Wheat up!?
Eat wheat. That’s the mantra of the medical establishment and conventional nutritionists.
Leading alternative physicians and top nutritionists take a different tack: Eat what? As in: Say what? Wheat, these experts insist, is one of, or the, prime reason for an expanding girth.
But … but … but, you sputter, all the health experts say whole wheat is good for us. We should eat whole grains, they preach. Yeah. They also tell us saturated fat is bad for us and statin drugs are good for us. The evidence of how right they are about these things is in an obesity epidemic that is ever growing.
Wheat, wheat everywhere — and not a grain to eat
Dr. William Davis
So-called “whole wheat” bread, one slice of which raises blood sugar more than does a tablespoon of sugar, is not by a long shot the only product containing wheat. It’s in pastries, spaghetti, breakfast cereals, soups, crackers, salad dressings and other foods. It’s hard to escape the stuff, and produces what Dr. William Davis dubbed a “wheat belly,” a term he used for the title of his popular book.
There was a time, way back, when wheat was indeed healthy. But in the 1960s and ’70s, scientists made many hybrids of the grain and applied chemicals to increase production, resulting in many varieties that are shorter and stockier than their natural parents.
Yes, people are now aware that the gluten in wheat is bad for persons sensitive to it. But beyond the problem with gluten, wheat products are a big cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, depression and other modern ailments, in the opinion of Dr. Mark Hyman, author of four New York Times bestselling books. Why? Because modern wheat contains:
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A super starch, amylopectin A, which is super fattening
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A form of super gluten, which is highly inflammatory
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Forms of a drug that whets the appetite, spurring increased food intake.
Nutritionist Michael Polan
Dr. Mark Hyman
The average American consumes about 55 pounds of wheat flour annually, Hyman says.
Ingrained in our diet
But it’s not just wheat. Almost all grains these days are harmful or lacking in nutrition because they undergo refining with chemicals, are infused with preservatives, and are nutritionally imbalanced. Nutritionist Michael Pollan says in his book In Defense of Food that 67 percent of the calorie consumption of the average adult in the United States is from corn, soy and wheat, and their derivatives. In the Paleolithic days, nutritionists estimate, no more than about 5 percent of a man’s diet consisted of those grains.
Worldwide wheat
The changes in wheat that occurred decades ago were brought about by fear of a population explosion. Ten times more of the grain per acre resulted, says nutritionist Mike Geary, author of The TOP 101 Foods That Fight Aging,but the product was altered for the worse.
Nutritionist Mike Geary
“The government tells us that we need to eat more grain, which generally means more wheat,” says Geary. “In the food pyramid, we are advised to eat 60 percent of calories from grains like wheat.” But it’s bad advice. Psychiatrists discovered in the 1970s that eliminating wheat from schizophrenic patients’ diets resulted in marked improvement, Geary says. The new wheat heralded the beginning of an explosion of obesity, and diabetes also skyrocketed. Wheat causes the gliadin protein to lose its protective shield against foreign substances entering the bloodstream, causing inflammation of the joints, bowels, brain and airways, and triggering acid reflux.
A grain of truth
One alternative doctor who does think whole grains are healthy is Dr. Andrew Weil. However, that’s only if the grains are “true,” not ground into flour, Weil says. The individual grains must be intact or cracked into a few large pieces, so that the outer bran and germ layers hold the starch inside and digestion takes longer to occur. The conversion of starch to sugar is slowed, reducing the appetite and preventing spikes in blood sugar, which can lead to insulin resistance and cause obesity, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes.