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

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       Frankengrain

      . . . it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery . . .

      Mary Shelley

      Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

      Wheat encapsulates a fundamental dilemma of our technological age: How much should we permit modern agriculture to modify our food, change its genetics, alter its biochemistry – but not tell us what they did, how they did it, why they did it and that there are potentially uncertain effects on us unwitting humans who consume it with our breakfast burrito?

      If your hairdresser one day decided to give you a new hairdo and dye your curls red, surely she would discuss this with you first. If your spouse decided that life would be better in John o’ Groats, wouldn’t it first come with a bit of discussion?

      The production of our food does not seem to adhere to such common courtesies. Food crops and livestock are changed, you buy them, you eat them – no questions asked. The changes introduced are not just that of a new colour, or an adaptation to grow under some unique condition. The food is, in many cases, fundamentally changed.

      More than any other common foodstuff, wheat stands apart as the most changed. Selling bread, pretzels or ciabattas to you under the guise of wheat is a deception that you would not tolerate in other areas of your life, certainly not from your hairdresser or spouse.

      Modern wheat represents the technological capabilities of agricultural geneticists that pre-date the age of genetic engineering and genetic modification, the use of gene-splicing technology to insert or delete a gene. Wheat represents the brainchild of genetics manipulations that were employed before such technologies were developed. Wheat represents the product of genetic methods that were crude, often stumbling, less controllable, less predictable – far worse than genetic modification. Yes, believe it or not, modern genetic modification using gene-splicing technology to insert or delete single genes, as frightening as it may be in its implications to mess with nature’s design, represents a substantial improvement over what geneticists were doing previously.

      Using breeding methods that pre-date genetic modification, geneticists were unable to precisely control which genes were changed, which genes were turned on or turned off and whether entirely new and unique genetic traits were created by accident. They simply looked for the characteristics relevant to their own interests, such as shorter height or greater yield, but had no real interest in nor insight into what the total package did to humans. Why would they, since none of us ever asked?

      And yet the products of these stumbling early efforts at creating ‘improved’ genetic variations of your food are already on your supermarket shelves. And you’ve been consuming them for something like 35 years.

      Healthy Whole . . . What?

      ‘Healthy whole grains’. It is the mantra you hear and see repeated dozens of times each day in TV commercials, on cereal boxes and bread wrappers, and by well-meaning people offering nutritional advice. The message is delivered by happy mums, sports figures, superheroes and well-dressed leprechauns, well-intentioned nutritionists and concerned doctors. Whole grains are good for everybody, they say: every man, woman and child, from infancy on up to our retirement years. Whole grains reduce weight gain, colon cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Whole grains make you regular. Whole grains should represent the biggest part of your diet every day.

      Just what are ‘healthy whole grains’? By ‘grains’, we nearly always mean wheat. After all, how many times a day do you sit down to a sandwich with bread made of sorghum flour, breakfast cereal made of quinoa or pancakes made with millet and buckwheat? If you are like most people, it is rare to never. It’s wheat that constitutes nearly all of what most people consider ‘whole grains’ and thereby dominates consumption. Whole wheat, along with white flour products in their many and varied forms, dominates the diets of most people, adding up to 20 per cent of all human calories. It’s wheat that’s in your pizza base, bagels, pretzels, bread, pasta, muffins, breakfast cereals, doughnuts, beefburger and hot dog rolls, dinner rolls, breadcrumbs and breading, pittas, wraps, subs and sandwiches. And those are just the obvious sources.

      Grains occupy the widest part of the former Food Pyramid, and now the largest segment of the Food Plate, the graphic renditions of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. School lunch programmes aim to include more ‘healthy whole grains’, and educators teach children that ‘healthy whole grains’ should be a part of every child’s daily eating habits. Grains, we are told, are good for us, and without them our health will suffer.

      So, just what is this thing called ‘wheat’ that occupies a huge chunk of the modern diet?

      It’s not what you thought it was. I would argue that it’s not wheat, or at least it is far removed from the wheat of 1950 that predates the extensive genetics transformations introduced during the 1960s and 1970s. But these crude genetics efforts were successful in delivering what geneticists were striving for: increased yield. To a lesser degree, efforts in wheat breeding were aimed at cultivating characteristics like resistance to drought or high temperature, or the ability to fight infestations like moulds. But most of the genetic changes introduced into modern wheat were performed to increase yield-per-acre. And, from the perspective of yield, the new genetic strains of wheat were successful – on a grand scale. From the perspective of Third World countries, for instance, that adopted high-yield wheat strains in the 1970s, famine was converted to surplus within a year of their introduction. High-yield strains of wheat became cause for celebration.

      But the day after the big party brings the . . . hangover. Sure, it yielded previously unimaginable riches in yield and fed the hungry. But at what price?

      This modern product of genetics research looks different. Nearly all the wheat grown today in all parts of the world stands 1½ feet to 2 feet tall, a semi-dwarf strain (full dwarf strains stand 1 to 1½ feet tall) with a thick shaft that resists buckling in the wind and rain, a large seedhead and larger-than-normal seeds. (Seeds are harvested to make flour.) With heavy nitrogen fertilizer application, modern semi-dwarf wheat yields tenfold more per acre than its traditional 4½-foot-tall predecessor.

      But changes in height and yield are only the start. Outward changes in appearance are unavoidably accompanied by changes in biochemical makeup. Just one hybridization, for instance, of two parent wheat plants can yield 5 per cent unique proteins not found in either parent. Modern high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat is not the result of a few hybridizations, but the result of thousands of hybridization events conducted by geneticists, repeated breeding to select for qualities like height and seed size, resulting in the creation of many unique proteins and other compounds. And breeding efforts ventured much further than just crossing two plants, often employing techniques we’d СКАЧАТЬ