Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (3 page)

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.
Within minutes, many would experience diarrhea, joint swelling and pain, or wheezing. 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.

For many, the idea of removing wheat from the diet is, at least psychologically, as painful 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 a wide spectrum of health benefits.

So why eliminate wheat rather than, say, sugar, or all grains in general? The next chapter will explain why wheat is unique among modern grains in its ability to convert quickly to blood sugar. In addition, it has a poorly understood and understudied genetic
makeup and addictive properties that actually cause us to overeat even
more;
has been linked to literally dozens of debilitating ailments beyond those associated with overweight; and has infiltrated almost every aspect of our diet. Sure, cutting out refined sugar is probably a good idea, as it provides little or no nutritional benefit and will also impact your blood sugar in a negative way. But for the most bang for your buck, eliminating wheat is the easiest and most effective step you can take to safeguard your health and trim your waistline.

He is as good as good bread.
Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote

WHEAT, MORE THAN
any other foodstuff (including sugar, fat, and salt), 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 lifestyle. What would a plate of 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 the crust?

I once 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, multigrain bread, seven-grain bread, rye bread, pumpernickel bread, sourdough bread, Italian bread, French bread, bread sticks, 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 shelf.

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.

Wheat as a crop has succeeded on an unprecedented scale, exceeded only by corn in acreage of farmland planted. It is, by a long stretch, among the most consumed grains on earth, constituting 20 percent of all calories consumed.

And wheat has been an undeniable financial success. How many other ways can a manufacturer transform a nickel’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 American Dietetic Association, 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 fifty years under the influence of agricultural scientists. Wheat strains have been hybridized, crossbred, and introgressed to make the wheat plant resistant to environmental conditions, such as drought, or pathogens, such as fungi. But most of all, genetic changes have been induced 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, including reducing the proud “amber waves of grain” of yesteryear to the rigid, eighteen-inch-tall high-production “dwarf” wheat of today. Such fundamental genetic changes, as you will see, have come at a price.

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 fifty years, permitting human intervention at a much more rapid rate than nature’s slow, year-by-year breeding
influence, the pace of change has increased exponentially. The genetic backbone of your high-tech poppy seed muffin has achieved its current condition by a process of evolutionary acceleration that makes us look like
Homo habilis
trapped somewhere in the early Pleistocene.

“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, a time 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 of wheat and bread. 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 have sustained humans for centuries, but the wheat of our ancestors is not the same as modern commercial wheat that reaches your breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. From the 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 their 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 may have purposefully stored seeds to sow in areas of their own choosing the next season. Einkorn wheat eventually became an essential component of the Natufian diet, reducing the need for hunting and gathering. The shift from harvesting wild grain to cultivating it was a fundamental change that shaped their subsequent migratory behavior, as well as the development of tools, language, and culture. It marked the beginning of agriculture, a lifestyle that required long-term commitment to more or less 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 cultural development at something resembling Neolithic life).

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 small 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 four-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 many centuries of predecessors.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in many preceding centuries, wheat 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 relative two centuries before that. Grinding of wheat had become more 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 part 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. As a result, wheat has undergone a more drastic transformation than Joan Rivers, 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 production 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 fifty years ago, wheat changed.