Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 delicious wheat-free recipes for effortless weight loss and optimum health. Dr Davis William

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СКАЧАТЬ for storage. Just as wheat products, especially whole wheat products, increase blood sugar levels higher than nearly all other foods, wheat products also increase blood insulin levels higher than nearly all other foods, too.

      Repetitive high levels of insulin set the stage for creating resistance to insulin, i.e., reduced responsiveness in muscle, the liver and other organs to the body’s own insulin. Insulin resistance is the fundamental process that leads to pre-diabetes and diabetes, situations in which the body can no longer cope with the carbohydrates driving repetitive high blood sugar, allowing blood sugars eventually to increase. Insulin resistance also causes the growth of deep abdominal fat, visceral fat, a form of fat that is highly inflammatory. Filled with white blood cells (like that in pus), visceral fat emits inflammatory proteins into the bloodstream, thereby increasing inflammation everywhere in the body, from your knees to your heart to your brain.

      By the way, this metabolically messy situation of insulin resistance, pre-diabetic or diabetic blood sugar levels, and the visceral fat of a wheat belly is nearly always accompanied by having an abundant quantity of small, dense LDL particles, by far the most common cause of coronary heart disease and heart attacks today.

      So high blood sugar leads to high blood insulin that, in turn, generates insulin resistance. Insulin resistance generates visceral fat that amplifies inflammation, which worsens insulin resistance and increases blood sugar and small LDL particles, starting the whole cycle over again, worse and worse and worse.

      And it all started with your morning bagel.

      Opiate of the Masses: Addiction and Withdrawal

      The gliadins in wheat, particularly the new forms crafted by geneticists, are opiates. Wheat is therefore an opiate. Yes, wheat keeps company with Oxycontin, heroin and morphine.

      It has been known for a century that opiates, when administered to laboratory animals or to humans, increase appetite. It was discovered around 30 years ago that the gliadin protein of wheat is, in effect, an opiate, as it yields digestive breakdown products that bind to the opiate receptors of the brain.

      Gliadin is degraded in the gastrointestinal tract to smaller polypeptides called exorphins (exogenous morphine-like compounds), such as gluteomorphin and gliadorphin, that, once absorbed into the bloodstream, penetrate into the brain and bind to the opiate receptors, exerting effects similar to those of opiates such as morphine. Wheat opiates, however, stimulate less of a ‘high’ but are more potent stimulants of appetite.

      The appetite-stimulating effect of wheat gliadin explains why people who eat more ‘healthy whole grains’ typically experience constant hunger: a 7:00 am breakfast of ‘high-fibre’ cereal followed by a growling stomach at 9:00 am with the need for a snack such as low-fat pretzels or crackers, hungry again at 11:00 am, hungry just a couple of hours after lunch, dinner at 6:00 pm followed by a need to snack at 8:00 pm Many people ‘graze’ all through the day or eat many small meals every 2 hours, a strategy endorsed by dietitians but representing nothing more than a pointless and counterproductive means of dealing with the constant cravings of the wheat-consumer.

      Stop consuming wheat and appetite plummets. People report going through the day barely hungry at all. A common experience is having breakfast at 7:00 am followed by noticing that ‘It’s 1:00 pm. Perhaps I might eat something, but I’m not really that hungry.’ The after-dinner munchies that many people struggle with disappear. Total calorie intake drops by 400 or so calories per day, documented in both clinical studies and in real life. And that’s the average experience: Some people reduce calorie intake less than 400 calories per day, while others experience far greater reduction. Four hundred fewer calories per day, multiplied by 365 days per year – that’s a lot of food, 146,000 cumulative calories, and a lot of weight that can be lost effortlessly.

      You can see why the failure to eliminate wheat explains why so many people struggle with weight-loss diets: because they failed to remove this appetite stimulant. Reducing calories becomes torture, like waving a syringe full of heroin at a helpless addict.

      Where there’s spaghetti, there are meatballs. And where there’s addiction, there’s withdrawal. Yes, indeed: withdrawal from the opiate in wheat. Don’t believe it? Try this little experiment: Stop feeding your husband or kids wheat during a 72-hour period when you can control their diet (e.g., a long weekend), then sit back and watch the emotional fireworks. You’re likely to observe crying, yelling, nausea, incapacitating fatigue, begging for a roll or pretzel, sneaking off to the nearest convenience store for a ‘hit’. (Wheat withdrawal is such an important phenomenon that I discuss it in more detail in the next chapter.) You’ll quickly realize that you’ve been living with a family of opiate addicts, consuming their drug of choice cleverly disguised as a bran muffin, breakfast cereal or pizza.

      Another caution: The longer you are wheat free, the more likely you will develop undesirable reactions when re-exposed, inadvertently or intentionally. I call these awful experiences wheat ‘re-exposure reactions’. (Readers and social media followers of Wheat Belly say they’ve been ‘wheated’.) Say you’ve been wheat free for 4 weeks, lost 1 stone 1 pound, been freed from irritable bowel syndrome symptoms and the funny rash that wouldn’t go away for 5 years. You eat a few of the crackers you let sit in your cupboard – what the heck, you’ve been so good! – and you’ve got yourself a case of diarrhoea and cramps, bloating, pain in your elbows and shoulders, and a recurrence of the rash, very common re-exposure reactions. Other common re-exposure reactions include headache, asthma and sinus congestion (in those prone), and emotional effects, especially sadness, hopelessness, anxiety and anger. Re-exposure reactions last from hours to days. Gastrointestinal reactions like diarrhoea tend to dissipate over a day or two, while joint pains can persist for days to weeks. You will survive, but for many of us, the experience is so unpleasant that no indulgence makes it worth the pain and hassle.

      Weight Gain: Grow Your Very Own Wheat Belly

      If the gliadin protein of wheat, changed by geneticists in their efforts to increase yield, stimulates appetite and increases calorie consumption by 400 or more calories per day, 365 days per year, what happens to us unsuspecting participants in this national experiment? We get fat. Given the unique properties of wheat’s amylopectin A to raise blood sugar and insulin levels, we gain the weight mostly around our middles, evidenced on the surface by what I call a wheat belly, and evidenced on CT scans and MRIs as deep visceral fat encircling the intestines and other abdominal organs.

      And we don’t just get a little bit fat. Many of us get really fat, sufficient to send our body mass indexes (see ‘What Is Your Body Mass Index [BMI]?’) to 30 and above, falling into the range classified as obese, or even morbidly or super-obese with BMIs of 40 and over, the group growing the fastest. Such classifications have only become a matter of necessity in the last 25 years, since these extreme ranges of overweight were previously uncommon, rarely seen outside of circus tents and peep shows.

      Recall that modern semi-dwarf strains of wheat were introduced in the mid- to late 1970s, with only a few per cent of farmers adopting this crop viewed as peculiar in 1979. As more and more farmers began to observe the startling surges in yield-per-acre of high-yield, semi-dwarf strains, this wheat was rapidly embraced in the early 1980s. By 1985, virtually every wheat product you bought – white, whole grain, organic, sprouted – came from high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat.

      Oddly, data collected by the USDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 1985 also marks the year when calorie intake began to climb, increasing 440 calories per day, every day, 365 days a year. Increased calorie intake leads to weight gain, year after wheat-consuming year. It means we have obese adults, obese elderly, obese teenagers, obese children – more overweight, obese and super-obese people than ever before in the history of man.

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