3/18/13: Wheat Belly: I Feel Duped!

I am about halfway through the book, 'Wheat Belly,' by William Davis, MD, and if half of what he says in his book is true, I feel like we have been completely and totally duped.  Duped by whom? you may ask.  I'm not sure I know the answer to that question.  Scientists?  Doctors?  The government?  Big Food?  All of them, I guess.  First of all, let me warn you that I am a little bit of a Conspiracy Theorist when it comes to Big Food (companies like Monsanto and ConAgra) and the public.  While I understand the benefits of bigger yields per acre when it comes to feeding the populations of the world, I don't believe for a second that Big Food has an ounce of altruism at its core.  It's all about profit margins and stock prices.  Produce food as cheaply as possible and get people to consume as much of it as you can.  Who gives a rat's ass whether it's good for them or not?  Best scenario possible:  Get them addicted to the stuff that is cheapest to produce and charge a lot of money for it.  Oh yeah, and while we're at it, let's genetically modify the seeds so that they can't reproduce and you have to use our fertilizer and bug spray to keep the crop alive.  Oh, and don't forget to patent the seeds while we're at it, so if any of our crops end up unwittingly on another farmer's field, we can sue him for not buying the seed from us.

Yeah, I'm jaded.  Yeah, I don't trust Big Food one little bit.  Yeah, I am into the whole buy local eat local movement, though I don't get to farmers markets and that sort of thing nearly enough.  I certainly believe in eating food that looks like it did when it was alive and growing, food that hasn't been transformed and processed into something completely different from what it was to begin with.

All of that said, I believed "them" when "they" said whole wheat products were good for me.  I believed them completely, hook, line and sinker.  I read my labels.  If "whole wheat" was not the only type of flour in the bread, I didn't buy it.  I avoided breads with labels like "whole grain."  I was smart enough to look at the list of ingredients and see that the "whole grain" bread was basically enriched white flour with some whole grains thrown in for color and texture.  I really didn't think my two slices of dry whole wheat 45 per calorie slice of bread in the morning was doing me any harm at all.  The opposite, in fact.  I believed that bread had some nutritional qualities to it.  Whole wheat bread, until yesterday, was not on my list of Dead Foods.  Until yesterday.  Now, after reading Dr. Davis' book, I think it is highly possible that wheat is the worst culprit of them all.

This is just one book by one guy and, while he sites several experiments over the last 30-40 years that provide support for his theories, it doesn't appear as if there have been any large, controlled experiments that conclusively prove that wheat is the culprit when it comes to our bulging waist lines and increased incidences of illnesses such as diabetes, celiacs disease, and cancer.  On the other hand, the circumstantial evidence appears to be overwhelming.  The studies and experiments that he sites are pretty impressive.  It appears as if "they" have known for sometime that "whole wheat" is not the health food it has been cracked up to be.

Dr. Davis sites the high glycemic index of whole wheat bread as one of the prime reasons wheat is bad for you.  On the back of his book he says, "Did you know that eating two slices of whole wheat bread can increase blood sugar more than 2 tablespoons of pure sugar can?"  No.  I did not know that.  He blames the increase of large waistlines over the last 30 years on the changes that have occurred in wheat.  Basically, he says that the wheat we eat today is not the wheat our parents ate when they were children.  Wheat has been cross bred and cross bred and cross bed, to the point that it is barely recognizable as the same plant it was when the song, "America the Beautiful" was written.  There are no longer "Amber waves of grain," that flow in the breeze like an ocean in the fields of America.  The fields are now filled with dwarf wheat, whose short, stout stalks can support the larger heads of grain that are now characteristic of the wheat we consume.  This dwarf wheat is amazing.  It has a much higher yield per acre than the grain of yesteryear.  It is drought and temperature tolerant.  In can be grown in many different climates.  It is helping solve the world's hunger problem.  While all of this is true, Dr. Davis tells us in his book that this cross bred beyond recognition wheat has never been tested to make sure it is still healthy for us to consume.  According to Dr. Davis, because this wheat was not genetically engineered, it was just carefully bred, scientists assumed that it was basically the same wheat.  But it's not.  Chromosomally, it is a very different plant.  And Dr. Davis says that those differences have everything to do with why we are fatter and sicker than we have ever been.

Dr. Davis gives a lot of examples of studies that support his theories and of people that have transformed their lives by not eating wheat.  He sites evidence that negative effects of wheat on our health have been known for decades.  And yet, we are told to eat many servings of "Healthy whole grains," every day.  Dr. Davis claims that wheat is the culprit behind our food cravings, our afternoon slumps, our inability to "stop at just one."  Dr. Davis claims that wheat is the culprit behind a lot of things.  He suggests we give it up and see what happens.  He has me convinced to give it a try.  Yesterday was my first wheat free day.

So there is this huge "Gluten Free" thing going on right now.  Many nutritionists say to ignore the gluten free foods on the market.  Most of them remove gluten and replace the gluten with sugars and fats.  It's just another marketing scheme, like the "fat free" cookies and salad dressing that starting making us fat 20 years ago.   Even Dr. Davis says that you don't need to worry about being gluten free if you don't have Celiacs disease.  Apparently there is wheat in a lot of things that you would never imagine, such as dry roasted nuts and chewing gum.  I am not going to go as far as to avoid incidental trace amounts of flour in such products.  I am going to avoid all wheat products such as bread, rolls, muffins, cakes, cookies, breaded anything, bread crumb, crackers, etc...  My Food Plan for Life now includes not eating wheat.

This morning has gotten away from me.  It's 8:05 and I must go to work.  Today is day two, wheat free.  I'll let you know how it goes.