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

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СКАЧАТЬ I was freed from mind fog that persisted no matter how many cups of coffee I drank and I found relief from the annoying symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. My triglyceride level dropped from 350 to 42 mg/dl, my HDL increased from 27 to 97 mg/dl, and the dark thoughts and moods that I had struggled with for many years were simply erased. I did the opposite of widely accepted health advice and experienced a transformation in health.

      Coming to the realization that conventional nutritional advice has as much value as old chewing gum stuck on the pavement can’t help but make you sceptical about whether most sources of health advice are objective, unbiased and based on science in the first place. At best, dietary advice was driven by incomplete or misinterpreted data, an army of dietitians and ‘experts’ unwittingly doing the dirty work of distributing the information. At worst, it was advice that served the ambitions of agribusiness and other powerful interests, all working to commoditize the human diet – yes, commoditize, or derive maximal financial gain by persuading us that the human diet should be dependent on foods that are inexpensive, indifferent to quality, blind to source, traded and arbitraged on a massive scale, and hungrily desired by the masses. Yes, you were grained.

      When we peel back the veneer of marketing, trumped-up science, the appeal of convenience, and the yank of addiction, we find that, as a civilization, we made an enormous dietary blunder about 10,000 years ago: we mistook the seeds of grasses – first consumed in desperation – as food. We then allowed this mistake to balloon, not only perceiving this mistake as the discovery of a dietary staple, but as a food ideal for human consumption. Recognizing the ills of modern wheat in Wheat Belly was the first step, but now we can take another major step and eliminate all grains. Once that is accomplished, we proceed even further along the path towards total health by identifying and undoing all the harmful effects we’ve accumulated during our grain-consuming years and that can persist even in the aftermath of grain removal. That’s why I call this approach ‘Total Health’.

      In Wheat Belly Total Health, we are going to explore in greater detail why this dietary detour has caused more human disease and suffering than all the wars of the world combined. We’ll discuss why and how experts joined in on this mass hysteria, even co-opting government agencies and policies into the delusion and creating an example of collective madness larger than the Salem witch trials or the fearmongering of the Red Scare, making absurd practices such as bleeding with leeches or frontal lobotomies seem quaint. We will then take this journey of discovery further, discussing how, after you undo this grain-induced mess, you can pick up the pieces and reconstruct diet and correct weight, hormonal status and other facets of health you may have thought were out of reach.

      There are aspects of life that are beyond your influence – genetics, family and shoe size, for instance – but most of the factors that colour your day-to-day existence are indeed under your control. Removing grains is the courageous first step, but there are plenty more steps to climb to fully undo the years of health abuse you’ve endured. In this book, there are wonderfully empowering strategies for you to consider to heal the wounds received during your grain-consuming days and unravel the tangle of health problems that developed. Once you’re grain-free, you may be left with disruptions of bowel flora and digestive function, nutritional deficiencies, and chronic conditions like osteoporosis. These will all need to be addressed. You may find that medications previously prescribed to treat a long list of grain-related health conditions are no longer necessary. Some people take their diets on other unhealthy detours, such as by introducing gluten-free grains or unhealthy sweeteners, and discover that, while they may not be as bad off as when they consumed grains, they’re striking compromises in health that needn’t be struck. All these issues must be addressed to find your path back to total health, ungrained.

      Brace yourself for revelations about diet and health that you’ve probably never heard, even if you were an avid reader of the original Wheat Belly. In Wheat Belly Total Health, I follow a no-holds-barred, sacred-cows-be-damned, reach-for-the-skies attitude. My goal is not to titillate, nor to astound, but to inform without the influence of agribusiness interests or the bias of flawed epidemiology. I’m going to ask tough questions while discarding preconceived notions to get to the root of dietary wisdom. There we discover that, minus grains, not only does a long list of chronic health conditions dissolve, but you are also capable of achieving new heights of health and life performance that you had only previously imagined were possible.

      We relieve this emperor of his new clothes while watching his huge wheat belly and man breasts shrink, his swollen joints flex and his seborrhoeic skin clear. We observe his further health gains by dodging all other grains, then reclothe him in fabrics truly fit for a king. That king will be you, in all your noble, grain-free glory.

      The Grain-Free Experience: A Crowd Pleaser

      I could not have written Wheat Belly Total Health three years ago when the original Wheat Belly book came out. So many people have engaged in this lifestyle change, so many doctors and health-care professionals have come to embrace these concepts, so many new lessons have been learned as the worldwide rejection of the ‘healthy whole grain’ message has grown that have crowd-sourced a steady stream of new and unexpected lessons. Wheat Belly Total Health distils the wisdom gained from the millions of people who have embraced grain-free living and rediscovered what it means to be fully healthy and alive. We are collectively undoing what humans have managed to botch for 300 generations, and we are doing it while dietitians, the USDA and other defenders of the status quo harrumph, protest and cast insults as they watch their last 40 years of work crumble beneath their feet.

      The Information Age explodes with the empowered wisdom of crowds, shared at lightning speed and dispelling conventional ‘wisdom’ as fast as sexting can take down a congressional career. We’ve learned, for instance, that wheat intolerance really means intolerance to all grains since, after all, they are all genetically related grasses. (Yes, grasses, just like the stuff in your backyard or what’s munched on by goats and horses. We will discuss the implications of this simple biological realization in some detail.) We learned that virtually everyone benefits from reestablishing healthy bowel flora after removing grains. We learned that iodine deficiency is making a comeback and can impair weight loss and health improvement efforts. Many removed wheat and enjoyed increased energy but didn’t experience the full return of youthful vigour because synthetic perchlorate fertilizer residues and brominated flour whiteners from bagels and pizza impaired thyroid function, leaving them with less-than-perfect ability to control weight, a head of prematurely thinning hair and sluggish bowel function. As more and more people have said no to grains, we have recognized that, while grain elimination is powerful, there may be metabolic derangements that block weight loss and must therefore be addressed, no matter how meticulous the diet. We gained a better understanding that autoimmune, inflammatory and neurological conditions require additional efforts to maximize the potential for a rebound to total health. We’ve come to appreciate that the entire package of benefits from grain elimination goes beyond, say, weight loss, and adds up to an astoundingly powerful collection of health-restoring, anti-ageing, youth preserving, performance-enhancing and life-prolonging practices.

      Even if you’ve already enjoyed a major health success by eliminating wheat, understanding the strategies articulated in Wheat Belly Total Health and putting them to use can take your health efforts several steps further. If you are among the many people who have shed 2, 4, 8 or even more stones of wheat-induced visceral fat and reversed one or more health conditions, there are still many more steps you can take to further improve your health.

      Or you may be among those who, minus wheat, failed to enjoy a full return to health. You may find yourself still struggling with 4 or more stones of weight you want to shed, plus joint pains, skin rashes and other health problems; you may be left wondering if there is something you can do, short of prescription medications and procedures, to restore your health. Or perhaps you now realize just how good you feel minus wheat and are motivated to achieve total health in as many ways as possible to ensure long-term ideal health. Or you may be brand new to the wheat-free message. СКАЧАТЬ