Read the book: «Wheat Belly»
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.
Thorsons
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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
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Getty Images
Progress photos provided by the subjects
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Dr William Davis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008367466
Ebook Edition © December 2019 ISBN: 9780007568147
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.
