear that our species made a huge blunder: seeds of grasses, i.e., wheat and its genetic cousins, do not belong in the human diet, let alone be promoted as healthy or necessary. You can’t eat the leaves, stalks, or husks of grasses—so why should we be able to consume the seeds?

Not eating this thing called wheat, celebrated by virtually all who offer dietary advice, is a revelation as big as recognizing that trafficking humans is a bad idea or that enslaving populations for cheap labor is not right. You think I’m pushing the comparisons too far? I predict that, as you get into this book, you will soon recognize how deep, disabling, and prevalent the consequences of consuming wheat are for us, and that a comparison to enslavement is really not that far off. It’s not just a matter of avoiding gluten or reducing calories. You have to make healthy additions as well. If you were to disapprove of a lion’s lifestyle because you watched it tear open the abdomen of a wildebeest, then consume its liver, intestines, and heart, and then, out of disgust, replace its diet with kale and spinach—you would have a dead lion in short order. Restoring the human diet to its natural state, one programmed into our genetics, is like giving the lion another serving of wildebeest: It is lifesaving. Recognizing the fundamental error we made as a species by viewing the seeds of grasses as food is just as big a mistake, but one that we have barely started to recover from with wheat and related grains comprising 70 percent of all worldwide human calories. This is no small economic matter, either. Think of all the farmers, millers, bakers, food companies, dietitians, and multinational Big Agribusiness conglomerates that play a role in an industry created around this awful collection: seeds of grasses misconstrued as food. Undoing this mistake will be messy.

Wheat Belly began as my modest effort to help people with heart disease stop relying on the revolving door of angioplasty, stents, and bypass surgery. The lifestyle that evolved from this effort did indeed bring a halt to chest pain and heart attacks, converting my procedural practice into one that was purely preventive with virtually no need for heart procedures or hospitals. But it proved to accomplish far more than that. Drugs to reduce blood sugar or blood pressure? Gone. Drugs for acid reflux or diarrhea? Flushed down the toilet. Statin drugs with all-expenses-paid trips to Orlando for the prescriber? Phooey. These efforts evolved into a comprehensive program that addressed a long list of common modern health conditions, from excess weight to type 2 diabetes, from autoimmune conditions to irritable bowel syndrome, along with hundreds of others. The explosive success of this approach, not just in the reduction of heart disease, but in improvements in so many other areas of health, means that the world of nutrition and health will never be the same.

This new and expanded edition of Wheat Belly contains the latest version of this lifestyle, so readers can follow the strategies within as a stand-alone program. I detail the nutritional supplement program that compensates for nutrients deficient in former grain-eaters, as well as nutrients to compensate for deficiencies arising from living modern life. I introduce an in-depth discussion of the hormonal disruptions introduced by consuming “healthy whole grains” that I call Mr. and Mrs. Wheat Belly, showing how readers can take back personal control over hormonal health. I’ve updated the advice and added new recipes to incorporate all the lessons learned along the way as this lifestyle has been adopted by millions of people, making the message even more powerful and effective.

This book includes material never before published in any of the books in the Wheat Belly series. After all, we are trying to unlearn the many lessons drilled into us, now realizing it was all wrong, learning new lessons along the way. And, you know what? It is liberating, exhilarating, and enormously empowering. The problem all along was not you.

Now put down that onion bagel and dive in—your life, health, and appearance will never be the same, even minus the schmear.

INTRODUCTION

FLIP THROUGH YOUR parents’ or grandparents’ family albums and you’re likely to be struck by how thin everyone looks. The women probably wore size-4 dresses and men sported 32-inch waists. Overweight was something measured by only a few pounds, obesity rare. Overweight children? Almost never. Any 42-inch waists? Not here. Two-hundred-pound teenagers? Certainly not.

Why were the June Cleavers of the fifties and sixties, the stay-at-home housewives and other people of that era, so much slimmer than modern people we see at the beach, mall, or in our own mirrors? While women of that era typically weighed in at 110 or 115 pounds, men at 150 or 165 pounds, today we carry 50, 75, even 200 pounds more.

The women of that world didn’t exercise much at all. (It was considered unseemly, after all, like having impure thoughts at church.) How many times did you see your mom put on her jogging shoes to go out for a three-mile run? Exercise for my mother was vacuuming the stairs. Nowadays I go outdoors on any nice day and see dozens of women jogging, riding bicycles, power walking—things we’d virtually never see fifty or sixty years ago. And yet, we’re getting fatter and fatter every year.

I’ve observed many triathlon and marathon events over the years, as friends and family have engaged in such things. Triathletes train intensively for months to years before a race to complete a 1- to 2½-mile open water swim, a 56- to 112-mile bike ride, and finish with a 13- to 26-mile run. Just completing a race is a feat in itself, since the event requires up to several thousand calories and spectacular endurance.

Then why are a third of these dedicated men and women athletes overweight? I give them even greater credit for having to cart around the extra 30, 40, or 50 pounds. But, given their extreme level of sustained activity and demanding training schedule, how can they still be overweight?

If we follow conventional logic, overweight triathletes need to exercise more or eat less to lose weight. I believe that is a downright ridiculous notion. I am going to argue that the problem with the diet and health of most Americans, triathletes to couch potatoes, is not fat, not sugar, not the rise of the Internet and the demise of the agrarian lifestyle. It’s wheat—or what we are being sold that is called “wheat.”

You will see that what we are eating, cleverly disguised as a bran muffin or toasted ciabatta, is not really wheat at all but the transformed product of genetic research conducted during the mid-twentieth century. Modern wheat is no more real wheat than a chimpanzee is an approximation of a human. While our hairy primate relatives share 99 percent of all genes found in humans, with longer arms, full body hair, and lesser capacity to win the jackpot at Jeopardy!, I trust you can readily tell the difference that 1 percent makes. Compared to its ancestor of only sixty years ago, modern wheat isn’t even that close.

I believe that the increased consumption of grains—or, more accurately, the increased consumption of this genetically altered thing called modern wheat—explains the contrast between slender, sedentary people of the fifties and overweight twenty-first-century people.

I recognize that declaring wheat a malicious food is like declaring that Ronald Reagan was a Communist. It may seem absurd, even unpatriotic, to demote an iconic dietary staple to the status of public health hazard. But I will make the case that the world’s most popular grain is also the world’s most destructive dietary ingredient.

Documented peculiar effects of wheat on humans include appetite stimulation, exposure to brain-active exorphins (the counterpart of internally derived endorphins) with opioid properties, exaggerated blood sugar surges that trigger cycles of satiety alternating with heightened appetite, the process of glycation that underlies disease and aging, inflammatory and pH effects that erode cartilage and damage bone, activation of misguided immune responses, and disruption of the notion that men can be men and women can be women. A complex range of diseases results from consumption of wheat, from celiac disease—the devastating intestinal disease that develops from exposure to wheat gluten—to an assortment of neurological disorders, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, curious rashes, unwanted facial hair, infertility, and the paralyzing delusions of schizophrenia.

If this thing called wheat is such a problem, then removing it should yield outsize and unexpected benefits. Indeed, that is the case. As a cardiologist who saw and treated thousands of patients at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and the myriad destructive effects of obesity, I have personally observed protuberant, flop-over-the-belt belly fat vanish when patients eliminated wheat from their diets, with typical weight loss totaling 20, 30, or 50 pounds just within the first few months. Rapid and effortless weight loss is usually followed by health benefits that continue to amaze me even today after having witnessed this phenomenon thousands of times.

I’ve seen dramatic turnarounds in health, such as the thirty-eight-year-old woman with ulcerative colitis, with 24-hour-a-day pain, diarrhea, and hemorrhage, facing colon removal who was cured within days with wheat elimination—colon intact. Or the twenty-six-year-old man, incapacitated and barely able to walk because of joint pain, who experienced complete relief and walked and ran freely again after taking wheat off the menu.

Extraordinary as these results may sound, there is ample scientific research to implicate wheat as the root cause of these conditions and to indicate that removal of wheat can reduce or relieve symptoms entirely. You will see that we have unwittingly traded convenience, abundance, and low cost for health with wheat bellies, bulging thighs, and double chins to prove it. Many of the arguments I make in the chapters that follow have been proven in scientific studies that are available for one and all to review. Incredibly, many of the lessons I’ve learned were demonstrated in clinical studies decades ago, but somehow never percolated to the surface of medical or public consciousness. I’ve simply put two and two together to come up with some conclusions that you may find startling.

IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT

In the movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s character, possessing uncommon genius but harboring demons of past abuse, breaks down in sobs when psychologist Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) repeats, “It’s not your fault” over and over again.

Likewise, too many of us, stricken with an unsightly wheat belly and all its unpleasant accompaniments, blame ourselves: too many calories, too little exercise, not enough restraint. But it’s more accurate to say that the advice we’ve been given to eat more “healthy whole grains” has deprived us of control over appetites and impulses, making us fat and unhealthy despite our best efforts and good intentions.

I liken the widely accepted advice to eat healthy whole grains to telling an alcoholic that, if a drink or two won’t hurt, nine or ten may be even better. Taking this advice will have disastrous repercussions on health.

It’s not your fault.

If you find yourself carrying around a protuberant, uncomfortable wheat belly; unsuccessfully trying to squeeze into last year’s jeans; reassuring your doctor that, no, you haven’t been eating badly, but you’re still overweight and prediabetic with high blood pressure and cholesterol and a fatty liver; or desperately trying to conceal a pair of humiliating man breasts or itchy red rashes on various body parts, consider saying good-bye to wheat.

Eliminate the wheat, eliminate the problem.

What have you got to lose except your wheat belly, your man breasts, or your bagel butt?

PART ONE

WHEAT: THE UNHEALTHY WHOLE GRAIN

CHAPTER 1

WHAT BELLY?

The scientific physician welcomes the establishment of a standard loaf of bread made according to the best scientific evidence. … Such a product can be included in diets both for the sick and for the well with a clear understanding of the effect that it may have on digestion and growth.

—MORRIS FISHBEIN, MD, EDITOR, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, 1932

IN CENTURIES PAST, a prominent belly was the domain of the privileged, a mark of wealth and success, a symbol of not having to clean your own stables or plow your own field. In this century, you don’t have to plow your own field. Today, obesity has been democratized: Everybody can have a big belly. Your dad called his rudimentary mid-twentieth-century equivalent a beer belly. But what are soccer moms, kids, and two-thirds of your friends and neighbors who don’t drink beer doing with a beer belly?

I call it “wheat belly,” though I could have just as easily called this condition pretzel brain or bagel bowel or biscuit face since there’s not an organ system unaffected by wheat. But wheat’s impact on the waistline is its most visible and defining characteristic, an outward expression of the grotesque distortions humans experience with consumption of this grain.

A wheat belly represents the accumulation of fat that results from years of consuming foods that trigger insulin, the hormone of fat storage. While some people store fat in their buttocks and thighs, most people collect ungainly fat around the middle. This “central” or “visceral” fat is unique: Unlike fat in other body areas, it provokes inflammatory phenomena, distorts insulin responses, and issues abnormal metabolic signals to the rest of the body. Visceral fat is responsible for effects as varied as cancer, knee arthritis, and infertility. In the unwitting wheat-bellied male, visceral fat also produces estrogen and other hormonal distortions that create “man breasts.” In susceptible females, the same inflammatory fat causes abnormally high testosterone levels, male-like facial hair, and infertility.

The consequences of wheat consumption are manifested on the body’s surface but also reach deep down into virtually every organ of the body, from the intestines, liver, heart, and thyroid gland all the way up to the brain. In fact, there’s hardly an organ that is not affected by wheat in some potentially damaging way.

PANTING AND SWEATING IN THE HEARTLAND

I practiced cardiology in Milwaukee. Like many other midwestern cities, Milwaukee is a good place to live and raise a family. City services work pretty well, the libraries are first-rate, my kids attended quality public schools, and the population is just large enough to enjoy big-city culture, such as an excellent symphony and art museum. The people living here are a fairly friendly bunch. But … they’re fat.

I don’t mean a little bit fat. I mean really, really fat. I mean panting-and-sweating-after-one-flight-of-stairs fat. I mean 240-pound eighteen-year-old women, SUVs tipped sharply to the driver’s side, double-wide wheelchairs, hospital equipment unable to accommodate patients who tip the scales at 350 pounds or more. (Not only can’t they fit into the CT scanner or other imaging device, but you wouldn’t be able to see anything even if they could. It’s like trying to determine whether the image in the murky ocean water is a flounder or a shark.)

Once upon a time, an individual weighing 250 pounds or more was a rarity; today it’s a common sight among the men and women walking the mall, as humdrum as selling jeans at the Gap. Retired people are overweight or obese, as are middle-aged adults, young adults, teenagers, even children. White-collar workers are fat, blue-collar workers are fat. The sedentary are fat and so are athletes. White people are fat, black people are fat, Hispanics are fat, Asians are fat. Carnivores are fat, vegetarians are fat. Americans are plagued by obesity on a scale never before seen in the human experience. No demographic has escaped the weight-gain crisis.

Wheat Belly Success Story: Katie

“Down ninety-five pounds, lower than my goal weight. Normal blood pressure and no meds. Depression-free. Pain-free. Full of energy and loving the acne-free skin I am in!

“Today my blood pressure is normal. Today my acne is gone. Today my depression is gone. Today I wear a size two instead of a size sixteen/eighteen. Another new discovery: my tonsils are normal. I’ve had abnormally large tonsils my entire life. Stayed sick as a kid with strep and tonsillitis, and have snored all my life as well. I realized in the mirror a few days ago my tonsils are almost gone. I barely had a space in my throat my whole life and now they have disappeared. And I no longer snore!

“Two years ago I was put on blood pressure meds. I did a random check yesterday, and it was 102/62—but without meds! My body didn’t just change with this way of eating. My physical health has changed. My mental health has changed. My entire life has changed.

“Every day I find somethinng new. Every day I feel better than the one before. Every day I am so thankful!”

Ask the USDA or the Surgeon General’s office and they will tell you that Americans are fat because they drink too many soft drinks, eat too many potato chips, drink too much beer, and don’t exercise enough. And those things may indeed be part of the truth. But that’s hardly the whole story.

Many overweight people, in fact, are quite health conscious. Ask anyone tipping the scales over 250 pounds: What do you think happened to allow such incredible weight gain? You may be surprised at how many do not say “I drink Big Gulps, eat Pop Tarts, and watch TV all day.” Most will say something like “I don’t get it. I exercise five days a week. I’ve cut my fat and increased my healthy whole grains. Yet I can’t seem to stop gaining weight!”

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The national trend to reduce fat and cholesterol intake and increase carbohydrate calories has created a peculiar situation in which products made from wheat have not just inflated their presence in our diets; they have also come to dominate our diets. For most Americans, every single meal and snack contains foods made with wheat flour. It might be the main course, it might be the side dish, it might be the dessert—and it’s probably all of them.

Wheat has become the national icon of health: “Eat more healthy whole grains,” we’re told, and the food industry happily jumped on board, creating “heart healthy” versions of all our favorite wheat products chock-full of whole grains.

The sad truth is that the proliferation of wheat products in the American diet parallels the expansion of our waists. Advice to cut fat and cholesterol intake and replace the calories with whole grains that was issued by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute through its National Cholesterol Education Program in 1985 coincides precisely with the start of a sharp upward climb in body weight for men and women. Ironically, 1985 also marks the year when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began tracking body weight statistics, tidily documenting the explosion in obesity and diabetes that began that very year.

Of all the grains in the human diet, why pick on wheat? Because wheat, by a considerable margin, is the worst of the bunch, the ringleader of dietary ne’er-do-wells. Unless they’re Euell Gibbons, most people don’t eat much rye, barley, spelt, triticale, bulgur, kamut, or other less common grains; wheat consumption overshadows consumption of most other grains by more than a hundred to one. Wheat also has unique attributes those other grains do not, attributes that make it especially destructive to our health, which I will cover in later chapters. And it’s not just about gluten—modern wheat is an impressive collection of dozens of dietary toxins. Once you come to appreciate just how toxic many of the components of modern wheat truly are, you will be amazed that most people even survive its consumption. While I mostly focus on wheat, the worst offender, I will also discuss how and why other grains that are, after all, genetic cousins, will not be left off the hook, either. Grains—really just seeds of grasses—are also uncommonly promiscuous, readily sharing genes across species. It means that, although wheat is the worst, genetically related grasses like rye, oats, or corn are not blameless.

The health impact of Triticum aestivum, common bread wheat, and its genetic brethren ranges far and wide, with curious effects from mouth to anus, brain to pancreas, Appalachian housewife to Wall Street arbitrageur. But recognize that this food, blessed by virtually all who provide dietary advice, star of nutritionally bankrupt “healthy whole grains,” lies at the foundation of struggles with weight, visceral fat, and, oh, just a few hundred common health conditions, and you will be on your way to undoing the entire mess.

If it sounds crazy, bear with me. I make these claims with a clear, wheat-free conscience.

NUTRI-GROAN

Like most children of my generation, born in the middle of the twentieth century and reared on Wonder Bread and Devil Dogs, I have had a long and close personal relationship with wheat. My sisters and I were veritable connoisseurs of breakfast cereal, making our own individual blends of Trix, Lucky Charms, and Froot Loops and eagerly drinking the sweet, pastel-hued milk that remained at the bottom of the bowl. The Great American Processed Food Experience didn’t end at breakfast, of course. For school lunch, my mom usually packed peanut butter or bologna sandwiches, the prelude to cellophane-wrapped Ho Hos and Scooter Pies. Sometimes she would throw in a few Oreos or Vienna Fingers, too. For supper, we loved the TV dinners that came packaged in their own foil plates, allowing us to consume our battered chicken, corn muffin, and apple brown betty while watching Get Smart.

My first year of college, armed with an all-you-can-eat dining room ticket, I gorged on waffles and pancakes for breakfast, fettuccine Alfredo for lunch, pasta with Italian bread for dinner. Poppy seed muffin or angel food cake for dessert? You bet! Not only did I gain a hefty spare tire around the middle at age nineteen (my version of the “freshman fifteen”), I felt exhausted all the time. For the next twenty years, I battled this effect, drinking gallons of coffee, struggling to shake off the pervasive stupor that persisted no matter how many hours I slept each night.

Yet none of this really registered until I caught sight of a photo my wife snapped of me while on vacation with our kids, then ages ten, eight, and four, on Marco Island, Florida. It was 1999.

In the picture, I was fast asleep on the sand, my flabby abdomen splayed to either side, my second chin resting on my crossed flabby arms.

That’s when it really hit me: I didn’t just have a few extra pounds to lose, I had a good 30 pounds of accumulated weight around my middle. What must patients think when I counseled them on diet? I was no better than the doctors of the sixties puffing on Marlboros while advising their patients to live healthier lives.

Why did I have those extra pounds under my belt? After all, I jogged three to five miles every day, ate a sensible, balanced diet that didn’t include excessive quantities of meats or fats, avoided junk foods and snacks, and instead concentrated on getting plenty of healthy whole grains. What was going on here?

Sure, I had my suspicions. I couldn’t help but notice that on the days when I’d eat toast, waffles, or bagels for breakfast, I’d stumble through several hours of sleepiness and lethargy. But when I’d eat a three-egg omelet with cheese, I’d feel fine. Some basic laboratory work, though, really stopped me in my tracks. Triglycerides: 350 mg/dl; HDL (“good”) cholesterol: 27 mg/dl, a level that put me at high risk for heart disease. And I was diabetic, with a fasting blood sugar of 161 mg/dl. I was jogging nearly every day, cutting my fat, but I was overweight and diabetic? Something had to be fundamentally wrong with my diet. Of all the changes I had made in my diet in the name of health, cutting fat and boosting my intake of healthy whole grains had been the most significant. Could it be that the grains were actually making me fatter?

That moment of flabby realization began the start of a journey, following the trail of crumbs back from being overweight and all the health problems that came with it. But it was when I observed even greater effects on a larger scale beyond my own personal experience that I became convinced that there really was something interesting going on, something completely contrary to prevailing dietary opinion.

LESSONS FROM A WHEAT-FREE EXPERIMENT

An interesting fact: Whole wheat bread (glycemic index 72) increases blood sugar as much as or more than table sugar, or sucrose (glycemic index 59). (Glucose increases blood sugar to 100, hence a glycemic index of 100. The extent to which a particular food increases blood sugar relative to glucose determines that food’s glycemic index.) So when I was devising a strategy to help my overweight, diabetes-prone patients reduce blood sugar most efficiently, it made sense to me that the quickest and simplest way to get results would be to eliminate the foods that caused their blood sugar to rise most profoundly: in other words, not just sugar, but wheat. I provided a simple handout detailing how to replace wheat-based foods with other foods to create a healthy diet.

After three months, my patients returned to have more blood work done. As I had anticipated, with only rare exceptions, blood sugar (glucose) had indeed often dropped from diabetic range (126 mg/dl or greater) to normal. Yes, diabetics became non-diabetics. That’s right: Diabetes in most cases can be cured—not simply managed—by removal of carbohydrates, especially wheat, from the diet, with the odds further stacked in your favor by correcting a few common nutrient deficiencies. Many of my patients also lost 20, 30, even 40 pounds, even when I didn’t tell them that they would slim down—yes: weight loss by “accident.”

But it’s what I didn’t expect that astounded me.

They reported that symptoms of acid reflux disappeared and the cyclic cramping and diarrhea of irritable bowel syndrome were gone, typically within five days, eliminating the need for mad rushes to the toilet. Energy improved, focus was greater, sleep was deeper. Rashes disappeared, even rashes that had been present for years. Rheumatoid arthritis pain improved or disappeared over several weeks, enabling them to cut back, even eliminate, the nasty medications used to treat it. Joint pains in the hands, wrists, and elbows disappeared within a week. Anxiety, dark moods, even suicidal thoughts miraculously receded. Asthma symptoms improved or resolved completely, allowing many to throw away their inhalers. Athletes reported more consistent performance.

Thinner. More energetic. Clearer thinking. Better bowel, joint, and lung health. Time and time again. Surely these results were reason enough to forgo wheat.

What convinced me further were the many instances in which people removed wheat, then permitted themselves a wheat indulgence: a couple of pretzels, a canapé at a cocktail party, a slice of birthday cake—“What the heck? It’s my daughter’s birthday. A few bites can’t hurt!” Within minutes, most would experience diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, bloating, joint swelling and pain, wheezing, anxiety, even anger. On again, off again, the phenomenon would repeat itself.

What started out as a simple experiment in reducing blood sugars exploded into an insight into multiple health conditions and weight loss that continues to amaze me even today.

A RADICAL WHEAT-ECTOMY

For many, the idea of removing wheat from the diet is, at least psychologically, as discomforting as the thought of having a root canal without anesthesia. For some, the process can indeed have uncomfortable side effects akin to withdrawal from cigarettes or alcohol. But this procedure must be performed to permit the patient to recover.

Wheat Belly explores the proposition that the health problems of Americans, from fatigue to arthritis to gastrointestinal distress to obesity, originate with the innocent-looking bran muffin or cinnamon raisin bagel you down with your coffee every morning.

The good news: There is a cure for this condition called wheat belly—or, if you prefer, pretzel brain, bagel bowel, or biscuit face.

The bottom line: Elimination of this food, part of human culture for more centuries than Larry King was on the air, will make you sleeker, smarter, faster, and happier. Weight loss, in particular, can proceed at a pace you didn’t think possible. And you can selectively lose the most visible, insulin-opposing, diabetes-creating, inflammation-producing, embarrassment-causing fat: belly fat. It is a process accomplished with virtually no hunger or deprivation, with an astonishing spectrum of health benefits. And, because this lifestyle rapidly reverses the inflammation caused by wheat, within days to weeks you will find that facial appearance is transformed, sufficient for people around you to ask if you’ve undergone radical plastic surgery—no kidding. (Consider taking before/after “selfies” to prove it.)

I suspect that, once you experience the wonderful health and weight liberation that develops by banishing this problematic group of foods, you may be eager to explore even greater heights of health. I will, therefore, discuss why you should take steps to correct the nutritional deficiencies caused or worsened by prior grain consumption, as well as a few other common nutritional deficiencies. This is like the physical therapy that you undergo after surgery, the steps you can take to get back to the dance floor and dance your dietary version of the boogie-woogie.

The next chapter will explain why wheat has a unique ability to convert quickly to blood sugar. In addition, it has addictive properties that actually cause us to overeat; has been linked to literally dozens of debilitating ailments beyond those associated with being overweight; and has infiltrated almost every aspect of our diet. Sure, cutting out refined sugar is a good idea, as it provides little or no nutritional benefit and impacts your blood sugar in a negative way. But eliminating wheat is the easiest and most effective step, the biggest bang for your buck that you can take to safeguard your health and trim your waistline.

CHAPTER 2

NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S MUFFINS: THE CREATION OF MODERN WHEAT

He is as good as good bread.

—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE

WHEAT, MORE THAN any other foodstuff, is woven into the fabric of the American food experience, a trend that began even before Ozzie met Harriet. It has become such a ubiquitous part of the American diet in so many ways that it seems essential to our lives. What would a plate of fried eggs be without toast, lunch without sandwiches, beer without pretzels, picnics without hot dog buns, dip without crackers, hummus without pita, lox without bagels, apple pie without crust?

IF IT’S TUESDAY, IT MUST BE WHEAT

I measured the length of the bread aisle at my local supermarket: sixty-eight feet.

That’s sixty-eight feet of white bread, whole wheat bread, multi-grain bread, seven-grain bread, rye bread, pumpernickel bread, sourdough bread, Italian bread, French bread, breadsticks, white bagels, raisin bagels, cheese bagels, garlic bagels, oat bread, flax bread, pita bread, dinner rolls, Kaiser rolls, poppy seed rolls, hamburger buns, and fourteen varieties of hot dog buns. That’s not even counting the bakery and the additional forty feet of shelves packed with a variety of “artisanal” wheat products.

And then there’s the snack aisle with forty-some brands of crackers and twenty-seven brands of pretzels. The baking aisle has bread crumbs and croutons. The dairy case has dozens of those tubes you crack open to bake rolls, Danish, and crescents.

Breakfast cereals fill a world unto themselves, usually enjoying a monopoly over an entire supermarket aisle, top to bottom shelves.

There’s much of an aisle devoted to boxes and bags of pasta and noodles: spaghetti, lasagna, penne, elbows, shells, whole wheat pasta, green spinach pasta, orange tomato pasta, egg noodles, tiny-grained couscous to three-inch-wide pasta sheets.

How about frozen foods? The freezer has hundreds of noodle, pasta, and wheat-containing side dishes to accompany the meat loaf and roast beef au jus.

In fact, apart from the detergent and soap aisle, there’s barely a shelf that doesn’t contain wheat products. Can you blame Americans if they’ve allowed wheat to dominate their diets? After all, it’s in practically everything from Twizzlers to Twinkies to twelve-grain bread.

Wheat as a crop has succeeded on an unprecedented scale, exceeded only by its cousin, corn, in acreage of farmland planted. It is, by a long stretch, among the most consumed foods on earth, constituting 20 percent of all human calories. While humans also consume plenty of corn in its widely varied forms, from corn on the cob to high-fructose corn syrup and maltodextrin, much of the corn is also fed to livestock to fatten them up and marble the meat just before slaughter.

Wheat has been an undeniable financial success. How many other ways can a manufacturer transform a dime’s worth of raw material into $3.99 worth of glitzy, consumer-friendly product, topped off with endorsements from the American Heart Association? In most cases, the cost of marketing these products exceeds the cost of the ingredients themselves.

Foods made partly or entirely of wheat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks have become the rule. Indeed, such a regimen would make the USDA, the Whole Grains Council, the Whole Wheat Council, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association happy, knowing that their message to eat more “healthy whole grains” has gained a wide and eager following.

So why has this seemingly benign plant that sustained generations of humans suddenly turned on us? For one thing, it is not the same grain our forebears ground into their daily bread. Wheat naturally evolved to only a modest degree over the centuries, but it has changed dramatically in the past sixty years under the influence of agricultural scientists. Wheat strains have been hybridized, crossbred, and chemically mutated to make the wheat plant resistant to environmental conditions, such as drought, or pathogens, such as fungi, as well as resistant to herbicides. But most of all, genetic changes have been introduced to increase yield per acre. The average yield on a modern North American farm is more than tenfold greater than farms of a century ago. Such enormous strides in yield have required drastic changes in genetic code, reducing the proud “amber waves of grain” of yesteryear to rigid, stocky, eighteen-inch-tall high-production “semi-dwarf” wheat of today. Such fundamental genetic changes, as you will see, have come at a price for the unwitting creatures who consume it.

Even in the few decades since your grandmother survived Prohibition and danced the Big Apple, wheat has undergone countless transformations. As the science of genetics has progressed over the past sixty years, permitting human intervention to unfold much more rapidly than nature’s slow, year-by-year breeding influence, the pace of change has increased exponentially. The genetic backbone of a high-tech poppy seed muffin has achieved its current condition by a process of evolutionary acceleration for agricultural advantage that makes us look like pre-humans trapped somewhere in the early Pleistocene.

FROM NATUFIAN PORRIDGE TO DONUT HOLES

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

It’s in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, Moses describes the Promised Land as “a land of wheat and barley and vineyards.” Bread is central to religious ritual. Jews celebrate Passover with unleavened matzo to commemorate the flight of the Israelites from Egypt. Christians consume wafers representing the body of Christ. Muslims regard unleavened naan as sacred, insisting it be stored upright and never thrown away in public. In the Bible, bread is a metaphor for bountiful harvest, times of plenty, freedom from starvation, even salvation.

Don’t we break bread with friends and family? Isn’t something new and wonderful “the best thing since sliced bread”? “Taking the bread out of someone’s mouth” is to deprive that person of a fundamental necessity. Bread is a nearly universal diet staple: chapati in India, tsoureki in Greece, pita in the Middle East, aebleskiver in Denmark, naan bya for breakfast in Burma, glazed donuts any old time in the United States.

The notion that a foodstuff so fundamental, so deeply ingrained in the human experience, can be bad for us is, well, unsettling and counter to long-held cultural views. But today’s bread bears little resemblance to the loaves that emerged from our forebears’ ovens. Just as a modern Napa Cabernet Sauvignon is a far cry from the crude ferment of fourth-century BC Georgian winemakers who buried wine urns in underground mounds, so has wheat changed. Bread and other foods made of wheat may have helped sustain humans for centuries (but at a chronic health price, as I shall discuss), but the wheat of our ancestors is not the same as modern commercial wheat that reaches your breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. From original strains of wild grass harvested by early humans, wheat has exploded to more than 25,000 varieties, virtually all of them the result of human intervention.

In the waning days of the Pleistocene, around 8500 BC, millennia before any Christian, Jew, or Muslim walked the earth, before the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires, the Natufians led a semi-nomadic life roaming the Fertile Crescent (now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq), supplementing hunting and gathering by harvesting indigenous plants. They harvested the ancestor of modern wheat, einkorn, from fields that flourished wildly in open plains. Meals of gazelle, boar, fowl, and ibex were rounded out with dishes of wild-growing grain and fruit. Relics like those excavated at the Tell Abu Hureyra settlement in what is now central Syria suggest skilled use of tools such as sickles and mortars to harvest and grind grains, as well as storage pits for stockpiling harvested food. Remains of harvested wheat have been found at archaeological digs in Tell Aswad, Jericho, Nahal Hemar, Navali Cori, and other locales. Wheat was ground by hand, then eaten as porridge. The modern concept of bread leavened by yeast would not come along for several thousand years.

Natufians harvested wild einkorn wheat and stored seeds to sow in areas of their own choosing the following season. Einkorn wheat eventually became an essential component of the Natufian diet, reducing need for hunting and gathering. The shift from harvesting wild grain to cultivating it from one season to the next was a fundamental change that shaped subsequent human migratory behavior, as well as development of tools, language, and culture. It marked the beginning of agriculture, a lifestyle that required long-term commitment to permanent settlement, a turning point in the course of human civilization. Growing grains and other foods yielded a surplus of food that allowed for occupational specialization, government, and all the elaborate trappings of culture (while, in contrast, the absence of agriculture arrested development of other cultures in a lifestyle of nomadic hunting and gathering).

Over most of the ten thousand years that wheat has occupied a prominent place in the caves, huts, and adobes, and on the tables of humans, what started out as harvested einkorn, then emmer, followed by cultivated Triticum aestivum, changed gradually and only in fits and starts. The wheat of the seventeenth century was the wheat of the eighteenth century, which in turn was much the same as the wheat of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Riding your oxcart through the countryside during any of these centuries, you’d see fields of five-foot-tall “amber waves of grain” swaying in the breeze. Crude human wheat-breeding efforts yielded hit-and-miss, year-over-year incremental modifications, some successful, most not, and even a discerning eye would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the wheat of early twentieth-century farming from its centuries of predecessors.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in many preceding centuries, wheat therefore changed little. The Pillsbury’s Best XXXX flour my grandmother used to make her famous sour cream muffins in 1940 was little different from the flour of her great-grandmother sixty years earlier or, for that matter, from that of a distant relative two or three centuries before that. Grinding of wheat became mechanized in the twentieth century, yielding finer flour on a larger scale, but the basic composition of the flour remained much the same.

That all ended in the latter half of the twentieth century, when an upheaval in hybridization methods transformed this grain. What now passes for wheat has changed, not through the forces of drought or disease or a Darwinian scramble for survival, but through human intervention.

Wheat has undergone more drastic transformation than the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, stretched, sewed, cut, and stitched back together to yield something entirely unique, nearly unrecognizable when compared to the original and yet still called by the same name: wheat.

Modern commercial wheat production has been intent on delivering features such as increased yield, decreased operation costs, and large-scale production of a consistent commodity. All the while, virtually no questions have been asked about whether these features are compatible with human health. I submit that, somewhere along the way during wheat’s history, perhaps five thousand years ago but more likely sixty years ago, wheat changed in ways that yielded exaggerated adverse effects on human health.

The result: A loaf of bread, biscuit, or pancake of today is different from its counterpart of a thousand years ago, different even from what our grandmothers made. They might look the same, even taste much the same, but there are fundamental biochemical differences. Small changes in wheat protein structure, for instance, can spell the difference between a devastating immune response to wheat protein versus no immune response at all.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST WHEAT-EATERS?

After not consuming the seeds of grasses for the first 99.6 percent of our time on this planet, we finally turned to them for sustenance ten thousand years ago. Desperation, caused by a shortage of wild game and plants due to a natural shift in climate, prompted Neolithic hunter-gatherers to view seeds of grasses as food. But we cannot save grass clippings gathered from cutting our lawns to sprinkle on top of a salad with a little vinaigrette; likewise, we found out the hard way that, when ingested, the leaves, stalks, and husks of grasses are tasteless and inedible, wreaking gastrointestinal havoc like nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, or passing through the gastrointestinal tract undigested. The grasses of the earth are indigestible to humans (unlike herbivorous ruminants, who possess adaptations that allow them to graze on grasses, such as multi-compartment stomachs and spiral colons that harbor unique microorganisms that break grasses down).

It must have taken considerable trial and error to figure out that the seeds of grass, removed from the husk, then dried, pulverized with stones, and heated in water, would yield something that could be eaten and provide carbohydrate nourishment. Over time, increased efficiencies in harvesting and grinding allowed grass seeds to play a more prominent role in the human diet.

So what became of those first humans who turned to the seeds of wheat grass to survive?

Anthropologists tell us that there was an explosion of tooth decay and tooth abscess; microorganisms of the mouth and colon changed; the maxillary bone and mandible of the skull shrank, resulting in crooked teeth; iron deficiency anemia became common; the frequency of knee arthritis doubled; and bone length and diameter decreased, resulting in a reduced height of five inches in males, three inches in females.1, 2, 3, ⁴

The explosion of tooth decay, in particular, is telling: Prior to the consumption of the seeds of grasses, tooth decay was uncommon, affecting only 1 to 3 percent of all teeth recovered. This is extraordinary, as non-grain-eating humans had no fluoridated water or toothpaste, no toothbrushes, no dental floss, no dentists, no dental insurance card, yet had perfectly straight, healthy teeth even to old age. (Yes, ancient humans lived to their fifties, sixties, and seventies, contrary to popular opinion.) When humans first turned to grains—einkorn wheat in the Fertile Crescent, millet in sub-Saharan Africa, and maize and teosinte in Central America—humans developed an explosion of tooth decay: 16 to 49 percent of teeth showed decay and abscess formation, as well as misalignment, even in young people.⁵

Living in a wild world, hunting and gathering food, humans needed a full set of intact teeth to survive, sometimes having to eat their food raw, which required prolonged, vigorous chewing. The dental experience with wheat and grains encapsulates much that is wrong with their consumption. The amylopectin A carbohydrate that provides carbohydrate calories may allow survival for another few days or weeks, but it is also responsible for the decline in dental health months to years later—trading near-term survival in exchange for long-term crippling changes in health at a time when mercury fillings and dentures were not an option. Over the centuries, human grain consumers learned they had to take extraordinary steps to preserve their teeth. Today, of course, we have a multi-billion dollar industry delivered by dentists, orthodontists, toothpaste manufacturers, and so forth, all to largely counter the decay and misalignment of teeth that began when humans first mistook the seeds of grasses for food.

WHEAT BEFORE GENETICISTS GOT HOLD OF IT

Wheat is uniquely adaptable to environmental conditions, growing in Jericho, 850 feet below sea level, to Himalayan mountainous regions 10,000 feet above sea level. Its latitudinal range is also wide, ranging from as far north as Norway, 65° north latitude, to Argentina, 45° south latitude. Wheat occupies sixty million acres of farmland in the United States, an area equal to the state of Ohio. Worldwide, wheat is grown on an area ten times that figure, or twice the total acreage of Western Europe. After all, Domino’s has lots of pizzas to sell at $5.99.

The first wild, then cultivated, wheat was einkorn, the great-granddaddy of all subsequent wheat. Einkorn has the simplest genetic code of all wheat, containing only fourteen chromosomes. Circa 3300 BC, hardy, cold-tolerant einkorn wheat was a popular grain in Europe. This was the age of the Tyrolean Iceman, fondly known as Ötzi. Examination of the intestinal contents of this naturally mummified Late Neolithic hunter, killed by attackers and left to freeze in the mountain glaciers of the Italian Alps, revealed the partially digested remains of einkorn wheat consumed as unleavened flatbread, along with remains of plants, deer, and ibex meat.⁶

Shortly after human cultivation of the first einkorn plant, the emmer variety of wheat, the natural offspring of parents einkorn and an unrelated wild grass, Aegilops speltoides or goatgrass, made its appearance in the Middle East.⁷ Consistent with the peculiar promiscuity unique to grasses, goatgrass added its genetic code to that of einkorn, resulting in the more complex twenty-eight-chromosome emmer wheat. Grasses such as wheat have the ability to retain the sum of the genes of their forebears. Imagine that, when your parents mated to create you, rather than mixing chromosomes and coming up with forty-six chromosomes to create their offspring, they combined forty-six chromosomes from Mom with forty-six chromosomes from Dad, totaling ninety-two chromosomes in you. This, of course, doesn’t happen in higher species. Such additive accumulation of chromosomes in grasses is called polyploidy and you and other mammals like hedgehogs and squirrels are incapable of it. But the grasses of the earth, including the various forms of wheat, are capable of such chromosomal multiplication.

Einkorn and its evolutionary successor emmer wheat remained popular for several thousand years, sufficient to earn their place as food staples and religious icons, despite their relatively poor yield and less desirable baking characteristics compared to modern wheat. (These denser, cruder flours would have yielded lousy ciabattas or bear claws.) Emmer wheat is probably what Moses referred to in his pronouncements, as well as the kussemeth mentioned in the Bible, and the variety that persisted up until the dawn of the Roman Empire.

Sumerians, credited with developing the first written language, left us tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets. Pictographic characters, dated to 3000 BC, describe recipes for breads and pastries, all made by taking mortar and pestle or hand-pushed grinding wheel to emmer wheat. Sand was often added to the mixture to hasten the laborious grinding process, leaving bread-eating Sumerians with sand-chipped teeth.

Emmer wheat flourished in ancient Egypt, its cycle of growth suited to the seasonal rise and fall of the Nile. Egyptians are credited with learning how to make bread “rise” by the addition of yeast. When the Jews fled Egypt, in their hurry they failed to take the leavening mixture with them, forcing them to consume unleavened bread made from emmer wheat.

Sometime in the millennia predating Biblical times, twenty-eight-chromosome emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum) mated naturally with another grass, Triticum tauschii, yielding primordial forty-two-chromosome Triticum aestivum, genetically closer to what we now call wheat. Because it contains the sum total of the chromosomal content of three unique grasses with forty-two chromosomes, it is the most genetically complex. It is therefore the most genetically “pliable,” an issue that will serve future genetics researchers well in the millennia to come.

Over time, the higher yielding and more baking-compatible Triticum aestivum species gradually overshadowed its parents, einkorn and emmer wheat. In the ensuing centuries, Triticum aestivum wheat changed little. By the mid-eighteenth century, the great Swedish botanist and biological cataloger, Carolus Linnaeus, father of the Linnean system of the categorization of species, counted five different varieties falling under the Triticum genus.

Wheat did not evolve naturally in the New World, but was introduced by Christopher Columbus, whose crew first planted a few grains in Puerto Rico in 1493. Spanish explorers accidentally brought wheat seeds in a sack of rice to Mexico in 1530, and later introduced it to the American Southwest. The namer of Cape Cod and discoverer of Martha’s Vineyard, Bartholomew Gosnold, first brought wheat to New England in 1602, followed shortly thereafter by the Pilgrims, who transported wheat with them on the Mayflower.

WILL THE REAL WHEAT PLEASE STAND UP?

What was the wheat grown ten thousand years ago and harvested by hand from wild fields like? That simple question took me to the Middle East—or more precisely, to a small organic farm in western Massachusetts.

There I found Elisheva Rogosa. Eli is not only a science teacher but an organic farmer, advocate of sustainable agriculture, and founder of the Heritage Grain Conservancy (www.growseed.org), an organization devoted to preserving ancient food crops and cultivating them using organic principles. After living in the Middle East for ten years and working with the Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian GenBank project to collect nearly extinct ancient wheat strains, Eli returned to the United States with seeds descended from the original wheat plants of ancient Egypt and Canaan. She has since devoted herself to cultivating the ancient grains that sustained her ancestors.

My first contact with Eli began with an exchange of e-mails that resulted from my request for 2 pounds of einkorn wheat grain. She couldn’t stop herself from educating me about her unique crop, which was not just any old wheat grain, after all. Eli described the taste of einkorn bread as “rich, subtle, with more complex flavor,” unlike bread made from modern wheat flour that she believes tastes like cardboard.

Eli bristles at the suggestion that wheat products might be unhealthy, citing instead the yield-increasing, profit-expanding agricultural practices of the past few decades as the source of the adverse health effects of wheat. She views einkorn and emmer as the solution, restoring the original grasses, grown under organic conditions, to replace modern industrial wheat.

And so it went, a gradual expansion of the reach of wheat plants with only modest and continual evolutionary selection at work.

Today einkorn, emmer, and the original wild and cultivated strains of Triticum aestivum have been replaced by thousands of modern human-bred offspring of Triticum aestivum, as well as Triticum durum (pasta) and Triticum compactum (yielding very fine flours used to make cupcakes and other products). To find einkorn or emmer today, you’d have to look for the limited wild collections or modest human plantings scattered around the Middle East, southern France, northern Italy, or Eli Rogosa’s farm. Courtesy of modern human-managed hybridizations and other genetic manipulations, Triticum species of today are thousands of genes apart from the original einkorn wheat that grew naturally, farther apart than you are from the primates hanging from trees in the zoo.

Modern Triticum wheat is the product of breeding to generate greater yield and characteristics such as disease, drought, and heat resistance. In fact, wheat has been modified by humans to such a degree that modern strains are unable to survive in the wild without human support such as nitrate fertilization and pest control.⁸ (Imagine this bizarre situation in the world of domesticated animals: an animal able to exist only with human assistance, such as special feed or antibiotics, else it would die.)

Differences between the wheat of the Natufians and what we call wheat in the twenty-first century are evident to the naked eye. Original einkorn and emmer wheat were “hulled” forms, simply meaning that the seeds clung tightly to the stem. Modern wheats are “naked” forms, in which the seeds depart from the stem more readily, a characteristic that makes threshing (separating the seed from the chaff) easier, determined by mutations at the Q and Tg (tenacious glume) genes.⁹ But other differences are even more obvious. Modern wheat is much shorter. The romantic notion of tall fields of wheat grain gracefully waving in the wind has been replaced by “dwarf” and “semi-dwarf” varieties that stand barely a foot or two tall, yet another product of breeding experiments to increase yield and reflecting the extensive genetic changes that this grass has undergone.

SMALL IS THE NEW BIG

For as long as humans have practiced agriculture, farmers have strived to increase yield. Marrying a woman with a dowry of several acres of farmland was, for many centuries, the primary means of increasing crop yield, arrangements often accompanied by several goats and a sack of potatoes. The twentieth century introduced mechanized farm machinery that replaced animal power and increased efficiency, providing another incremental increase in yield per acre. While production in the United States was usually sufficient to meet demand (with distribution limited more by poverty than by supply), many other nations were unable to feed their populations, resulting in widespread hunger.

In modern times, humans have tried to increase yield by creating new strains, crossbreeding different wheats and grasses and generating new genetic varieties in the laboratory. Hybridization efforts involved techniques such as introgression and “back-crossing,” in which offspring of plant breeding are mated with their parents or with different strains of wheat or even other grasses. Such efforts, though first formally described by Austrian priest and botanist Gregor Mendel in 1866, did not begin in earnest until the mid-twentieth century, when concepts such as heterozygosity and gene dominance were better understood. Since Mendel’s early efforts, geneticists have developed elaborate techniques to obtain a desired trait, though much trial and error is still required.

Much of the current world supply of purposefully bred wheat is descended from strains developed at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMWIC), located at the foot of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains east of Mexico City. IMWIC began as an agricultural research program in 1943 through a collaboration of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government to help Mexico achieve agricultural self-sufficiency. It grew into an impressive worldwide effort to increase the yield of corn, soy, and wheat, with the admirable goal of reducing world hunger. Mexico provided an efficient proving ground for plant hybridization, since the climate allows two growing seasons per year, cutting the time required to hybridize strains by half. By 1980, these efforts produced thousands of new strains of wheat, the most high-yielding of which have since been adopted worldwide, from Third World countries to modern industrialized nations, including the United States.

One of the practical difficulties solved during IMWIC’s push to increase yield is that, when large quantities of synthetic nitrogen-rich fertilizer are applied to wheat fields, the seed head at the top of the plant grows to enormous proportions. The top-heavy seed head, however, buckles the stalk (what agricultural scientists call “lodging”). Lodging kills the plant and makes harvesting problematic. University of Minnesota–trained agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, working at IMWIC, is credited with developing the exceptionally high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat that was shorter and stockier, allowing the plant to maintain erect posture and resist buckling under the large seed head. Short stalks are also more efficient; they reach maturity more quickly, which means a shorter growing season with less fertilizer required to generate the otherwise useless stalk.

Dr. Borlaug’s wheat-hybridizing accomplishments earned him the title of “Father of the Green Revolution” in the agricultural community, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. On his death in 2009, the Wall Street Journal eulogized him: “More than any other single person, Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.” Dr. Borlaug lived to see his dream come true: His high-yield semi-dwarf wheat did indeed help solve world hunger, with the wheat crop yield in China, for example, increasing eightfold from 1961 to 1999.

Semi-dwarf wheat today has essentially replaced virtually all other strains of wheat in the United States and much of the world thanks to its extraordinary capacity for high yield. According to Allan Fritz, PhD, professor of wheat breeding at Kansas State University, semi-dwarf wheat now comprises more than 99 percent of all wheat grown worldwide.

BAD BREEDING

The peculiar oversight in the flurry of breeding activity, such as that conducted at IMWIC, was that, despite dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of wheat and other crops in achieving the goal of increased yield, no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created. So intent were the efforts to increase yield, so confident were plant geneticists that hybridization yielded safe products for human consumption, so urgent was the cause of world hunger, that products of agricultural research were released into the food supply without human safety concerns being part of the equation.

It was simply assumed that, because breeding efforts yielded plants that remained essentially “wheat,” new strains would be perfectly well tolerated by the consuming public. Agricultural scientists, in fact, scoff at the idea that breeding manipulations have the potential to generate strains that are unhealthy for humans. After all, breeding techniques have been used, albeit in cruder form, in crops, animals, even humans for centuries. Mate two varieties of tomatoes, you still get tomatoes, right? Breed a Chihuahua with a Great Dane, you still get a dog. What’s the problem? The question of animal or human safety testing was never raised. With wheat, it was likewise assumed that variations in gluten content and structure, modifications of other enzymes and proteins, qualities that confer susceptibility or resistance to various plant diseases, would all make their way to humans without consequence.

Judging by research findings of agricultural geneticists, such assumptions are unfounded and just plain wrong. Analyses of proteins expressed by a wheat hybrid compared to its two parent strains have demonstrated that, while approximately 95 percent of the proteins expressed in the offspring are the same, 5 percent are unique, found in neither parent.¹⁰ Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with a method as basic as hybridization. In one hybridization experiment, fourteen new gluten proteins were identified in the offspring that were not present in either parent wheat plant.¹¹ Moreover, when compared to century-old strains of wheat, modern strains of Triticum aestivum express a higher quantity of genes for gluten proteins that are associated with celiac disease.¹²

The changes introduced into wheat go even further, involving a process called chemical mutagenesis. BASF, the world’s largest chemical manufacturer, holds the patent on a strain of wheat called Clearfield that is resistant to the herbicide imazamox (Beyond). Clearfield wheat is impervious to imazamox, allowing the farmer to spray it on his field to kill weeds but not the wheat, similar to corn and soy that are genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate (Roundup). In their marketing, BASF proudly declares that Clearfield is not the product of genetic-modification. So how did they get Clearfield wheat to be herbicide resistant?

Clearfield wheat was developed by exposing seeds and embryos to sodium azide, a toxic chemical used in industrial settings. If the compound is mixed with water or an acid or comes into contact with metal (for example, as a result of an accident in a laboratory) it can create a potentially deadly toxic gas. The sodium azide was used to induce genetic mutations in wheat seeds and embryos until the desired mutation was obtained. Problem: Dozens of other mutations were also induced, but as long as the wheat plant did its job in yielding satisfactory bagels and biscuits, no further questions were asked and the end product was sold to the public.¹³ In addition to the process of chemical mutagenesis, there are also gamma ray and high-dose x-ray mutagenesis, all relatively indiscriminate methods to introduce mutations.

In the semantic game that Big Agribusiness likes to play, these methods do not fall under the umbrella of “genetic modification” even though they yield even more genetic changes than genetic modification. Clearfield wheat is now grown on about a million acres in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Surely the wheat industry deserves an honorary doctorate from the Vladimir Putin College of Obfuscation.

A GOOD GRAIN GONE BAD?

Given the genetic distance that has evolved between modern-day wheat and its evolutionary predecessors, is it possible that ancient grains such as emmer and einkorn can be eaten without the unwanted effects that accompany modern wheat products?

I decided to put ancient wheat to the test, grinding 2 pounds of whole einkorn grain to flour, which I then used to make bread. I also ground modern conventional organic whole wheat flour from seed. I made bread from both the einkorn and conventional flour using only water and yeast with no added sugars or flavorings. The einkorn flour looked much like conventional whole wheat flour, but once water and yeast were added, differences became evident: The light brown dough was less stretchy, less pliable, and stickier than a traditional dough, and it lacked the moldability of conventional wheat flour dough. The dough smelled different, too, more like peanut butter rather than the standard neutral smell of dough. It rose less than modern dough, rising just a little, compared to the doubling in size of modern bread. And, as Eli Rogosa claimed, the final bread product did indeed taste different: heavier, nutty, with an astringent aftertaste. I could envision this loaf of crude einkorn bread on the tables of third century BC Amorites or Mesopotamians.

I have a wheat sensitivity and become quite ill with any re-exposure. So, in the interest of science, I conducted my own little experiment: four ounces of einkorn bread on day one versus four ounces of modern organic whole wheat bread on day two. I braced myself for the worst, since my reactions have been rather unpleasant.

Beyond simply observing my physical reaction, I also performed fingerstick blood sugar tests after eating each type of bread. The differences were striking.

Blood sugar at the start: 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming einkorn bread: 110 mg/dl. This was more or less the expected response to eating some carbohydrate. Afterward, though, I felt no perceptible effects—no sleepiness, no nausea, no pain, no urge to pound something. In short, I felt fine. Whew!

The next day, I repeated the procedure, substituting four ounces of conventional organic whole wheat bread. Blood sugar at the start: again 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming conventional bread: 167 mg/dl. Moreover, I soon became nauseated, nearly losing my lunch. The queasy effect persisted for thirty-six hours, accompanied by stomach cramps that started almost immediately and lasted for many hours. Sleep that night was fitful, filled with vivid, unpleasant dreams. The next morning, I couldn’t think straight, nor could I understand the research papers I was trying to read, having to read and reread paragraphs four or five times; I finally gave up. Only a full day and a half later did I start feeling normal again.

I survived my little wheat experiment, but I was impressed with the difference in responses to ancient wheat and modern wheat in my whole wheat bread. Surely something odd was going on here.

My personal experience, of course, does not qualify as a clinical trial. But it raises some questions about the potential differences that span a distance of ten thousand years: ancient wheat that predates the changes introduced by human genetic intervention versus modern wheat. (Please don’t interpret my comments to mean that heirloom or traditional strains of wheat are healthy or benign: They have their own set of problems when unwitting humans consume them, something I shall discuss later.)

Multiply these alterations by the tens of thousands of hybridizations, mutagenesis, and other manipulations to which wheat has been subjected and you have the potential for dramatic shifts in genetically determined traits such as gluten structure. And note that the genetic modifications inflicted on wheat plants are essentially fatal, since the thousands of new wheat breeds were helpless when left to grow in the wild, relying on human assistance for survival.¹⁴

The new agriculture of increased wheat yield was initially met with skepticism in the Third World, with objections based mostly on the perennial “That’s not how we used to do it” variety. Dr. Borlaug, hero of wheat hybridization, answered critics of high-yield wheat by blaming explosive world population growth, making high-tech agriculture a “necessity.” The marvelously increased yields enjoyed in hunger-plagued India, Pakistan, China, Colombia, and other countries quickly quieted naysayers. Yields improved exponentially, turning shortages into surplus and making wheat products cheap and accessible.

Can you blame farmers for preferring high-yield semi-dwarf hybrid strains? After all, many small farmers struggle financially. If they can increase yield-per-acre up to tenfold, with a shorter growing season and easier harvest, why wouldn’t they?

DON’T BE A PEST

If you’re a farmer, encountering a pest feasting on your wheat field is a feared development. And there are many of them, from fungal rusts to wheat curl mites to sawflies. Farmers and agricultural geneticists therefore work to develop wheat strains that have better pest-resistant properties.

Wheat comes with its own built-in pest-resistant protein called wheat germ agglutinin. The greater the wheat germ agglutinin content in a stalk of wheat, the greater its ability to fend off a pest trying to feast on it. After all, the plant cannot run away, or claw or bite the invader. When an insect eats a part of the wheat plant, wheat germ agglutinin attacks its gastrointestinal tract, either killing the creature or impairing its ability to generate offspring.

Modern wheat strains have therefore been chosen for greater wheat germ agglutinin content.¹⁵ This peculiar protein is completely indigestible to humans: What goes in the mouth as a component of pretzels or crackers comes out unchanged in a bowel movement. As we shall discuss in the next chapter, in its course from mouth to toilet, however, wheat germ agglutinin acts as an exceptionally potent bowel toxin, essentially ripping apart the intestinal lining when given to experimental animals in pure form, less dramatically but still quite damagingly so when ingested as crust on pepperoni pizza. The small quantity that enters the bloodstream in humans amplifies inflammation and is hormonally disruptive. More on this to come.

The enrichment of wheat germ agglutinin is yet another illustration that what’s good for the farmer and crop is not necessarily good for the consumer who feasts on onion bagels and penne pasta.

In the future, the science of genetic modification (GM) has the potential to change wheat even further. No longer do scientists need to breed strains or expose seeds or embryos to toxic chemicals or gamma rays, cross their fingers, and hope for just the right mix of chromosomal change. Instead, single genes can be purposefully inserted or removed and strains bred for disease resistance, pesticide resistance, cold or drought tolerance, or any number of other genetically determined characteristics. In particular, new strains can be genetically tailored to be compatible with specific fertilizers or pesticides. This is a financially rewarding process for Big Agribusiness and seed and chemical producers such as Cargill, Monsanto, BASF, and ADM, since specific strains of seeds can be patent protected and thereby command a premium and boost sales of the compatible chemical treatments. While no strain of GM wheat is yet on store shelves, nearly all corn is genetically modified and, to a lesser degree, rice, cousins of our favorite grass-to-bash, wheat.

Genetic modification is built on the premise that a single gene can be inserted in just the right place without disrupting the genetic expression of other characteristics. While the concept seems sound, it doesn’t always work out that cleanly. In the first decade of genetic modification, no animal or safety testing was required for genetically modified plants, since the practice was considered no different from the assumed-to-be-benign practice of hybridizing two strains of grasses. Public pressure has, more recently, caused regulatory agencies, such as the food-regulating branch of the FDA, to require testing prior to a genetically modified product’s release into the market. Critics of genetic modification, however, have cited studies that identify potential problems with genetically modified crops. Test animals fed glyphosate-tolerant soybeans show alterations in liver, pancreatic, intestinal, and testicular tissue compared to animals fed conventional soybeans. The difference is believed to be due to unexpected DNA rearrangement near the gene insertion site, yielding altered proteins in food with potential toxic effects, as well as the inclusion of herbicides tied to the GM crop such as glyphosate or the Bt toxin pesticide coded into the GM crop, now ingested by humans as hamburger buns and gluten-free cookies.¹⁶

It took the introduction of gene modification to finally bring the notion of safety testing for genetically altered plants to light. Public outcry prompted the international agricultural community to develop guidelines, such as the 2003 Codex Alimentarius, a joint effort by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, to decide what new genetically modified crops should be subjected to safety testing, what kinds of tests should be conducted, and what parameters should be measured.

But no such outcry was raised years earlier as farmers and geneticists carried out tens of thousands of hybridization and chemical mutagenesis experiments. There is no question that unexpected genetic rearrangements that might generate some desirable property, such as greater drought resistance or better dough properties, can be accompanied by changes in proteins that are not evident to the eye, nose, or tongue, but little effort has focused on these side phenomena. Hybridization and other efforts continue, breeding new “synthetic” wheat. While they fall short of the precision of gene modification techniques, they still possess the potential to inadvertently “turn on” or “turn off” genes unrelated to the intended effect, generating unique characteristics, not all of which are presently identifiable.¹⁷

Thus, alterations of wheat that could potentially result in undesirable effects on humans are not due to gene insertion or deletion, but are due to manipulations that predate genetic modification. As a result, over the past sixty years, thousands of new wheat strains have made it to the commercial food supply and supermarket shelves without a single effort at safety testing. This is a development with such enormous implications for human health that I will repeat it: Modern wheat, despite all the genetic alterations to modify thousands of its genetically determined characteristics, made its way to the worldwide human food supply with nary a question surrounding its suitability for human consumption.

Because hybridization experiments did not require the documentation of animal or human testing, pinpointing where, when, and how the precise hybrids that might have amplified the ill effects of wheat is an impossible task.

The incremental genetic variations introduced with each effort at “improving” wheat strains can make a world of difference. Take human males and females. While men and women are, at their genetic core, largely the same, the differences clearly make for interesting conversation, not to mention romantic moments in dark corners. The crucial differences between human men and women, a set of differences that originate with just a single chromosome, the diminutive male Y chromosome and its few genes, set the stage for thousands of years of human life and death, Shakespearean drama, and the chasm separating Homer from Marge Simpson.

And so it goes with this human-engineered grass we still call “wheat.” Genetic differences generated via thousands of human-engineered manipulations make for substantial variation in composition, appearance, and qualities important not just to chefs and food processors, but also to human health.

CHAPTER 3

WHEAT DECONSTRUCTED

WHETHER IT’S A loaf of organic high-fiber multi-grain bread or a Twinkie, what exactly are you eating? We all know that the Twinkie is just a processed indulgence, but conventional advice tells us that the former is a better health choice, a source of fiber and B vitamins, rich in “complex” carbohydrates, and your ticket to a life of slenderness and freedom from diabetes, heart disease, and colon cancer.

Ah, but there’s always another layer to the story. Let’s peer inside the contents of this grain and try to understand why—regardless of shape, color, fiber content, organic or not—it potentially does peculiar and harmful things to humans.

WHEAT: SUPERCARBOHYDRATE

The transformation of domesticated wild grass of Neolithic times into modern Cinnabon rolls, French crullers, or Dunkin’ Donuts requires some serious sleight of hand. These modern configurations were not possible with the dough of ancient wheat.

An attempt to make a modern jelly donut with einkorn wheat, for example, would yield a crumbly mess that would not hold its filling, and it would taste, feel, and look like, well, a crumbly mess. In addition to breeding wheat for increased yield, geneticists have also sought to generate strains with properties best suited to become, for instance, a chocolate sour cream cupcake or a seven-tiered wedding cake.

Modern Triticum aestivum wheat flour is, on average, 70 percent carbohydrate by weight, with protein and indigestible fiber each comprising 10 to 15 percent. The small remaining weight of Triticum wheat flour is fat, mostly phospholipids and polyunsaturated fatty acids.¹ (Interestingly, ancient wheat has higher protein content. Emmer wheat, for instance, contains 28 percent or more protein.)²

Wheat starches are the complex carbohydrates that are the darlings of dietitians. “Complex” means that the carbohydrates in wheat are composed of polymers (repeating chains) of the simple sugar, glucose, unlike simple carbohydrates such as sucrose that are one- or two-unit sugar structures. (Sucrose is a two-sugar molecule, glucose + fructose.) Conventional wisdom, such as that from your dietitian or the USDA, says we should all reduce our consumption of simple carbohydrates in the form of candy and soft drinks, and increase consumption of complex carbohydrates.

Of the complex carbohydrate in wheat, 75 percent is the chain of branching glucose units, amylopectin, and 25 percent is the linear chain of glucose units, amylose. In the human gastrointestinal tract, both amylopectin and amylose are digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme amylase. Amylopectin is efficiently digested by amylase to glucose, while amylose is much less efficiently digested, some of it making its way to the colon undigested. Thus, the complex carbohydrate amylopectin is rapidly converted to glucose and absorbed into the bloodstream and, because it is most efficiently digested, is mainly responsible for wheat’s blood-sugar-increasing effect.

Other carbohydrate foods also contain amylopectin, but not the same kind of amylopectin as wheat. The branching structure of amylopectin varies depending on its source.³ Amylopectin from legumes, so-called amylopectin C, is the least digestible. Undigested amylopectin C makes its way to the colon, whereupon the symbiotic bacteria happily dwelling there feast on the undigested starches and generate gases such as nitrogen and hydrogen—hence the schoolkids’ chant, “Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart, the more you eat, the more you …”—making the sugars unavailable for you to digest but forcing you to excuse yourself from a business meeting.

Amylopectin B is the form found in bananas and potatoes and, while more digestible than bean amylopectin C, still resists digestion to some degree. The most digestible form of amylopectin, amylopectin A, is the form found in wheat and its grain brethren. Because it is the most digestible, it is the form that most enthusiastically increases blood sugar. This explains why, gram for gram, wheat increases blood sugar to a greater degree than kidney beans or potato chips. The amylopectin A of wheat products, complex or no, is a supercarbohydrate, a form of highly digestible carbohydrate that is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than nearly all other carbohydrate foods, simple or complex.

This means that not all complex carbohydrates are created equal, with amylopectin A–containing wheat increasing blood sugar more than other complex carbohydrates. The uniquely digestible amylopectin A of wheat also means that the complex carbohydrate of wheat products, on a gram-for-gram basis, are no better, and are often worse, than simple carbohydrates such as sucrose.

People are often shocked when I tell them that whole wheat bread increases blood sugar to a higher level than sucrose.⁴ Aside from some extra fiber, eating two slices of whole wheat bread is really little different, actually worse, than drinking a can of sugar-sweetened soda or eating a sugary candy bar.

This information is not new. A 1981 University of Toronto study launched the concept of glycemic index, i.e., the comparative blood sugar effects of carbohydrates: the higher the blood sugar after consuming a specific food compared to glucose, the higher the glycemic index (GI). The original study showed that the GI of white bread was 69, while the GI of whole grain bread was 72 and Shredded Wheat cereal was 67, while that of sucrose (table sugar) was 59.⁵ Yes, the GI of whole grain bread is higher than that of sucrose. Incidentally, the GI of a Mars bar—nougat, chocolate, sugar, caramel—is 68. That’s better than whole grain bread. The GI of a Snickers bar is 41—far better than whole grain bread.

In fact, the degree of processing, from a blood sugar standpoint, makes little difference: Wheat is wheat, with various forms of processing or lack of processing, simple or complex, high-fiber or low-fiber, organic or non-organic, all generating similarly high blood sugars. Just as “boys will be boys,” amylopectin A will be amylopectin A. In healthy, slender volunteers, two medium slices of whole wheat bread increase blood sugar by 30 mg/dl (from 93 to 123 mg/dl), no different from white bread.⁶ In people with diabetes, both white and whole grain bread increase blood sugar 70 to 120 mg/dl over starting levels.⁷

One consistent observation, also made in the original University of Toronto study as well as in subsequent efforts, is that pasta has a lower two-hour GI, with whole wheat spaghetti showing a GI of 42 compared to white flour spaghetti’s GI of 50. Pasta stands apart from other wheat products, likely due, in part, to the compression of the wheat flour that occurs during the extruding process, slowing digestion by amylase. (Rolled fresh pasta, such as fettuccine, has similar glycemic properties to extruded pastas.) Pastas are also usually made from Triticum durum rather than aestivum, putting them genetically closer to emmer. But even the favorable GI rating of pasta is misleading, since it is only a two-hour observation and pasta has the curious ability to generate high blood sugars for four to six hours after consumption, sending blood sugars up by 100 mg/dl for sustained periods in people with diabetes.8, ⁹

These irksome facts have not been lost on agricultural and food scientists, who have been trying, via genetic manipulation, to increase the content of so-called resistant starch (starch that does not get fully digested) and reduce the amount of amylopectin. Amylose is the most common resistant starch, increased to as much as 40 to 70 percent by weight in some purposefully hybridized varieties of wheat.¹⁰

Wheat products therefore elevate blood sugar levels more than virtually any other carbohydrate, from beans to candy bars. This has important implications for body weight, since glucose is unavoidably accompanied by insulin, the hormone that allows entry of glucose into the cells of the body, converting glucose to fat. The higher the blood glucose after consumption of food, the greater the insulin level, the more fat is deposited. This is why, say, eating a three-egg omelet that triggers no increase in glucose does not add to body fat, while two slices of whole wheat bread increases blood glucose to high levels, triggering insulin and growth of fat, particularly abdominal or deep visceral fat.

There’s even more to wheat’s curious glucose behavior. The amylopectin A–induced surge in glucose and insulin following wheat consumption is a 120-minute-long phenomenon that produces the “high” at the glucose peak, followed by the “low” of the inevitable glucose drop. The surge and drop creates a two-hour roller coaster ride of satiety and hunger that repeats itself throughout the day. The glucose “low” is responsible for stomach growling at 9:00 a.m. that necessitates a snack, just two hours after a bowl of wheat cereal or an English muffin breakfast, followed by 11:00 a.m. prelunch cravings, as well as the mental fog, fatigue, and shakiness of the hypoglycemic glucose nadir.

Trigger high blood sugars repeatedly and/or over sustained periods, and more fat accumulation results. The consequences of glucose-insulin-fat deposition are especially visible in the abdomen—resulting in, yes, wheat belly. The bigger your wheat belly, the poorer your response to insulin, since the deep visceral fat of the wheat belly is associated with poor responsiveness, or “resistance,” to insulin, demanding higher and higher insulin levels, a situation that cultivates diabetes. Moreover, the bigger the wheat belly in males, the more testosterone is converted to estrogen by fat tissue, and the larger the breasts. In susceptible females, testosterone is increased, accompanied by facial hair and infertility. The bigger your wheat belly, the more inflammatory responses that are triggered: heart disease, cancer, and dementia.

Because of wheat’s morphine-like effect (discussed in the next chapter) and the glucose-insulin cycle that wheat amylopectin A generates, wheat is, in effect, an appetite stimulant. Accordingly, people who eliminate wheat from their diet consume far fewer calories, something I will discuss later in the book.

If glucose-insulin-fat provocation from wheat consumption is a major phenomenon underlying weight gain, then elimination of wheat from the diet should reverse the phenomenon. And that is exactly what happens.

For years, wheat-related weight loss has been observed in patients with celiac disease, who must eliminate all foods containing gluten from their diets to halt an immune response gone awry, which in celiac patients essentially destroys the small intestine. As it happens, wheat-free, gluten-free diets are also amylopectin A–free, especially if other grains are eliminated.

However, the weight loss effects of wheat elimination are not immediately clear from clinical studies. Many celiac sufferers are diagnosed after years of suffering and begin the diet change in a severely malnourished state due to prolonged diarrhea and impaired nutrient absorption. Underweight, malnourished celiac sufferers may actually gain weight with wheat removal thanks to improved digestive function.

Wheat Belly Success Story: Kathleen

“Just came back from my annual physical, where I managed to shock the bejeezus out of my doctor, which is not an easy thing to do.

“She looked at my vitals and last year’s report, looked at me, and said in complete surprise, ‘What have you been doing?! What happened to last year’s issues?’ Meaning dangerously low blood pressure, heart palpitations, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), Barrett’s esophagitis (a nasty little swallowing disorder), leg edema, unstoppable weight gain/BMI in the obese range, chronic fatigue and brain fog, and zero libido to be the frosting on that little cake of unpleasantness.

“All of those issues have completely resolved, BMI normal and healthy, and my blood pressure has actually increased to normal. I’ve always had very low blood pressure, which caused fainting spells, edema, and heart palpitations. I’ve actually passed out right in front of her during exams in the past. Haven’t had any of those issues since starting this way of eating eleven months ago.

“The ‘before’ was taken during a time when I was doing CrossFit three times a week, spin classes three times a week, and riding my bicycle hundreds of miles a week (yes, every week) to train for hundred-mile charity bike rides. All the while eating low-fat and ‘healthy’ whole grains and barely losing any weight. Would you just look at that butt! My doctor told a frustrated me that I just needed to exercise more and it would come off. I asked her what more could I do, wrestle a bear?!

“The ‘after’ is me eighty pounds lighter after eighteen months grain-free. The cardiac issues are gone. And recovering from a broken ankle and being confined to a walking boot for almost two months. The muscles that I’ve worked so hard to build for years are finally showing. I’m fifty-three-and-a-half and am here to show that it’s never too late to get your health back and you’re never too old to start living! Soldier on, Wheat Belliers, and let your inner jock come out to play!”

But if we look only at overweight people who are not severely malnourished at the time of diagnosis who remove wheat from their diet, it becomes clear that this enables them to lose a substantial amount of weight. A Mayo Clinic/University of Iowa study of 215 obese celiac patients showed 27.5 pounds of weight loss in the first six months of a wheat-free diet.¹¹ In another study, wheat elimination slashed the number of people classified as obese (body mass index, or BMI, 30 or greater) in half within a year.¹² Oddly, investigators performing these studies usually attribute the weight loss of wheat- and gluten-free diets to lack of food variety. (Food variety, incidentally, can still be quite wide and wonderful after wheat is eliminated, as I will discuss.)

Advice to consume more healthy whole grains therefore causes increased consumption of the amylopectin A form of wheat carbohydrate, a form of carbohydrate that, for all practical purposes, is little different, and in some ways worse, than dipping your spoon into the sugar bowl.

GLUTEN: WE HARDLY KNOW YA!

If you were to add water to wheat flour, knead the mixture into dough, then rinse the glob under running water to wash away starches and fiber, you’d be left with a protein mixture called gluten.

Wheat is the principal source of gluten in the diet, both because wheat products have come to dominate and because most Americans do not make a habit of consuming plentiful quantities of barley, rye, bulgur, kamut, spelt, einkorn, emmer, or triticale, the other sources of gluten. For all practical purposes, therefore, when I discuss gluten, I am primarily referring to wheat.

While wheat is, by weight, mostly amylopectin A carbohydrate, gluten protein is what makes wheat “wheat.” Gluten is the unique component of wheat that makes dough “doughy”: stretchable, rollable, spreadable, twistable, baking gymnastics that cannot be achieved with rice flour, corn flour, or any other grain. Gluten allows the pizza maker to roll and toss dough and mold it into the characteristic flattened shape; it allows the dough to stretch and rise when yeast fermentation causes it to fill with air pockets. The distinctive doughy quality of the simple mix of wheat flour and water, properties food scientists call viscoelasticity and cohesiveness, are due to gluten. While wheat is mostly carbohydrate and only 10 to 15 percent protein, 80 percent of that protein is gluten. Wheat without gluten would lose all its unique qualities that transform dough into bagels, pizza, or focaccia.

Glutens are the storage proteins of the wheat plant, a means of storing carbon and nitrogen for germination of the seed to create new wheat plants. Leavening, the “rise” process created by the marriage of wheat with yeast, does not occur without gluten, and is therefore unique to wheat flour.

The term “gluten” encompasses two primary families of proteins, the gliadins and the glutenins. Gliadins, the protein group that most vigorously triggers the immune response in celiac and other diseases, has three subtypes: α/β-gliadins, γ-gliadins, and ω-gliadins. Importantly, gliadin proteins are responsible for effects beyond celiac disease, such as initiating autoimmune diseases, direct intestinal injury, and opiate effects on the brain, effects we shall discuss later. Glutenin proteins are long repeating structures, or polymers, of more basic units. The strength of dough is due to the large polymeric glutenins, a genetically programmed characteristic purposefully selected by plant breeders.¹³ Glutenins are likewise a source of health problems for unwitting humans consuming them.

Gluten from one wheat strain can be quite different in structure from that of another strain. Gluten proteins produced by einkorn wheat, for example, are distinct from the gluten proteins of emmer, which are, in turn, different from the gluten proteins of the thousands of strains of Triticum aestivum.14, ¹⁵ Because fourteen-chromosome einkorn has the smallest chromosomal set, it codes for the fewest number and variety of glutens. Twenty-eight-chromosome emmer codes for a larger variety of gluten. Forty-two-chromosome Triticum aestivum has the greatest gluten variety, even before any human manipulation. Breeding efforts of the past sixty years have generated numerous additional changes in gluten-coding genes in Triticum aestivum.¹⁶ Because breeding efforts focus only on agricultural and baking interests and not on human health, genes contained in modern wheat are most frequently pinpointed as the source of glutens that trigger celiac disease, effects amplified compared to traditional strains.¹⁷

It is therefore modern Triticum aestivum that, having been the focus of all manner of genetic shenanigans by geneticists, has accumulated substantial changes in genetically determined characteristics of gliadin and glutenin proteins within gluten. It is also the source for many of the other odd health phenomena experienced by consuming humans.

In celiac disease, the one conventionally accepted (though miserably underdiagnosed) example of wheat-related intestinal illness, gliadin proteins, specifically α-gliadin, provoke an immune response that inflames the small intestine, causing abdominal cramps and diarrhea. Treatment is simple: complete avoidance of anything containing gluten. Unfortunately, this association has caused most people, including doctors, to believe that the only problem with wheat and grains is gluten when there are actually dozens of toxic compounds in the seeds of grasses.

The “wheat is only a gluten problem” has blinded many people into thinking that, if you don’t have celiac disease, then eating all the ciabattas, donut holes, and tortellini you want is actually healthy. It has led to silly research efforts such as those conducted at Monash University in Australia in which purified gluten was administered to people with presumed non-celiac gluten intolerance and the majority (92 percent) tolerated it without gastrointestinal consequences, causing the authors to declare that gluten is not a problem for most people.¹⁸ Removing nicotine from cigarettes does not make smoking healthy. Tolerating purified gluten over a brief period of observation does not negate the potential for long-term harm, such as autoimmune diseases or brain effects, not to mention the harmful consequences of the dozens of other components besides gluten.

Did you want a low-tar cigarette with that salami sandwich?

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT GLUTEN

You now know that gluten isn’t the only potential villain lurking in wheat flour.

Beyond gluten, the other 20 percent or so of non-gluten proteins in wheat include albumins, prolamins, and globulins, each of which can also vary from strain to strain. In total, there are more than a thousand other proteins that are meant to serve such functions as protecting the grain from pests, providing water resistance, and supplying reproductive functions. There are agglutinins, peroxidases, α-amylases, serpins, and acyl CoA oxidases, not to mention five forms of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenases. I shouldn’t neglect to mention β-purothionin, puroindolines a and b, and starch synthases. Wheat ain’t just gluten, any more than southern cooking is just grits.

Let’s take just one of these non-gluten proteins, wheat germ agglutinin, which has been enriched in modern strains of wheat through breeding to take advantage of its pest-resistant effects, making a stalk of wheat more resistant to fungi and molds. Wheat germ agglutinin is completely indigestible to humans, passing through the entire gastrointestinal tract unfazed by stomach acid, thumbing its nose at digestive enzymes and bile, eventually exiting into the toilet. But, in its travels from swallow to flush, it wreaks gastrointestinal havoc. One milligram (just a speck—there are 4,000 milligrams in just one packet of sugar) of purified wheat germ agglutinin fed to a laboratory animal results in extensive damage to the intestinal lining.¹⁹ While grains such as ancient wheat, rye, barley, and rice contain a single form of wheat germ agglutinin, modern wheat contains three different varieties, given its heightened genetic pliability. And this is just one protein among many beyond gluten in wheat and related grains.

There are also allergic or anaphylactic (a severe allergic reaction resulting in shock) reactions to non-gluten proteins, including α-amylases, thioredoxin, and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, along with about a dozen others.²⁰ Exposure in susceptible individuals triggers asthma, rashes (eczema and hives), and a curious and dangerous condition called wheat-dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis (WDEIA) in which rash, asthma, or anaphylaxis are provoked during exercise. WDEIA has been attributed to ω-gliadins and glutenins.

Wheat and grains are rich in phytates, compounds that, like wheat germ agglutinin, provide pest-resistance to the plant. Once again, plant geneticists select strains richer in phytates and thereby are more pest-resistant. Phytate content parallels fiber content. This means that conventional advice to consume plentiful fiber from grains, such as whole grain breads and bran cereals hawked for promoting bowel regularity, thereby increases exposure to phytates. Problem: Phytates are effective binders of any mineral that has a positive charge. This includes iron, zinc, magnesium, and calcium. Phytates from grains are therefore a common cause of iron deficiency anemia, unresponsive to iron supplementation (since the iron never makes it to the bloodstream).21, ²² Zinc deficiency from phytates results in slowed wound healing, increased susceptibility to infections, skin rashes, impaired taste and smell, and slowed growth in children.²³ Wheat consumption is one of several causes of magnesium deficiency that is ubiquitous and results in bone thinning, higher blood pressure and blood sugar, muscle cramps, and heart rhythm disorders.²⁴ You may begin to appreciate just how many ironies there are in conventional diet advice: Eating more “healthy whole grains” to ensure adequate nutrition actually achieves the opposite.

As if this protein/enzyme smorgasbord weren’t enough, food manufacturers have also turned to fungal enzymes, such as cellulases, glucoamylases, xylanases, and β-xylosidases, to enhance leavening and texture in wheat products. Many bakers also add soy flour to their dough to enhance mixing and whiteness, introducing yet another collection of proteins and enzymes. And farmers add their own unique collection of herbicides and pesticides such as glyphosate, imazamox, malathion, and chlorpyrifos. Choosing organic sources may reduce or eliminate exposure to such chemicals, but you’ve still got to contend with all the components intrinsic to the wheat plant.

In short, wheat is not just a complex carbohydrate with gluten and bran. Wheat is a smorgasbord of compounds that vary widely according to genetic code. Just by looking at a poppy seed muffin, for instance, you would be unable to discern the variety of gliadins, wheat germ agglutinins, and other non-gluten proteins, phytates, and amylopectins contained within, much of it unique to modern semi-dwarf wheat. On taking your first bite, you might enjoy the immediate sweetness of the muffin’s amylopectin A, as it sends your blood sugar skyward, but you may be largely unaware of the toxic effects of its many other components until disaster strikes—in the form of pain and swelling caused by rheumatoid arthritis or stumbling and warm incontinence caused by cerebellar ataxia.

Let’s next explore the incredible wide-ranging health effects of your muffin and other wheat-containing foods.

PART TWO

WHEAT AND ITS HEAD-TO-TOE DESTRUCTION OF HEALTH

CHAPTER 4

HEY, MAN, WANNA BUY SOME EXORPHINS? THE ADDICTIVE PROPERTIES OF WHEAT

ADDICTION. WITHDRAWAL. DELUSIONS. Hallucinations. Wild, unrestrained outbursts. I’m not describing mental illness or a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’m talking about this food you invite into your kitchen, share with friends, and dunk in your coffee.

I will discuss why wheat is unique among foods for its curious effects on the brain, effects shared with opiate drugs. It explains why some people experience incredible difficulty removing wheat from their diet. It’s not just a matter of inadequate resolve, inconvenience, or breaking well-worn habits; it’s about severing a relationship with something that gains hold of your psyche and emotions, not unlike the hold heroin has over the desperate addict.

While you knowingly consume coffee and alcohol to obtain specific mind effects, wheat is something you consume for “nutrition,” not for a “fix.” Like drinking the Kool-Aid at the Jim Jones revival meeting, you may not even be aware that this thing, endorsed by all “official” agencies, is fiddling with your mind.

People who eliminate wheat from their diet typically report improved mood, fewer mood swings, improved ability to concentrate, and deeper sleep within just days to weeks of their last bite of bagel or baked lasagna. I have been impressed with how consistent these observations are, experienced by the majority of people once the initial withdrawal effects of mental fog and fatigue subside. I’ve personally experienced these effects and also witnessed them in thousands of people.

It is easy to underestimate the psychological pull of wheat. Just how dangerous can an innocent bran muffin be, after all?

“BREAD IS MY CRACK!”

Wheat is the Haight-Ashbury of foods, unparalleled for its potential to generate entirely unique effects on the brain and nervous system. There is no doubt: For some people, wheat is addictive. And, in some people, it is addictive to the point of obsession.

Some people with wheat addiction just know they have a wheat addiction. Or they identify it as an addiction to some wheat-containing food, such as pasta or pizza. They already understand, even before I tell them, that their wheat-food-addiction-of-choice provides a little “high.” I still get shivers when a well-dressed, suburban soccer mom desperately confesses to me, “Bread is my crack. I just can’t give it up!”

Wheat can dictate food choice, caloric consumption, timing of meals and snacks. It can influence behavior and mood. It can even dominate thoughts. A number of my patients, when presented with the suggestion of removing it from their diets, report obsessing over wheat products to the point of thinking about them, talking about them, salivating over them constantly for weeks. “I can’t stop thinking about bread. I dream about bread!” they tell me, leading some to succumb to a wheat-consuming frenzy and give up within days after trying to banish it from their lives.

There is, of course, a flip side to addiction. When people divorce themselves from wheat-containing products, 40 percent experience something that can only be called withdrawal.

I’ve personally witnessed thousands of people report extreme fatigue, mental fog, irritability, inability to function at work or school, even depression in the first several days to weeks after eliminating wheat. Complete relief is obtained by consuming a bagel or cupcake (or, sadly, more like four bagels, two cupcakes, a bag of pretzels, two muffins, and a handful of brownies, followed the next morning by a nasty case of wheat remorse). It’s a vicious circle: Abstain from a substance and a distinctly unpleasant experience ensues; resume it, the unpleasant experience ceases—that sounds a lot like addiction and withdrawal to me.

People who haven’t experienced these effects pooh-pooh it all, thinking it strains credibility to believe that something as pedestrian as wheat can affect the central nervous system as much as nicotine or crack cocaine do.

There is a scientifically plausible reason for both the addiction and withdrawal effects. Not only does wheat exert effects on the normal brain but also on the vulnerable abnormal brain, with results beyond simple addiction and withdrawal. Studying the effects of wheat on the abnormal brain can teach us some lessons on why and how wheat can be associated with such phenomena.

“GOD, IS THAT YOU?” WHEAT AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIC MIND

The first important lessons on the effects wheat has on the brain came through studying its effects on people with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenics lead a difficult life. They struggle to differentiate reality from internal fantasy, often entertaining delusions of persecution, even believing their minds and actions are controlled by external forces. (Remember “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer who stalked his victims on instructions received from his dog? Thankfully, violent behavior is uncommon in schizophrenics, but it illustrates the depth of pathology possible.) Once schizophrenia is diagnosed, there is little hope of leading a normal life of work, family, and children. A life of institutionalization, medications with awful side effects, and a constant struggle with dark internal demons lies ahead.

So what are the effects of wheat on the vulnerable schizophrenic mind?

The earliest formal connection of the effects of wheat on the schizophrenic brain began with the work of physician F. Curtis Dohan, whose observations ranged as far as Europe and New Guinea. Dr. Dohan journeyed down this line of investigation because he observed that, during World War II, the men and women of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada, and the United States required fewer hospitalizations for schizophrenia when food shortages made bread unavailable, only to require an increased number of hospitalizations when wheat consumption resumed after the war was over.¹

Dr. Dohan observed a similar pattern in the hunter-gatherer Stone Age culture of New Guinea, Micronesia, and the Solomon Islands, where he was a member of a team of field researchers. Prior to Western influence, schizophrenia was virtually unknown, diagnosed in only 2 of 65,000 inhabitants in one New Guinea population previously unacquainted with Western ways. As Western eating habits infiltrated these populations and wheat products were cultivated, beer was made from barley, and corn was introduced, Dr. Dohan watched the incidence of schizophrenia skyrocket sixty-five-fold.² On this background, he set out to develop the observations that established whether or not there was a cause-and-effect relationship between wheat consumption and schizophrenia.

In the mid-sixties, while working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Dohan and his colleagues decided to remove all wheat products from meals provided to schizophrenic patients without their knowledge or permission. (This was the era before informed consent of participants was required, before the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment became publicized that triggered public outrage and led to legislation requiring fully informed participant consent.) Lo and behold, four weeks sans wheat and there were distinct and measurable improvements in the hallmarks of the disease: a reduced number of auditory hallucinations, fewer delusions, less detachment from reality—they weren’t cured, but just showed less severe signs of schizophrenia. Psychiatrists then added the wheat products back into their patients’ diets and the hallucinations, delusions, and social detachment rushed right back. Remove wheat again, patients and symptoms got better; add it back, they got worse.³

The Philadelphia observations in schizophrenics were corroborated by psychiatrists at the University of Sheffield in England, with similar conclusions.⁴ There have since even been reports of complete remission of the disease, such as the seventy-year-old schizophrenic woman described by Duke University doctors, suffering with delusions, hallucinations, and suicide attempts with sharp objects and cleaning solutions over a period of fifty-three years, who experienced complete relief from psychosis and suicidal desires within eight days of stopping wheat.⁵

While it seems unlikely that wheat exposure caused schizophrenia in the first place, the observations of Dr. Dohan and others suggest that wheat is associated with measurable worsening of symptoms. In the years since Dr. Dohan’s early observations, the explosion of more recent investigations suggests that consumption of gluten-containing foods is associated with increased intestinal permeability, or “leakiness,” along with alterations in the bowel microbiome that underlie the troublesome mind pathology of schizophrenia.⁶ Modern observations also corroborate Dohan’s observations with dramatic reversal of schizophrenic phenomena within days to weeks of gluten removal, even after years of unremitting symptoms.⁷ It has also become clear that celiac disease and schizophrenia are two different varieties of grain-induced disease and the psychotic behavior of schizophrenia can occur independently of celiac disease.⁸

Another condition in which wheat may exert effects on a vulnerable mind is autism. Autistic children suffer from impaired ability to interact socially and communicate. The condition has increased in frequency over the past forty years, from rare in the mid-twentieth century to 1 in 150 children in the twenty-first.⁹ Initial small samples have demonstrated improvement in autistic behaviors with gluten removal.10, ¹¹ The most comprehensive clinical trials to date with formal measures of autistic behavior have demonstrated improvement with gluten elimination (sometimes combined with elimination of casein from dairy and a variety of different nutritional supplements).12, 13, ¹⁴

While it remains a topic of debate, a substantial proportion of children and adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may also respond to elimination of wheat. However, responses are often muddied due to sensitivities to other components of diet, such as sugars, artificial sweeteners, additives, and dairy.¹⁵

It is unlikely that wheat exposure was the initial cause of autism or ADHD but, as with schizophrenia, wheat appears to be associated with worsening of the symptoms characteristic of these conditions.

Though the laboratory rat treatment of the unsuspecting schizophrenic patients in the Philadelphia VA Hospital may send chills down our spines from the comfort of our fully informed and consenting twenty-first century, it is nevertheless a graphic illustration of wheat’s effect on mental function. But why in the world are schizophrenia, autism, and ADHD exacerbated by wheat? What is in this grain that worsens psychosis, prompts hearing voices and other abnormal behaviors?

Investigators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to find some answers.

EXORPHINS: THE WHEAT-MIND CONNECTION

Dr. Christine Zioudrou and her colleagues at the NIH subjected gluten, the main protein of wheat, to a simulated digestive process to mimic what happens after we eat bread or other wheat-containing products.¹⁶ Exposed to pepsin (a stomach enzyme) and hydrochloric acid (stomach acid), gluten is degraded to a mix of polypeptides. (Unlike the proteins in, say, eggs or pork chops that are broken down into single amino acids, the proteins of wheat are either indigestible or only digestible to polypeptides, small chains of amino acids, because humans lack the digestive enzymes to break down the components of seeds of grasses.) The dominant polypeptides were then isolated and administered to laboratory rats. These polypeptides were discovered to have the peculiar ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain. This barrier is there for a reason: The brain is highly sensitive to the wide variety of substances that gain entry to the blood, some of which can provoke undesirable effects should they cross into your amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex, or other brain structure. Once having gained entry into the brain, wheat polypeptides bind to the brain’s morphine receptors, the very same receptors to which opiate drugs like fentanyl and oxycodone bind.

Zioudrou and her colleagues dubbed these polypeptides “exorphins,” short for exogenous morphine-like compounds, distinguishing them from endorphins, the endogenous (internally sourced) morphine-like compounds that occur, for instance, during a “runner’s high.” They named the dominant polypeptide that crossed the blood-brain barrier “gluteomorphin,” or morphine-like compound from gluten. The investigators speculated that exorphins might be the active factors derived from wheat that account for the deterioration of schizophrenic symptoms seen in the Philadelphia VA Hospital and elsewhere.

Even more telling, the NIH group found that the brain effects of gluten-derived polypeptides are blocked by administration of the opiate-blocking drug naloxone.

Let’s pretend you’re an inner-city heroin addict. You get knifed during a drug deal gone sour and get carted to the nearest trauma emergency room. Because you’re high on heroin, you kick and scream at the ER staff trying to help you. So these nice people strap you down and inject you with a drug called naloxone, and you are instantly not high. Through the magic of chemistry, naloxone immediately reverses the action of heroin or any other opiate drug such as morphine or oxycodone.

In lab animals, administration of naloxone blocks the binding of wheat exorphins to the morphine receptors of brain cells. Yes, opiate-blocking naloxone prevents the binding of wheat-derived exorphins to the brain. The very same drug that turns off the heroin in a drug-abusing addict to reverse life-threatening overdose also blocks the effects of wheat exorphins.

In a World Health Organization study of thirty-two schizophrenic people with active auditory hallucinations, naloxone was shown to reduce hallucinations.¹⁷ Unfortunately, the next logical step—administering naloxone to schizophrenics eating a “normal” wheat-containing diet compared to schizophrenics administered naloxone on a wheat-free diet—has not been studied. (Clinical studies that might lead to conclusions that don’t support drug use are often not performed. In this case, had naloxone shown benefit in wheat-consuming schizophrenics, the unavoidable conclusion would have been to eliminate wheat, not prescribe the drug.)

The schizophrenia experience shows us that wheat exorphins have the potential to exert distinct and peculiar effects on the brain. Those of us without schizophrenia don’t experience auditory hallucinations from exorphins resulting from a cinnamon raisin bagel, but these compounds are still there in the brain, no different from in a schizophrenic. It also highlights how wheat is truly unique among grains, since other grains such as millet and oats do not generate exorphins (because they lack the gliadin protein from gluten), nor do they cultivate obsessive behavior or opiate withdrawal in people with normal brains or people with abnormal brains.

So this is your brain on wheat: Digestion yields morphine-like compounds that bind to the brain’s opiate receptors. It induces a form of reward, a mild euphoria. When the effect is blocked or no exorphin-yielding foods are consumed, many people experience a distinctly unpleasant withdrawal.

What happens if normal (i.e., non-schizophrenic) humans are given opiate-blocking drugs? In a study conducted at the Psychiatric Institute of the University of South Carolina, wheat-consuming participants given naloxone consumed 33 percent fewer calories at lunch and 23 percent fewer calories at dinner (a total of approximately 400 calories less over the two meals) than participants given a placebo.¹⁸ At the University of Michigan, binge eaters were confined to a room filled with food for one hour. (There’s an idea for a new TV show: The Biggest Gainer.) Participants consumed 28 percent fewer wheat crackers, breadsticks, and pretzels with the administration of naloxone.¹⁹

In other words, block the euphoric reward of wheat and calorie intake goes down, since wheat no longer generates the favorable feelings and addictive behavior that encourage repetitive consumption. (Predictably, this strategy has been pursued by the pharmaceutical industry to commercialize a weight loss drug that contains naltrexone, an oral equivalent to naloxone. The drug is purported to block the mesolimbic reward system buried deep within the human brain responsible for generating pleasurable feelings from heroin, morphine, and other substances. Because naltrexone administration alone can replace pleasurable feelings with feelings of dysphoria, or unhappiness, naltrexone has been combined with the antidepressant and smoking-cessation drug bupropion in the recently FDA-approved drug Contrave.)

From withdrawal effects to psychotic hallucinations, wheat is party to some peculiar neurological phenomena. To recap:

 Common wheat, upon digestion, yields polypeptides that possess the ability to cross into the brain and bind to opiate receptors.

 The action of wheat-derived polypeptides, the so-called exorphins such as gluteomorphin, can be short-circuited with the opiate-blocking drugs naloxone and naltrexone.

 When administered to normal people or people with uncontrollable appetite, opiate-blocking drugs yield reductions in appetite, cravings, and caloric intake, as well as dampen mood, and the effect seems particularly specific to wheat-containing products.

Wheat, in fact, nearly stands alone as a food with potent central nervous system effects. Outside of intoxicants such as ethanol (like that in your favorite merlot or chardonnay), wheat is one of the few foods that can alter behavior, induce pleasurable effects, and generate a withdrawal syndrome upon its removal. And it required observations in schizophrenic patients to teach us about these effects.

NIGHT CRAVING CONQUERED

For as long as he could remember, Larry struggled with weight.

It never made sense to him: He exercised, often to extremes. A fifty-mile bike ride was not unusual, nor was a fifteen-mile walk in the woods or desert. As part of his work, Larry enjoyed the terrain of many different areas of the United States. His travel often took him to the southwest, where he hiked for up to six hours. He also prided himself on following a healthy diet: limiting his red meat and oils and eating plenty of vegetables, fruit, and, yes, an abundance of “healthy whole grains.”

I met Larry because of a heart rhythm problem, an issue we dealt with easily. But his blood work was another concern. In short, it was a disaster: blood glucose in the low diabetic range, triglycerides too high at 210 mg/dl, HDL too low at 37 mg/dl, and 70 percent of his LDL particles were the small heart disease–causing type. Blood pressure was an important issue with systolic (“top”) values ranging up to 170 mmHg and diastolic (“bottom”) values of 90 mmHg, even while sitting quietly. Larry was also, at 5 feet 8 inches and 243 pounds, about 80 pounds overweight.

“I don’t get it. I exercise like nobody you know. I really like exercise. But I just cannot—cannot—lose the weight, no matter what I do.” Larry recounted his diet escapades that included an all-rice diet, protein drink programs, “detox” regimens, even hypnosis. They all resulted in a few pounds lost, only to be promptly regained. He did admit to one peculiar excess: “I really struggle with my appetite at night. After dinner, I can’t resist the urge to graze. I try to graze on the good stuff, like whole wheat pretzels and these multi-grain crackers I have with a yogurt dip. But I’ll sometimes eat all night from dinner until I go to bed. I don’t know why, but something happens at night and I just can’t stop.”

I counseled Larry on the need to remove the number one most powerful appetite stimulant in his diet: wheat. Larry gave me that “not another kooky idea!” look. After a big sigh, he agreed to give it a go. With four teenagers in the house, clearing the shelves of all things wheat was quite a task, but he and his wife did it.

Larry returned to my office six weeks later. He reported that, within three days, his nighttime cravings had disappeared entirely. He now ate dinner and was satisfied with no need to graze. He also noticed that his appetite was much smaller during the day and his desire for snacks virtually disappeared. He also admitted that, now that his craving for food was much less, his caloric intake and portion size was a fraction of its former level. With no change in his exercise habits, he’d lost “only” 11 pounds. But, more than that, he also felt that he’d regained control over appetite and impulse, a feeling he thought he’d lost years earlier.

WHEAT: APPETITE STIMULANT

Crackheads and heroin addicts shooting up in the dark corners of an inner-city drug house have no qualms about ingesting substances that mess with their minds. But how about law-abiding citizens like you and your family? I’ll bet your idea of mind bending is going for the strong brew rather than the mild stuff at Starbucks, or hoisting one too many Heinekens on the weekend. But ingesting wheat means you have been unwittingly ingesting the most common dietary mind-active food known.

In effect, wheat is an appetite stimulant: It makes you want more—more cookies, cupcakes, pretzels, candy, soft drinks. More bagels, muffins, tacos, submarine sandwiches, pizza. It makes you want both wheat-containing and non-wheat-containing foods. And, on top of that, for some people wheat is a drug, or at least yields peculiar drug-like neurological effects that can be reversed with medications used to counter the effects of narcotics.

If you balk at the notion of being dosed with a drug such as naloxone, you might ask, “What happens if, rather than blocking the brain effect of wheat chemically, you simply remove wheat altogether?” Well, that’s the very same question I have been asking. Provided you can tolerate the withdrawal (while unpleasant, the withdrawal syndrome is generally harmless aside from the rancor you incur from your irritated spouse, friends, and co-workers), hunger and cravings diminish, caloric intake decreases, mood and well-being increase, weight goes down, wheat belly shrinks.

Understanding that wheat, specifically exorphins from gluten, have the potential to generate euphoria, addictive behavior, and appetite stimulation means that we have a potential means of taking back control over eating habits and weight: Lose the wheat and lose the weight, as well as the myriad effects this never-should-have-been-food-in-the-first-place thing has over us.

CHAPTER 5

YOUR WHEAT BELLY IS SHOWING: THE WHEAT/OBESITY CONNECTION

PERHAPS YOU’VE EXPERIENCED this scenario:

You encounter a friend you haven’t seen in some time and exclaim with delight: “Elizabeth! When are you due?”

Elizabeth: [Pause.] “Due? I’m not sure what you mean.”

You: Gulp …

Yes, indeed. Wheat belly’s abdominal fat can do a darn good imitation of a baby bump.

Why does wheat cause fat accumulation specifically in the abdomen and not, say, on the scalp, left ear, or backside? And, beyond the occasional “I’m not pregnant” mishap, why does it matter?

And why would elimination of wheat lead to loss of abdominal fat?

Let’s explore the unique features of the wheat belly–body configuration.

WHEAT BELLY, LOVE HANDLES, MAN BOOBS, AND “FOOD BABIES”

These are the curious manifestations of consuming the modern grain we call wheat. Dimpled or smooth, hairy or hairless, tense or flaccid, wheat bellies come in as many shapes, colors, and sizes as there are humans. But all share the same underlying metabolic cause.

I’d like to make the case that foods produced with or containing wheat make you fat. I’d go as far as saying that overly enthusiastic wheat consumption is the main cause of the obesity and diabetes crisis in the United States. It’s a big part of the reason why Jillian Michaels needed to badger The Biggest Loser contestants. It explains why modern athletes, such as baseball players and triathletes, are fatter than ever, and why the most popular dress sizes are now 16 to 18. Blame wheat when you are being crushed in your airline seat by the 280-pound man next to you.

Sure, sugary soft drinks and sedentary lifestyles add to the problem. But for the great majority of health-conscious people who don’t indulge in these obvious weight-gaining behaviors, the principal trigger for increasing weight is wheat.

In fact, the incredible financial bonanza that the proliferation of wheat in the American diet has created for the food and drug industries can make you wonder if this “perfect storm” was somehow man-made. Did a group of powerful men convene a secret Howard Hughesian meeting in 1955, map out an evil plan to mass-produce high-yield, low-cost semi-dwarf wheat, engineer the release of government-sanctioned advice to eat plenty of “healthy whole grains,” lead the charge of corporate Big Food to sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of processed wheat food products—all leading to obesity and the “need” for billions of dollars of drug treatments for diabetes, heart disease, and all the other health consequences? It may sound ridiculous, but in a sense that’s exactly what happened. Here’s how.

WHEAT BELLY DIVA

Celeste no longer felt “cool.”

At age sixty-one, Celeste reported that she’d gradually gained weight from her normal range of 120 to 135 pounds in her twenties and thirties. Something happened starting in her mid-forties, and even without substantial changes in habits, she gradually ballooned up to 182 pounds. “This is the heaviest I have ever been,” she groaned.

As a professor of modern art, Celeste hung around with a fairly urbane crowd. Her weight made her feel self-conscious and out of place. So I got an attentive ear when I explained my diet approach that involved elimination of all wheat products.

Over the first three months she lost 21 pounds, more than enough to convince her that the program worked. She was already having to reach into the back of her closet to find clothes she hadn’t been able to wear for the past five years.

Celeste stuck to the lifestyle, admitting to me that it had quickly become second nature, with no cravings, a rare need to snack, just a comfortable cruise through meals that kept her satisfied. She noted that, from time to time, work pressures kept her from being able to have lunch or dinner, but the prolonged periods without something to eat proved effortless. I reminded her that healthy snacks such as raw nuts, flaxseed crackers, and cheese readily fit into her program. But she simply found that snacks weren’t necessary most of the time.

Fourteen months after adopting the Wheat Belly lifestyle, Celeste couldn’t stop smiling when she returned to my office at 127 pounds—a weight she’d last seen in her thirties. She’d lost 55 pounds from her high, including 12 inches off her waist, which shrank from 39 inches to 27. Not only could she fit into size 6 dresses again, she no longer felt uncomfortable mingling with the artsy set. No more need to conceal her sagging wheat belly under loose-fitting tops or layers. She could wear her tightest Oscar de la Renta cocktail dress proudly, no wheat belly bulge in sight.

WHOLE GRAINS, HALF-TRUTHS

In nutrition circles, whole grains are the dietary darling du jour. In fact, this USDA-endorsed, “heart healthy” ingredient, the stuff that purveyors of dietary advice agree you should eat more of, even dominate diet, makes us hungry and fat, hungrier and fatter than any other time in human history.

Hold up a current picture of ten random Americans against a picture of ten Americans from the early twentieth or preceding century, and you’ll see the stark contrast: Americans are now fat. According to the CDC, 39.6 percent of adults are obese (BMI 30 or greater), another 36 percent are overweight (BMI of 25 to 29.9), leaving only one in four at normal weight. Since 1960, the ranks of the obese have grown the most rapidly, nearly tripling over those sixty years.¹

Few Americans were overweight or obese during the first two centuries of the nation’s history. (Most actual data collected on BMI that we have for comparison prior to the twentieth century come from body weight and height tabulated by the U.S. military. The average male in the military in the late nineteenth century had a BMI of <23.2, regardless of age; by the 1990s, the average military BMI was well into the overweight range.² We can easily presume that, if it applies to military recruits, it’s worse in the civilian population.) Weight grew at the fastest pace once the USDA and others got into the business of telling Americans what to eat. Accordingly, while obesity grew gradually from 1960, the real upward acceleration of obesity started in the mid-eighties.

Studies conducted during the eighties and since have shown that, when processed white flour products are replaced with whole grain flour products, there is a reduction in colon cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and less weight is gained. All that is indeed true, an indisputable half-truth.

According to accepted dietary wisdom, if something that is bad for you (white flour) is replaced by something less bad (whole wheat), then lots of that less-bad thing must be great for you. By that logic, if high-tar cigarettes are bad for you and low-tar cigarettes are less bad, then lots of low-tar cigarettes should be good for you. This is the flawed rationale used to justify the proliferation of grains in our diet. Throw into the mix the fact that wheat has undergone extensive agricultural genetics-engineered changes, and you have devised a formula for creating a nation of fat, unhealthy people. Less bad is not necessarily good.

Let’s look a bit closer, for instance, at the notion that “healthy whole grains” are part of an effort to maintain a healthy weight. Time and again, studies have demonstrated that people who consume greater proportions of whole grains weigh less than those who consume white flour—no argument here. But look closer: What studies like the Nurses’ Health Study and the Physicians’ Health Study really show is that people who consume white flour products gain substantial weight, while people who consume whole grains gain less weight—but both gain weight. Once again, less bad is not necessarily good. Whole grains have most definitely not been associated with weight loss but with less weight gain.³ Yet, this has been reported as better weight management, with whole grain consumption, trumpeted by the media, doctors, dietitians, and the grain industry, heard by Mary and John Q. Public as “whole grains are part of a healthy weight control program.” (This flawed sequence of logic, by the way, is a problem that shows itself over and over again in nutritional thinking and is responsible for a number of other common misconceptions that I shall touch on later.)

The USDA and other “official” opinion makers insist that more than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese because we’re inactive and gluttonous. We sit on our fat behinds watching too much reality TV, spend too much time online, and don’t exercise. We drink too much sugary soda and eat too much fast food and junk snacks. Betcha can’t eat just one!

Certainly these are poor habits that will eventually take their toll on health. But I meet plenty of people who tell me that they follow nutritional guidelines seriously, avoid junk foods and fast foods, exercise an hour every day, all while continuing to gain and gain and gain. Many very seriously adhere to the guidelines set by the USDA food pyramid and food plate (six to eleven servings of grain per day, of which four or more should be whole grain), the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, or the American Diabetes Association. The cornerstone of all these nutritional directives? “Eat more healthy whole grains.”

Are these organizations in cahoots with the wheat farmers and seed and chemical companies? There’s more to it than that. “Eat more healthy whole grains” is really just the corollary of the “cut the fat” movement embraced by the medical establishment since the sixties. Based on epidemiological observations (as well as misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and concealed, unreported findings to the contrary) suggesting that higher dietary fat intakes are associated with higher cholesterol levels and risk for heart disease, Americans were advised to reduce total and saturated fat intake. Grain-based foods filled the calorie gap left by reduced fat consumption. The blundering logic of whole-grain-is-better-than-white argument further fueled the transition. The low-fat, more-grain message also proved enormously profitable for the processed food industry. It triggered an explosion of processed food products, most requiring just a few nickels’ worth of basic materials. Wheat flour, cornstarch, high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and food coloring are now the main ingredients in thousands of products that fill the interior aisles of any modern supermarket. (Non-grain foods such as vegetables, meats, and dairy tend to be at the perimeter.) Revenues for Big Food companies swelled. Breakfast cereals alone generate nearly $8 billion per year built on claims of fiber, bowel regularity, B vitamins, better school performance, and part of a “healthy breakfast to start your day.”

Just as the tobacco industry created and sustained its market with the addictive property of cigarettes, so does wheat in the diet make for a helpless, hungry consumer. From the perspective of the seller of food products, wheat is a perfect processed food ingredient: The more you eat, the more you want. The situation for the food industry has been made even better by the glowing endorsements provided by the U.S. government urging Americans to eat more “healthy whole grains.”

GRAB MY LOVE HANDLES: THE UNIQUE PROPERTIES OF VISCERAL FAT

Wheat triggers a cycle of insulin-driven satiety and hunger, paralleled by the ups and downs of euphoria and withdrawal, distortions of neurological function, and addictive effects, all leading to fat deposition.

The extremes of blood sugar and insulin are responsible for growth of fat specifically in the visceral organs. Experienced over and over again, visceral fat accumulates, creating a fat liver, two fat kidneys, a fat pancreas, fat large and small intestines, as well as its familiar surface manifestation, a wheat belly. (Even your heart gets fat, but you can’t see this through the semi-rigid ribs.)

So the Michelin tire encircling your or your loved one’s waistline represents the surface manifestation of visceral fat contained within the abdomen and encasing abdominal organs, resulting from months to years of repeated cycles of high blood sugar and high blood insulin, followed by insulin-driven fat deposition. Not so much fat deposition in the arms, buttocks, or thighs, but the saggy ridge encircling the abdomen accompanied by bulging fatty internal organs. (Exactly why disordered glucose-insulin metabolism preferentially causes visceral fat accumulation in the abdomen and not your left shoulder or the top of your head is a question that continues to stump medical science.)

Buttock or thigh fat is precisely that: buttock or thigh fat—no more, no less. You sit on it, you squeeze it into your jeans, you lament the cellulite dimples it creates. While wheat consumption adds to buttock and thigh fat, the fat in these regions is comparatively quiescent, metabolically speaking.

Visceral fat is different. While it might be useful as “love handles” grasped by your partner, it is also uniquely capable of triggering a universe of inflammatory phenomena. Visceral fat filling and encircling the abdomen of the wheat belly sort is a unique, twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week metabolic factory. It produces inflammatory signals and abnormal cytokines, or cell-to-cell hormone signal molecules, such as leptin, resistin, and tumor necrosis factor.4, ⁵ The more visceral fat present, the greater the quantities of abnormal signals released into the bloodstream, the “louder” the blare of inflammation throughout the body.

All body fat is capable of producing another cytokine, adiponectin, a protective molecule that reduces risk for heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension. However, as visceral fat increases, its capacity to produce protective adiponectin diminishes (for reasons unclear).⁶ The combination of lack of adiponectin along with increased leptin, tumor necrosis factor, and other inflammatory products underlies abnormal insulin responses, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.⁷ The list of other health conditions triggered by visceral fat is growing and now includes dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, and colon cancer.⁸ This is why waist circumference is proving to be a powerful predictor of all these conditions, as well as for mortality.⁹

Visceral fat not only produces abnormally high levels of inflammatory signals but is also itself inflamed, containing bountiful collections of inflammatory white blood cells (macrophages).¹⁰ The endocrine and inflammatory molecules produced by visceral fat empty directly into the liver (via the portal circulation draining blood from the intestinal tract), which then responds by producing yet another collection of inflammatory signals and abnormal proteins.

In other words, in the human body, all fat is not equal. Wheat belly fat is an especially bad fat. The belly is not just a passive repository for excess pizza calories; it is, in effect, an endocrine gland much like your thyroid gland or pancreas, albeit a very large and active endocrine gland. (Ironically, Grandma was correct forty years ago when she labeled an overweight person as having a “gland” problem.) Unlike other endocrine glands, the visceral fat endocrine gland does not play by the rules, but it follows a unique playbook that works against the body’s health.

So a wheat belly is not just unsightly, it’s also dreadfully unhealthy.

GETTING HIGH ON INSULIN

Why is wheat so much worse for weight than other foods?

The essential phenomenon that sets the growth of the wheat belly in motion is high blood sugar (glucose). High blood sugar, in turn, provokes high blood insulin. (Insulin is released by the pancreas in response to the blood sugar: The higher the blood sugar, the more insulin must be released to move the sugar into the body’s cells, such as those of muscle, liver, and fat cells.) When the pancreas’s ability to produce insulin in response to blood sugar rises is exceeded, diabetes develops. But you don’t have to be diabetic to experience high blood sugar and high insulin: Non-diabetics can easily experience the high blood sugars required to cultivate their very own wheat belly, particularly because foods made from wheat so readily convert to sugar.

High blood insulin provokes visceral fat accumulation, the body’s means of storing excess energy. When visceral fat accumulates, the flood of inflammatory signals it produces causes tissues such as muscle and liver to respond less to insulin. This so-called insulin resistance means that the pancreas must produce greater and greater quantities of insulin to metabolize the sugars. Eventually, a vicious cycle of increased insulin resistance, increased insulin production, increased deposition of visceral fat, increased insulin resistance, etc., etc., ensues.

Nutritionists established the fact that wheat increases blood sugar more profoundly than table sugar forty years ago. As we’ve discussed, the glycemic index, or GI, is the nutritionist’s measure of how much blood sugar levels increase in the 90 to 120 minutes after a food is consumed. Whole wheat bread has a GI of 72, while plain table sugar has a GI of 59 (though some labs have gotten results as high as 65). In contrast, kidney beans have a GI of 51, grapefruit comes in at 25, while non-carbohydrate foods such as salmon, eggs, and walnuts have GIs of zero: Eating these foods has no effect on blood sugar. In fact, with few exceptions, few foods have as high a GI as foods made from wheat. Outside of dried fruits such as dates and figs, the only other foods that have GIs as high as wheat products are dried, pulverized starches such as cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, and tapioca starch. (It is worth noting that these are the very same carbohydrates used to make “gluten-free” foods. More on this peculiar and maddening situation later.)

Because wheat and grain carbohydrate, the uniquely digestible amylopectin A, causes a greater spike in blood sugar than virtually any other food—more than a candy bar, table sugar, or ice cream—it also triggers greater insulin release. More amylopectin A means higher blood sugar, higher insulin, more visceral fat deposition … bigger wheat belly. Or rye belly, barley belly, corn belly, and oat belly.

Throw in the inevitable drop in blood sugar (hypoglycemia) that is the natural aftermath of high insulin levels, and you see why irresistible hunger so often results, as the body tries to protect you from the dangers of low blood sugar. You scramble for something to eat to increase blood sugar, and the cycle is set in motion again, repeating every two hours.

Factor in your brain’s response to the euphoric exorphin effects induced by wheat (and the potential for withdrawal if your next “fix” is missed), and it’s no wonder the wheat belly encircling your waist continues to grow and grow.

MEN’S LINGERIE IS ON THE SECOND FLOOR

Wheat belly is not just a cosmetic issue, but a phenomenon with real health consequences. In addition to producing inflammatory hormones such as leptin, visceral fat is also a factory for estrogen production in both sexes, the very same estrogen that confers female characteristics on girls beginning at puberty, such as widening of the hips and growth of the breasts. Estrogen levels are oddly jacked up by visceral fat of the wheat belly and peculiar and unwanted effects in both women and men follow.

Until menopause, adult females have high levels of estrogen. Surplus estrogen, however, produced by visceral fat adds considerably to breast cancer risk, since estrogen at high levels stimulates breast tissue.¹¹ Thus, increased visceral fat on females has been associated with as much as fourfold increased risk for breast cancer. Breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women with the visceral fat of a wheat belly is double that of slender, non-wheat-belly-bearing postmenopausal females.¹² Despite the apparent connection, no study—incredibly—has examined the results of a wheat-free, lose-the-visceral-fat-wheat-belly diet and its effect on the incidence of breast cancer. If we simply connect the dots, a marked reduction in risk would be predicted.

Males, having only a tiny fraction of the estrogen of females, are sensitive to anything that increases estrogen. The bigger the wheat belly in males, the more testosterone is converted to estrogen by visceral fat tissue via the aromatase enzyme. Since estrogen stimulates growth of breast tissue, elevated estrogen levels can cause men to develop larger breasts—those dreaded “man boobs,” “man cans,” or, for you professional types, gynecomastia.¹³ Levels of the hormone prolactin are also increased substantially by visceral fat.¹⁴ As the name suggests (prolactin means “stimulating lactation”), high prolactin levels stimulate breast tissue growth and milk production. To make matters worse, one of the exorphin breakdown products of wheat gliadin, called the B₅ pentapeptide, is another potent stimulator of the pituitary gland’s release of prolactin in males.¹⁵

Enlarged breasts on a male are therefore not just the embarrassing body feature that your annoying nephew snickers at, but B-cup evidence that estrogen and prolactin levels are increased due to the inflammatory and hormonal factory hanging around your waist, as well as peculiar digestive by-products of gliadin that make your body do things it should not.

An entire industry has emerged to help men embarrassed by their enlarged breasts. Male breast reduction surgery is booming, growing nationwide at double-digit rates. Other “solutions” include special clothing, compression vests, and exercise programs. (Maybe Seinfeld’s Kramer wasn’t so crazy when he invented the mansierre.)

Increased estrogen, breast cancer, man boobs … all from the bag of bagels shared at the office.

CELIAC DISEASE: A WEIGHT LOSS LABORATORY

As noted earlier, the one ailment to which wheat has been conclusively linked even among conventional dietary thinkers is celiac disease. Celiac sufferers are counseled to remove wheat products and other gluten-containing grains from their diet, lest all manner of nasty complications of their disease develop. What can their experience teach us about the effects of wheat elimination? In fact, there are unclaimed gems of important weight loss lessons to be gleaned from clinical studies of people with celiac disease who remove wheat gluten–containing foods.

The lack of appreciation of celiac disease among physicians, coupled with its many unusual presentations (for example, fatigue or migraine headaches without intestinal symptoms), means an average delay of eleven years from symptom onset to diagnosis.16, ¹⁷ Some celiac sufferers therefore develop a severely malnourished state due to impaired nutrient absorption at the time of diagnosis. This is especially true for children with celiac disease, who are often both underweight and underdeveloped for their age.¹⁸

Some celiac sufferers become positively emaciated before the cause of their illness is determined. A 2010 Columbia University study of 369 people with celiac disease enrolled 64 participants (17.3 percent) with an incredible body mass index of 18.5 or less.¹⁹ (A BMI of 18.5 in a 5-foot-4 female would equate to a weight of 105 pounds, or 132 pounds for a 5-foot-10 male.) Years of poor nutrient and calorie absorption, worsened by frequent diarrhea, leave some celiac sufferers underweight, malnourished, and struggling just to maintain weight.

Elimination of wheat gluten removes the offensive agent that destroys the intestinal lining. Once the intestinal lining regenerates, better absorption of vitamins, minerals, and calories becomes possible, and weight begins to increase due to improved nutrition. Such studies document the weight gain with wheat removal experienced by underweight, malnourished celiac sufferers.

For this reason, celiac disease has traditionally been regarded as a plague of children and emaciated adults. However, celiac experts have observed that, over the past forty to fifty years, newly diagnosed patients with celiac disease are more and more often overweight or obese. One such recent ten-year tabulation of newly diagnosed celiac patients showed that 39 percent started overweight (BMI 25 to 29.9) and 13 percent started obese (BMI ≥ 30).²⁰ By this estimate, more than half the people now diagnosed with celiac disease are therefore overweight or obese.

If we focus only on overweight people who are not severely malnourished at the time of diagnosis, celiac sufferers actually lose a substantial quantity of weight when they eliminate gluten. A Mayo Clinic/University of Iowa study tracked 215 celiac patients after wheat gluten elimination and tabulated 27.5 pounds of weight loss in the first six months in those who started obese.²¹ In the Columbia University study cited above, wheat elimination cut the frequency of obesity in half within a year, with more than 50 percent of the participants with a starting BMI in the overweight range of 25 to 29.9 losing an average of 26 pounds.²² Dr. Peter Green, lead gastroenterologist in the study and professor of clinical medicine at Columbia, speculates that “it is unclear whether it is reduced calories or another factor in diet” responsible for the weight loss of the gluten-free diet. With all you’ve learned, isn’t it clear that it’s the elimination of wheat that accounts for the extravagant weight loss?

Similar observations have been made in children. Kids with celiac disease who eliminate wheat gluten gain muscle and resume normal growth, but also have less fat mass compared to kids without celiac disease.²³ (Tracking weight changes in kids is complicated by the fact that they are growing.) Another study showed that 50 percent of obese children with celiac disease approached normal BMI with wheat gluten elimination.²⁴

What makes this incredible is that, beyond gluten removal, the diet in celiac patients is not further restricted. These were not purposeful weight loss programs, just wheat and gluten elimination. No calorie counting was involved, nor portion control, exercise, or any other means of losing weight … just losing the wheat. There are no prescriptions for carbohydrate or fat content, just removal of wheat gluten. It means that some people incorporate “gluten-free” foods, such as breads, cupcakes, and cookies, that cause weight gain, sometimes dramatic. (As we will discuss later, if you have a goal of weight loss or any health concerns, it will be important not to substitute one weight-increasing food, wheat, with yet another collection of weight-increasing and unhealthy gluten-free items.) In many gluten-free programs, gluten-free foods are actually encouraged. Despite this flawed diet prescription, the fact remains: Overweight celiac sufferers experience marked weight loss with elimination of wheat gluten.

Investigators performing these studies, though suspecting “other factors,” never offer the possibility that weight loss is from elimination of a food that causes extravagant weight gain—i.e., wheat.

Interestingly, these people have substantially lower caloric intake once on a gluten-free diet, compared to people not on a gluten-free diet, even though other foods are not restricted. Caloric intake measured 14 percent less per day on gluten-free diets.²⁵ Another study found that celiac patients who strictly adhered to gluten elimination consumed 418 calories less per day than celiac patients who were non-compliant and permitted wheat gluten to remain in their diets.²⁶ For someone whose daily caloric intake is 2,500 calories, this would represent a 16.7 percent reduction in caloric intake. Guess what that does to weight?

Symptomatic of the bias of conventional nutritional dogma, the investigators in the first study labeled the diet followed by participants recovered from celiac disease “unbalanced,” since the gluten-free diet contained no pasta, bread, or pizza but included more “wrong natural foods” (yes, they actually said this) such as meat, eggs, and cheese. In other words, the investigators proved the value of a wheat-free diet that reduces appetite and requires calorie replacement with real food without intending to or, indeed, even realizing they had done so. A recent thorough review of celiac disease, for instance, written by two highly regarded celiac disease experts, makes no mention of weight loss with gluten elimination.²⁷ But it’s right there in the data, clear as day: Lose the wheat, lose the weight. Investigators in these studies also tend to dismiss the weight loss that results from wheat-free, gluten-free diets as due to the lack of food variety with wheat elimination, rather than wheat elimination itself. (As you will see later, there is no lack of variety with elimination of wheat; there is plenty of great food remaining in a wheat-free lifestyle.)

Removal of gliadin-derived exorphins and reduction of the insulin-glucose cycle that triggers hunger reduces total daily caloric intake by 350 to 400 calories per day, not uncommonly 1,000 or more calories—without consciously restricting calories, fats, carbohydrates, or portion size. No smaller plates, prolonged chewing, or frequent small meals. Just banishing wheat and related grains from your table.

There’s no reason to believe that weight loss with wheat elimination is peculiar to celiac disease sufferers. It’s true for people with gluten sensitivity and for people without gluten sensitivity. It’s true if you’re tall or short, wear a size 28 or size 6 dress, or whether you like shoes with 4-inch heels or sandals.

So when we extrapolate wheat elimination to people who don’t have celiac disease, as I have done for thousands of people and observed in the worldwide Wheat Belly community, we see the same phenomenon: immediate and dramatic weight loss, similar to that seen in the obese celiac population.

LOSE THE WHEAT BELLY

Ten pounds in fourteen days. I know: It sounds like another TV infomercial boasting the latest “lose weight fast” gimmick.

But I’ve seen it time and time again: Eliminate wheat in all its myriad forms and pounds melt away, often as much as a pound a day. No gimmicks, no subscription meals, no special formulas, no calorie counting, no “meal replacement” drinks or “cleansing” regimens required.

Obviously, weight loss at this rate can be maintained for only so long, or you’d end up a pile of dust. But the initial pace of weight loss can be shocking, equaling what you might achieve with an outright fast. I find this phenomenon fascinating: Why would elimination of wheat yield weight loss as rapid as starvation? It is due to a combination of halting the glucose-insulin-fat-deposition cycle, the natural reduction in caloric intake that results, and the loss of inflammation and, most of all, inflammatory water retention. That last phenomenon—loss of inflammatory edema—can be seen in the face, as the thousands of people who have shared their “selfies” show us. The change in facial appearance alone can be so dramatic that critics have claimed that I am finding mothers and daughters and calling them “before” and “after” photos. Nope: It’s just part of the phenomenal catalog of changes that occur with wheat elimination.

Wheat and grain elimination is, by definition, part of low-carbohydrate diets. Clinical studies are accumulating that demonstrate the weight loss advantages of low-carb diets.28, ²⁹ In fact, the success of low-carb diets originates largely from the elimination of wheat. Cut carbs and, by necessity, you cut wheat. Because wheat dominates the diets of most modern adults, removing wheat removes the biggest problem source. (I’ve also witnessed low-carb diets fail because the only remaining carbohydrate source in the diet was wheat-containing products.)

Sugar and other carbohydrates do indeed count, too. In other words, if you eliminate wheat but drink sugary sodas and eat candy bars and corn chips every day, you will negate most of the weight loss benefit of eliminating wheat. But most rational adults already know that avoiding Big Gulps and Cherry Garcia is a necessary part of weight loss. It’s the wheat that still seems counterintuitive.

Wheat elimination is a vastly underappreciated strategy for rapid and profound weight loss, particularly from visceral fat. I’ve witnessed the wheat belly weight loss effect thousands of times: Eliminate wheat and weight drops rapidly, effortlessly, often as much as 50, 60, 100, or more pounds over a year, depending on the degree of excess weight to start. Just among the last thirty patients who eliminated wheat in my clinic, the average weight loss was 26.7 pounds over 5.6 months.

The amazing thing about wheat elimination is that removing this food that triggers appetite and addictive behavior forges a brand-new relationship with food: You eat food because you need it to supply physiologic energy needs, not because you have some odd food ingredient pushing your appetite “buttons,” increasing appetite and the impulse to eat more and more. You will find yourself barely interested in lunch at noon, easily bypassing the bakery counter at the grocery store, turning down the donuts in the office breakroom without a blink. You will divorce yourself from the helpless, wheat-driven desire for more and more and more. And you will notice that your taste perception is enhanced. Foods like candy or cake that you formerly found tasty become sickeningly and intolerably sweet. Foods that you may not have been fond of before, such as Brussels sprouts or broccoli, yield new and delicious flavors that you couldn’t sense during wheat-consuming days, all part of the broad wave of gastrointestinal healing that occurs when your diet doesn’t include wheat and its cousins, a phenomenon that we will discuss in detail. (Apply this principle to kids, by the way, and watch them ask for veggies and chicken.)

It makes perfect sense: If you eliminate foods that trigger exaggerated blood sugar and insulin responses, you eliminate the cycle of hunger and momentary satiety. Eliminate the dietary source of addictive exorphins and you are thereby more satisfied with less. Excess weight dissolves and you revert back to physiologically appropriate weight. You lose the peculiar and unsightly ring around your abdomen: Kiss your wheat belly good-bye.

DOWN 104 POUNDS … 20 MORE TO GO

When I first met Geno, he had that familiar look: gray pallor, tired, almost inattentive. At 5 feet 10, his 322 pounds included a considerable wheat belly flowing over his belt. Geno came to me for an opinion regarding a coronary prevention program, triggered by concern over an abnormal heart scan “score,” an indicator of coronary atherosclerotic plaque and potential risk for heart attack.

No surprise, Geno’s girth was accompanied by multiple abnormal metabolic measures, including high blood sugars well into the range defined as diabetes, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, high C-reactive protein and other measures of inflammation, and several others, all contributors to coronary plaque and heart disease risk.

I somehow got through to him, despite his seemingly indifferent demeanor. I believe it helped that I enlisted the assistance of his chief cook and grocery shopper, Geno’s wife. He was at first puzzled by the idea of eliminating all “healthy whole grains,” including his beloved pasta, and replacing them with all the foods that he had regarded as no-no’s such as nuts, oils, eggs, cheese, and fatty meats.

Six months later, Geno came back to my office. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that he was transformed. Alert, attentive, and smiling, Geno told me that his life had changed. He had not only lost an incredible 64 pounds and 14 inches off his waist in those six months, but he had also regained the energy of his youth, again wanting to socialize with friends and travel with his wife, walking and biking outdoors, sleeping more deeply, along with a newly rediscovered optimism. And he had laboratory values that matched: Blood sugars were in the normal range, HDL cholesterol had doubled, triglycerides dropped from several hundred milligrams to a perfect range.

Another six months later, Geno lost 40 more pounds, now tipping the scale at 218—a total of 104 pounds lost in one year.

“My goal is 198 pounds, the weight I had when I got married,” Geno told me. “Only 20 more pounds to go.” And he said it with a smile.

BE GLUTEN-FREE BUT DON’T EAT “GLUTEN-FREE”

Say what?

Gluten is the main protein of wheat, and as I have explained, it is responsible for some, though not all, of the adverse effects of wheat consumption. The gliadin protein within gluten is the culprit underlying inflammatory damage to the intestinal tract in celiac disease. People with celiac disease must meticulously avoid foods containing gluten. This means the elimination of wheat, as well as other gluten-containing grains such as barley, rye, spelt, emmer, einkorn, triticale, bulgur, and kamut. People with celiac disease often seek out “gluten-free” foods that mimic wheat-containing products. An entire industry has developed to meet their gluten-free desires, from gluten-free bread to gluten-free cakes and desserts.

However, most gluten-free foods are made by replacing wheat flour with cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, or tapioca starch (starch extracted from the root of the cassava plant). This is especially hazardous for health and for anybody looking to drop 20, 30, or more pounds, since gluten-free foods, though they do not trigger the immune or neurological response of wheat gluten, still extravagantly trigger the glucose-insulin response that causes weight gain. Wheat products increase blood sugar and insulin more than most other foods. But remember: Foods made with cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, and tapioca starch are among the few foods that increase blood sugar even more than wheat products. Going gluten-free and indulging in gluten-free foods can therefore cause you to replace your wheat belly with a gluten-free belly accompanied by all the awful health consequences of excessive visceral fat—not good.

So gluten-free foods are not problem-free. Gluten-free foods are the likely explanation for overweight celiac sufferers who eliminate wheat and fail to lose weight. In my view, there is no role for gluten-free foods, since the metabolic effect of these foods is little different from eating a bowl of jelly beans even if it is cleverly disguised as seven-grain bread.

Thus, wheat elimination is not just about eliminating gluten. Eliminating wheat means eliminating the amylopectin A of wheat and other grains, the form of complex carbohydrate that increases blood sugar higher than table sugar and candy bars. But you don’t want to replace wheat’s amylopectin A with the rapidly absorbed carbohydrates of powdered rice starch, cornstarch, potato starch, and tapioca starch. Avoid gluten-free foods if you are gluten-free.

Later in the book, I will discuss the ins and outs of wheat removal, how to navigate everything from choosing healthy replacement foods to wheat withdrawal. I provide a view from the trenches, having witnessed thousands of people do it successfully.

But before we get to the details of wheat elimination, let’s talk about celiac disease. Even if you do not suffer from this devastating disease, understanding its causes and cures provides a useful framework for thinking about wheat and its role in the human diet. Beyond teaching us lessons about weight loss, celiac disease can provide other useful health insights to those of us without this condition.

So put down that Cinnabon and let’s talk about celiac.

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