Wheat Belly Total Health: The effortless grain-free health and weight-loss plan. Dr Davis William

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СКАЧАТЬ or, more properly, the seeds of grasses, the worse it gets. We uncover more and more reasons why non-ruminant Homo sapiens is just not equipped to handle the components of these plants: lectins in wheat, rye, barley and rice; the prolamin proteins gliadin, secalin, hordein, zein and kafirin; acrylamides; cyanide; and arsenic – not to mention that we suffer deficiencies like pellagra and beriberi when we come to overrely on these seeds. Ironically, the world’s calories are most concentrated in the calories of the most destructive grains – wheat and corn – and some serious questions have now been raised about the safety of rice.

      Funny how this just doesn’t happen with broccoli, celery, walnuts, olives, eggs or salmon – foods we can consume ad lib and digest easily, without triggering blood sugar, glycation, autoimmunity, dementia or other disease-related effects. As you might predict from the stories I’ve related so far, eliminating the seeds of grasses that were not on the instinctive menu for Homo sapiens frees us of many of the health conditions that plague modern humans, including rampant tooth decay, hypertension, diabetes, depression, and a wide range of neurological and gastrointestinal disorders – conditions notably absent or rare in humans following traditional diets. So I urge you to release your inner ruminant; recognize grains for the indigestible, often toxic seeds of grasses that they are; and allow your struggling Homo sapiens to fully express itself. I predict that you will rediscover health at a level you may not have known was possible.

      In the next chapter, we consider just why – beyond desperation, beyond convenience, beyond appeal – grains have managed to dominate the human diet over a relatively short period of time. Why have grains gone from an occasional food of hungry, desperate humans, to the dominant food supply for mankind?

       Chapter 3

       The Reign of Grain

      It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it. Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

      ‘Healthy whole grains’.

      It’s the dietary battle cry of the 21st century, echoed by all official providers of nutritional advice, the dietary community and a trillion-pound food industry. It’s the guiding principle of academic curricula in nutrition, embraced by makers of processed food who produce, along with sugar, mind-boggling quantities of foods from wheat, corn and rice. Is it all based on the purported health benefits of grains – or are there other motivations at work?

      Remember family farms, those places idealized or satirized by TV shows such as The Big Valley, The Waltons and Green Acres? It was only 60 years ago that, in the United States, we had more than 6 million of them, mostly near small towns like Walton’s Mountain or Hooterville. These were places where a family typically owned a few dozen acres to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, along with some chickens, pigs and a cow or two. They grew food for themselves and sold the surplus. Today, small family farms, along with John-Boy and Arnold Ziffel, are largely relics of the past, with the few that remain run by ageing part-time farmers whose primary jobs are off the farm. The food on your table is much more likely to come from a large operation of thousands of acres growing huge tracts of single crops (a farming method called monoculture) like wheat and corn. Parallel transformations from small farm to big business have occurred in the dairy and meat industries.

      Farmers, family and otherwise, are stepping up to meet the demands of a worldwide public that has made grains 50 per cent of their calories. That’s direct human consumption of grains. Grains, now favoured in place of forage and grass, are also the preferred feed for livestock. This trend began in the 1960s, and livestock now consume the bulk of the grain produced in the world, outstripping human consumption sevenfold. And we haven’t even discussed how much corn is cultivated for ethanol.¹ Grains are, by anyone’s definition, big business.

      Whenever there’s a peculiar situation, we have to ask: Who benefits? Is agribusiness simply responding to consumer demand by providing, for instance, £200 billion in snacks worldwide? Or are there forces at work that quietly cultivate this situation for other reasons? Answering these questions takes us a bit off course from the discussion of why and how forgoing grains gets you closer to total health. But I’m going to ask you to indulge this digression, as understanding this irksome situation will arm you better in the fight against reliance on the seeds of grasses for nutrition.

      So let us digress.

      The Art of the Commodity

      Pretend you are a businessman with ambitions to create a system that will generate millions, or perhaps billions, of pounds. And say you’d like to accomplish it through the world of food, rather than crude oil, iron ore or gold. You’re not all that concerned with environmental issues, long-term sustainability or the health of the consuming public. Your goals are elegantly simple: you’d like to conduct your venture on a worldwide scale for maximum profit.

      You certainly cannot achieve such ambitious goals by doing something as pedestrian as growing kale or cultivating an organic farm. You can’t do it by selling fresh foods to a local market: too small, too little room for growth, too much darned hard work. Conquering the world shouldn’t be so hard! Throw me a frickin’ bone here, people. How about manufacturing processed foods on a large scale using low-cost inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, cornflour, wheat flour, sucrose and the odd food colouring or two, and then creating the illusion of value-added convenience, health, weight management and sexiness? Well, now we’re talking, Mr Bigglesworth!

      But food can be hard work and dirty business. Moreover, most foods, such as eggs, pork, and fruit and vegetables, have finite shelf lives measured in just days – a shipping delay of just a few days could mean that your entire inventory becomes a worthless pile of rot. Lots of foods require refrigeration, adding another layer of cost and risk. Then you have to meet all sorts of regulatory requirements issued by agencies such as – in the US – the FDA, USDA, and federal, state, county and local health departments. What if you are the sort of businessman who doesn’t care to get his hands dirty? You don’t want to actually handle the food; you just want to make large transactions on paper or electronically. Buy low, sell high, bank your profit. No dirty hands, no messy, rotten food.

      You therefore want to transact millions or billions of dollars worth of food, but you don’t want to touch the stuff, deal with logistics, worry about risks or contend with endless regulatory hassles. In other words, you want to arbitrage your way to profits, i.e., take advantage of the different prices paid for a product in wide demand from every level of society and that sells as easily in Spokane as it does in London or Brisbane. And you want to do it with something that passes for food and enjoys extended, perhaps limitless, shelf life and can be transported over long distances to take maximum advantage of worldwide price differentials.

      What we’re talking about buying and selling is called a commodity. This is a good or collection of goods – whether iron ore, crude oil, gold, tin or aluminium – that is relatively indistinguishable from source to source and by different consumers. Commodities leave little or no room for variety, for boutique versions, for uniqueness. It’s all the same everywhere, for everyone.

      Grains are on the short list of foods consumed by humans that conform perfectly to a commodity market. (Coffee beans, tea, sugar and soyabeans are among the handful of others.) You won’t find heirloom tomatoes, radishes, garlic or grass-fed beef on any commodity exchange. Karl Marx observed that, ‘From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it: a Russian serf, a French peasant, or an English capitalist.’ When a loaf of multigrain bread is purchased, how many people are concerned with whether the wheat flour, oats, millet or rye came from Iowa, East Anglia or the Ukraine? СКАЧАТЬ