Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health

COPYRIGHT

HarperThorsons

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the USA by Rodale Inc. 2011

First published in the UK by HarperThorsons 2014

This edition 2015

© 2011, 2014 by William Davis, MD

William Davis asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This ebook 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.

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Source ISBN: 9780007568130

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007568147

Version: 2015-02-03

For Dawn, Bill, Lauren and Jacob, my companions on this wheat-free journey

In order to protect the privacy of patients, some names and personal details have been changed.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

PART ONE WHEAT: THE UNHEALTHY WHOLE GRAIN

Chapter 1 What Belly?

Chapter 2 Not Your Gran’s Muffins: The Creation of Modern Wheat

Chapter 3 Wheat Deconstructed

PART TWO WHEAT AND ITS HEAD-TO-TOE DESTRUCTION OF HEALTH

Chapter 4 Hey, Man, Wanna Buy Some Exorphins? The Addictive Properties of Wheat

Chapter 5 Your Wheat Belly Is Showing: The Wheat/Obesity Connection

Chapter 6 Hello, Intestine. It’s Me, Wheat. Wheat and Coeliac Disease

Chapter 7 Diabetes Nation: Wheat and Insulin Resistance

Chapter 8 Dropping Acid: Wheat as the Great pH Disrupter

Chapter 9 Cataracts, Wrinkles and Dowager’s Humps: Wheat and the Ageing Process

Chapter 10 My Particles Are Bigger Than Yours: Wheat and Heart Disease

Chapter 11 It’s All in Your Head: Wheat and the Brain

Chapter 12 Bagel Face: Wheat’s Destructive Effect on the Skin

PART THREE SAY GOODBYE TO WHEAT

Chapter 13 Goodbye, Wheat: Create a Healthy, Delicious, Wheat-Free Life

Epilogue

Appendix A Looking for Wheat in All the Wrong Places

Appendix B Healthy Wheat Belly-Shrinking Recipes

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

References

About the Publisher

FOREWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

WHEAT BELLY IS not what it used to be.

In the three years since the original Wheat Belly was published in the US, something astounding and wonderful has happened. What began as an experience in helping people reduce blood sugars, tame inflammation and regain control over appetite has evolved into a nationwide experience of lives transformed on an unprecedented scale. The few thousand people who understood this message in 2011 has now ballooned to the millions, and they are experiencing effortless weight loss and turnarounds in health across a whole spectrum of conditions.

Within weeks of its initial release, I was flooded with stories from people who, for the first time in years, finally understood why they had struggled with health, weight, appetite and pain – despite doing everything ‘right’. A man named Lucas sent a comment saying that he had tried with little success to get rid of his belly despite what he thought was a healthy diet and active lifestyle. ‘I’ve tried raw, vegan, low-carb, low-fat – and none of them had much effect and all left me with food cravings that never went away. In the month since I started Wheat Belly, I’ve lost 12 pounds,’ said Lucas. ‘The most remarkable thing for me, though – and I wasn’t really expecting it – is that after the first week of being completely grainfree, I have not had a single headache of any kind, and I have been a migraine sufferer since my teens.’

Another comment came from Cindy, a woman whose obsession with food was controlling her life. ‘I was in constant turmoil over eating; I couldn’t understand how the educated, intelligent, strongwilled person I believed myself to be could become totally defeated by food. I was completely exhausted by my preoccupation with eating, not eating, dieting, binging, crying, hating myself, dieting again, binging and hating myself more. I was at the end of my rope,’ she said. Then she found Wheat Belly and her life changed. ‘After cutting out the wheat, I could barely believe the feeling of calm that descended upon my life. The weight dropped off, my depression lifted and I too experienced all of the amazing things everyone else had reported. I now love my food, but I rarely think about it anymore.’

Multiply those wonderful stories by several thousand and you get a sense of what unfolded in just the first several months of Wheat Belly’s publication.

When the original Wheat Belly hit the bookstores, I already knew that this message had the potential to change lives, achieve astounding quantities of weight loss, and turn around conditions such as depression, eating disorders, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol, skin rashes, joint pain, heart disease, fatty liver and hundreds of other conditions. I knew this because I’d already witnessed such transformations in thousands of people in my cardiology practice and online discussions, backed up by a surprising wealth of science already available. What I did not anticipate was the tidal wave of people embracing this message. I credit that to the phenomenon of social media and the awesome potential of shared experiences.

When people tell their stories on Facebook or Twitter, for instance, detailing their 56-pound weight loss over 6 months, relief from the disfigurement and pain of rheumatoid arthritis, and transitioning from barely being able to rise from a chair to running their first half-marathon, well … that makes for the kind of conversation that changes the world. It’s the same process that led to the overturn of despotic governments and the same process that can now make the difference between someone winning and losing a presidential election. We’ve now applied this miraculous, 21st-century formula to nutrition.

If you peel back the layers of the nutritional advice given to Americans by ‘official’ agencies through the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the USDA Food Pyramid or MyPlate, and the legions of dietitians and other providers of conventional dietary advice, we find the agendas of agribusiness, Big Food and other parties who stand to profit from such advice. We do not find objective, unbiased science, interpreted by the rules of logic.

We also find that the darling of all nutritional advice, the proposed centrepiece of every meal, the widest parts of the pyramid and plate – wheat – is something different today than it was 40 years ago. Just one look at a modern stalk of wheat and you will immediately know: this is not the wheat I remember, not the wheat I’ve seen in pictures, certainly not the wheat I saw as a kid. It’s been changed. That fundamental insight – that many of our foods have been changed by the efforts of agribusiness and genetics, whether the methods were ‘genetic modification’ (using gene splicing techniques, as used to create genetically modified corn) or repetitive hybridization and mutagenesis (the purposeful induction of mutations using chemicals, gamma rays and x-rays, used to create new strains of wheat) – is a growing reality in the 21st-century. Contrary to the claim of geneticists and agribusiness, the full implications of the changes introduced into such crops are not known, but are showing themselves in a variety of ways in the humans who consume them.

Some people, understandably wary of a notion as revolutionary and potentially disruptive as doing away with all things wheat, have asked: ‘Is this elimination based solely on anecdote, or is there clinical data to back it up?’ When I first set out to understand why the removal of wheat might result in such extravagant health and weight changes, I talked to agricultural geneticists, studied their experimental data and probed the data generated by physicians to study conditions such as coeliac disease. What I found was that an astounding amount of science had already been collected that showed us the following: 1) Modern wheat has undergone change in several crucial components, such as the gliadin protein and others; 2) These changes have been associated with various effects in humans, such as intestinal inflammation outside of coeliac disease and an astounding array of mind effects; 3) Direct connections between wheat consumption and conditions such as diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, had been conclusively made … but virtually nobody had collected the data into one place nor dared question conventional advice that advocates essentially unrestrained consumption of the new modern strains of wheat.

Alongside my efforts to explore and understand the changes introduced into modern wheat were my efforts to help people rid themselves of this component of diet. One of the experiences I observed was the 38-year-old schoolteacher (whose story I tell in more detail in this book) who, on the eve of her colon-removal surgery, experienced complete relief from her ulcerative colitis, so dramatically improved that she was able to stop her medications as well as not have her colon removed. After twelve years of failed response to drugs, constant abdominal pain, diarrhoea and intermittent intestinal hemorrhage, she was now essentially cured with removal of all wheat from her diet. That experience spurred me on to share this collection of insights, or else people might undergo such awful things as colon removal or worse, never understanding that wheat is what lies at the root of the entire problem.

Thus was born Wheat Belly. And the nutritional world has never been the same.

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-eight dresses and the men sported 32-inch waists. Overweight was something measured only by a few pounds; obesity rare. Overweight children? Almost never. Any 42-inch waists? Not here. Fourteen-stone teenagers? Certainly not.

Why were the typical mums of the fifties and sixties, the stay-at-home housewives, as well as other people of that era, so much skinnier than the modern people we see at the beach, on the high street or in our own mirrors? While women of that era typically weighed in at 7½ to 8 stone, men at 11 or 12 stone, today we carry 4, 5, even 14 stone 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 mum put on her trainers to go out for a three-mile run? Exercise for my mother was hoovering the stairs. Nowadays I go outdoors on any nice day and see dozens of women jogging, riding their bicycles, power walking – things we’d virtually never see 40 or 50 years ago. And yet, we’re getting fatter and fatter every year.

My wife is a triathlete and triathlon instructor, so I observe a few of these extreme exercise events every year. 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. The majority of triathletes adhere to fairly healthy eating habits.

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 1½, 2 or 3½ stone. 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 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 onion ciabatta, is not really wheat at all but the transformed product of genetic research conducted during the latter half of the 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 per cent of all genes found in humans, with longer arms, full body hair and lesser capacity to win at Quiz Night at the pub, I trust you can readily tell the difference that that 1 per cent makes. Compared to its ancestor of only forty 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, triathletes included.

I recognise that declaring wheat a malicious food is like declaring that Ronald Reagan was a Communist. It may seem absurd, even against nature, 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), exaggerated blood sugar surges that trigger cycles of satiety alternating with heightened appetite, the process of glycation that underlies disease and ageing, inflammatory and pH effects that erode cartilage and damage bone, and activation of disordered immune responses. A complex range of diseases results from consumption of wheat, from coeliac disease – the devastating intestinal disease that develops from exposure to wheat gluten – to an assortment of neurological disorders, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, curious rashes and the paralysing 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 sees and treats 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 my patients eliminated wheat from their diets, with typical weight loss totalling 1½, 2 or 3½ stone 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 facing colon removal who was cured 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 learnt 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 film Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s character, possessing uncommon genius but harbouring 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, blame ourselves: too many calories, too little exercise, too little 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 has 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 pre-diabetic with high blood pressure and cholesterol; or desperately trying to conceal a pair of humiliating man breasts, consider saying goodbye 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?

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 plough your own field. In this century, you don’t have to plough your own field. Today, obesity has been democratised: everybody can have a big belly. Your dad called his rudimentary mid-twentieth-century equivalent a beer belly. But what are mums, kids and half of your friends and neighbours 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. In the unwitting wheat-bellied male, visceral fat also produces oestrogen, creating ‘man breasts’.

The consequences of wheat consumption, however, are not just manifested on the body’s surface; wheat can 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 practise preventive 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 go to high-quality state 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 17-stone 18-year-old women, 4x4s tipped sharply to the driver’s side, double-wide wheelchairs, hospital equipment unable to accommodate patients who tip the scales at 25 stone or more. (Not only can’t they fit into the CT scanner or other imaging device, 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 17 stone or more was a rarity; today it’s a common sight among the men and women walking the streets, as humdrum as selling jeans at 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.