Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (9 page)

In nutrition circles, whole grain is 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, 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 century, or any preceding century where photographs are available, and you’d see the stark contrast: Americans are now fat. According to the CDC, 34.4 percent of adults are now overweight (BMI of 25 to 29.9) and another 33.9 percent are obese (BMI 30 or greater), leaving less than one in three normal weight.
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Since 1960, the ranks of the obese have grown the most rapidly, nearly tripling over those fifty years.
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Few Americans were overweight or obese during the first two centuries of the nation’s history. (Most data collected on BMI that we have for comparison prior to the twentieth century come from body weight and height tabulated by the US 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.
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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, and diabetes. That is indeed true and indisputable.

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. An imperfect analogy, perhaps, but it illustrates 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 the formula for creating a nation of fat people.

The USDA and other “official” opinion makers say 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 one’s health. But I meet plenty of people who tell me that they follow “official” nutritional guidelines seriously, avoid junk foods and fast foods, exercise an hour every day, all while continuing to gain and gain and gain. Many follow the guidelines set by the USDA food pyramid (six to eleven servings of grain per day, of which four or more should be whole grain), the American Heart Association, the American Dietetic Association, 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 in the sixties. Based on epidemiologic observations that suggested 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 came to replace the calorie gap left by reduced fat consumption. The 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 pennies worth of basic materials. Wheat flour, cornstarch, high-fructose corn
syrup, sucrose, and food coloring are now the main ingredients of products that fill the interior aisles of any modern supermarket. (Whole ingredients such as vegetables, meats, and dairy tend to be at the perimeter of these same stores.) Revenues for Big Food companies swelled. Kraft alone now generates $48.1
billion
in annual revenues, an 1,800 percent increase since the late eighties, a substantial portion of which comes from wheat- and corn-based snacks.

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 US government urging Americans to eat more “healthy whole grains.”

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 fat deposition in the arms, buttocks, or thighs, but the saggy ridge encircling the abdomen created 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. It represents excess calories over caloric expenditure. 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. And what it produces is inflammatory signals and abnormal cytokines, or cell-to-cell hormone signal molecules, such as leptin, resistin, and tumor necrosis factor.
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The more visceral fat present, the greater the quantities of abnormal signals released into the bloodstream.

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).
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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.
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The list of other health conditions triggered by visceral fat is growing and now includes dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, and colon cancer.
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This is why waist circumference is proving to be a powerful predictor of all these conditions, as well as of mortality.
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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).
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The endocrine and inflammatory molecules produced by visceral fat empty (via the portal circulation draining blood from the intestinal tract) directly into the liver, which then responds by producing yet another sequence of inflammatory signals and abnormal proteins.

In other words, in the human body, all fat is not equal. Wheat belly fat is a
special
fat. It 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 follows a unique playbook that works against the body’s health.

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

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 the muscle and liver.) When the pancreas’ 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: Nondiabetics 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 circle 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 thirty 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. By this measure, 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 noncarbohydrate foods such as salmon and walnuts have GIs of essentially 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 sugar-rich 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 often used to make “gluten-free” food. More on this later.)

Because wheat 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.

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.

Now factor in your brain’s response to the euphoric exorphin effects induced by wheat (and the attendant 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.

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.

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.
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Thus, increased visceral fat on a female has been associated with an increased risk for breast cancer as high as fourfold. 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.
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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 estrogen that is produced by visceral fat tissue. 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.
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Levels of the hormone prolactin are also increased as much as sevenfold by visceral fat.
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As the name suggests (prolactin means “stimulating lactation”), high prolactin levels stimulate breast tissue growth and milk production.