Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox (2 page)

Grains have posed a host of health problems for as long as humans have consumed them. But it became much more obvious when agribusiness genetically altered the favorite of all conventional “healthy foods,” wheat, creating modern 18-inch-tall semi-dwarf strains for increased yield that replaced the 5-foot-tall “amber waves of grain” we all remember. Its destructive health effects were compounded by conventional dietary advice to eat more of it, while food manufacturers put wheat, corn, and other grains into virtually every processed food on store shelves, taking the “eat more healthy whole grains” message to an absurd extreme.

One of the reasons why it was so difficult for people to draw cause-effect relationships between wheat and grains and this long list of health problems is that most of the effects are delayed and only show themselves over the long term. A stack of waffles eaten on May 1 may not yield, for instance, the swollen joints and pain of rheumatoid arthritis until September 30 or later, so it's tough to connect the dots. But the dots do indeed connect.

So the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox is not only the nutritional equivalent of a magical pill that can achieve all the above benefits, but also a rejection of the “eat more healthy whole grains” and other dietary advice we hear repeated over and over again. We are going to thumb our noses at the food pyramid and plate, turn a deaf ear to the advice of organizations like the American Diabetes and American Heart Associations, and snicker at the marketing antics of Big Food eager to sell us their cellophane-wrapped, processed foods packed with grains and sugar—all while you get closer and closer to fitting into size 4 jeans, pitching most, if not all, of your prescription drugs into the trash, and feeling the best you have in decades.

Yes, many of the prescription drugs that your doctor advised you to take are really efforts to treat the consequences of eating a diet centered on “healthy whole grains” and the grain-tainted
products
that fill processed supermarket foods. Being released from these effects does not involve cutting calories, reducing fat, prolonged periods of denial, restraint, exercise, or setting your TiVo for the last
Biggest Loser
episode. Get rid of the cause, reverse the effect: The start of this process is really that simple.

Ten days—a week and a half, a third of a month, the time it takes to order and receive a new pair of shoes online—and you can chart a new course for your life and enjoy the wonderful benefits of reprogramming your body along an entirely new design. Once you have gotten through the next 10 days and emerge thinner, faster, stronger, smarter, and healthier for less than the cost of a pair of new shoes, you will wonder what you were thinking over the preceding 30, 40, or 50 years. Your health and your appearance are likely to draw gasps from anyone who witnesses the “after” who lived with your “before.”

So let's begin!

CHAPTER

1

YOU'VE BEEN ROLLED, TOSSED, AND BAKED

“Follow a balanced diet low in fat.”
“You need whole grains for B vitamins and fiber.”
“It's unhealthy to eliminate an entire food group.”
“Everything in moderation.”

This should all
sound familiar to you because these nutritional mantras have been repeated over and over by dietitians, doctors, and the media. And, like many such pieces of conventional “wisdom,” there is a germ of truth in each of them—but just a germ and nothing more. Following such advice not only does
not
help you control weight or obtain health, it also destroys your grasp over weight and health. It can be as ineffective as believing that total health is restored by taking a prescription drug, subjecting yourself to a 4-week program of “cleansing” enemas, or concealing bulges under a new set of Spanx. Modern misguided dietary advice has made plus-size aisles the busiest place in clothing stores, huffing and puffing commonplace when climbing a single flight of stairs, and type 2 diabetes a double-digit growth industry.

Don't feel bad if you fell for it, choosing lean cuts and trimming the fat off meat, reaching for low-fat yogurt, and opting for whole grain breads, muffins, and bagels. Many beliefs, once
accepted
as gospel, have fallen by the wayside over the years, kicked to the curb by new discoveries, new science, and new understanding. It wasn't all that long ago that you would have been burned at the stake for believing that the earth revolved around the sun, been prosecuted for voicing the wrong political views during the McCarthy-era purges, or cheered for Milli Vanilli's “Girl You Know It's True” win at the Grammy Awards. Human history is filled with such campaigns of misinformation. But only in the recent past has misinformation permeated nutritional advice on such a grand scale.

HALF-BAKED

When you lose control over your health and weight because you ate “healthy” whole grains, doctors—stumped by why you feel so awful despite doing everything “right”—prescribe drugs with effects that create the “need” for even more prescription drugs. This is the modern downward health spiral that most people find themselves trapped in today. Once you understand this absurd and self-defeating situation, you are empowered to change it. And you can begin to powerfully reverse this situation over the next 10 days, the number of days it takes your husband to stop procrastinating over fixing a leaky kitchen faucet. This detox process yields a head-to-toe body and health makeover, reprogramming your body at so many levels, both internal and external. Your body and health will undergo a transformation that may even have friends and family not believing it's you.

With the bad science and politics that drove the “cut your cholesterol, fat, and saturated fat” agenda of the latter half of the 20th century, the bonfire was lit even brighter by over-the-top profit opportunities for Big Food. The low-fat message gained a huge following. In its wake now lies the result: obesity, diabetes, arthritis, dementia, and other health disasters on a scale never before witnessed in the history of mankind. It's an unprecedented
man-
made social and health apocalypse that makes reports of tornadoes and radiation spills seem like small-scale annoyances, even banal, with nearly two billion overweight or obese people worldwide (including nearly 50 million children under age 5) and more than half of Americans with diabetes or prediabetes. The low-fat message, because it eliminated a source of satiating calories from fat, caused everyone to resort to more carbohydrates, particularly the carbohydrate source that most nutritional authorities felt to be the healthiest: whole grains, such as whole wheat, oats, and rye.

But, like the message to cut fat and saturated fat—now debunked by more recent studies showing that fat and saturated fat have nothing to do with cardiovascular disease—so the “eat more healthy whole grains” message was also based on flawed science and misinterpretations. The purported health benefits of whole grains were based on epidemiological studies (i.e., studies of health in large populations) demonstrating that if white flour products are replaced with whole grains, there is less diabetes, less weight gain, less heart disease, and less colon cancer in the population observed. That is indeed true and not in question. Careers and entire university departments of nutrition have been built on this premise. But the next question should have been: What is the effect of removing grains, white and whole, altogether? We cannot answer that question with the same “replace one with the other” epidemiological studies; we have to look elsewhere. Such grain-eliminating studies have indeed already been performed.

What happens when we remove grains? Clinical studies have shown:

•
Reduction in overall calorie intake

•
Drops in blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c (a long-term measure of blood sugar)—many people with diabetes are cured

•
Reduction of blood pressure

•
Increased likelihood of remission of rheumatoid arthritis

•
Reversal of neurological conditions such as cerebellar ataxia, some forms of seizures, and peripheral neuropathy

•
Reversal of multiple forms of skin rash

•
Reductions in paranoia and hallucinations in people with schizophrenia

•
Improved attention span and behavior in children with attention deficit disorder and autistic spectrum disorder

•
Relief from the bowel urgency and disruption of irritable bowel syndrome

Such a collection of changes is rare to impossible when weight loss is achieved through a painful few weeks of calorie counting, liposuction, or kickboxing or other strenuous exercise. If this were just a weight-loss program or just a program to shrink your waist, well, that would be sort of interesting in a reality TV sort of way, complete with emotional outbursts and breakdowns. But it would not be accompanied by the sorts of body and health transformations we are seeking. In this detoxification process, we are going to go further than just losing weight; we are going to work to restore health from head to toe. Weight loss, feeling better, and looking younger are simply reflections of the dramatic improvements in health you are going to experience.

In particular, you are likely to experience a powerful reversal of inflammation throughout your body. The reversal of redness, swelling, pain, and hormonal signal disruption that we may
experience
variously as seborrhea, rheumatoid arthritis, acid reflux, leg swelling, or irrational anger all reflect the receding wave of inflammation previously caused by grains.

These are changes that I observe in people every day with the health strategies detailed in the Wheat Belly books. In this easy-to-consume, bite-size book, you will read about such changes from our detox panelists, even in the brief 10-day timeline of this program. I predict that many of you, like our volunteer panelists, will receive compliments from family and friends after these initial 10 days on how different you look: thinner, yes, but it's not uncommon for your appearance to begin to change, especially that of the face with less eye puffiness, less facial edema, and relief from the redness of the cheeks and seborrhea along the nose (what I call the signature rashes of wheat and related grains), as well as developing better defined facial contours, reduced waist size, smaller hips, reduced cellulite on the thighs, loss of edema in the ankles, even smaller feet—no kidding. I bet you'll even smile more readily, given how much better you feel inside.

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox program begins with the elimination of wheat and grains, the essential first step that gets the detoxification process under way. But this detox involves additional strategies for full benefit. These strategies are necessary because they undo many of the unhealthy effects that grains have exerted on your body and that have accumulated over the years, such as abnormal rises in insulin levels and altered composition of bowel flora (the microorganisms that inhabit your intestinal tract). Many of the drugs that your doctor prescribed to treat the destructive health effects of wheat and grain consumption will also need to be reduced or discarded. Remove the initial cause, correct the varied consequences, and the majority of drugs are no longer needed and health can finally reassert itself. Without grains, life is indeed good.

These sorts of benefits have nothing to do with celiac disease, the autoimmune destruction of the small intestine from gluten in
wheat,
rye, and barley experienced by 1 percent of the population. While this detox program could be undertaken by someone with celiac disease, it is primarily aimed at people without the disease, meaning the other 99 percent of the population. These ben
efits
also have little to do with being “gluten-free,” a misleading concept that has the potential to ruin health and weight in other ways, which we'll discuss throughout the book.

You will learn also that not only will you not become deficient in nutrients, but that nutrient levels
increase
with wheat and grain elimination—explaining why, for example, many people experience reversal of iron deficiency anemia and vitamin B
₁₂
deficiency with this approach. I also take the mystery out of fiber and show why the conventional notion of a high-fiber diet is largely a fiction of marketing, little different than sprinkling sawdust on your food. There are better ways to achieve bowel and overall health than gnawing on twigs.