Wheat Belly. William Davis, MD

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      “Just came back from my annual physical, where I managed to shock the bejeezus out of my doctor, which is not an easy thing to do.

      “She looked at my vitals and last year’s report, looked at me, and said in complete surprise, ‘What have you been doing?! What happened to last year’s issues?’ Meaning dangerously low blood pressure, heart palpitations, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), Barrett’s esophagitis (a nasty little swallowing disorder), leg edema, unstoppable weight gain/BMI in the obese range, chronic fatigue and brain fog, and zero libido to be the frosting on that little cake of unpleasantness.

      “All of those issues have completely resolved, BMI normal and healthy, and my blood pressure has actually increased to normal. I’ve always had very low blood pressure, which caused fainting spells, edema, and heart palpitations. I’ve actually passed out right in front of her during exams in the past. Haven’t had any of those issues since starting this way of eating eleven months ago.

      “The ‘before’ was taken during a time when I was doing CrossFit three times a week, spin classes three times a week, and riding my bicycle hundreds of miles a week (yes, every week) to train for hundred-mile charity bike rides. All the while eating low-fat and ‘healthy’ whole grains and barely losing any weight. Would you just look at that butt! My doctor told a frustrated me that I just needed to exercise more and it would come off. I asked her what more could I do, wrestle a bear?!

      “The ‘after’ is me eighty pounds lighter after eighteen months grain-free. The cardiac issues are gone. And recovering from a broken ankle and being confined to a walking boot for almost two months. The muscles that I’ve worked so hard to build for years are finally showing. I’m fifty-three-and-a-half and am here to show that it’s never too late to get your health back and you’re never too old to start living! Soldier on, Wheat Belliers, and let your inner jock come out to play!”

      But if we look only at overweight people who are not severely malnourished at the time of diagnosis who remove wheat from their diet, it becomes clear that this enables them to lose a substantial amount of weight. A Mayo Clinic/University of Iowa study of 215 obese celiac patients showed 27.5 pounds of weight loss in the first six months of a wheat-free diet.¹¹ In another study, wheat elimination slashed the number of people classified as obese (body mass index, or BMI, 30 or greater) in half within a year.¹² Oddly, investigators performing these studies usually attribute the weight loss of wheat- and gluten-free diets to lack of food variety. (Food variety, incidentally, can still be quite wide and wonderful after wheat is eliminated, as I will discuss.)

      Advice to consume more healthy whole grains therefore causes increased consumption of the amylopectin A form of wheat carbohydrate, a form of carbohydrate that, for all practical purposes, is little different, and in some ways worse, than dipping your spoon into the sugar bowl.

      GLUTEN: WE HARDLY KNOW YA!

      If you were to add water to wheat flour, knead the mixture into dough, then rinse the glob under running water to wash away starches and fiber, you’d be left with a protein mixture called gluten.

      Wheat is the principal source of gluten in the diet, both because wheat products have come to dominate and because most Americans do not make a habit of consuming plentiful quantities of barley, rye, bulgur, kamut, spelt, einkorn, emmer, or triticale, the other sources of gluten. For all practical purposes, therefore, when I discuss gluten, I am primarily referring to wheat.

      While wheat is, by weight, mostly amylopectin A carbohydrate, gluten protein is what makes wheat “wheat.” Gluten is the unique component of wheat that makes dough “doughy”: stretchable, rollable, spreadable, twistable, baking gymnastics that cannot be achieved with rice flour, corn flour, or any other grain. Gluten allows the pizza maker to roll and toss dough and mold it into the characteristic flattened shape; it allows the dough to stretch and rise when yeast fermentation causes it to fill with air pockets. The distinctive doughy quality of the simple mix of wheat flour and water, properties food scientists call viscoelasticity and cohesiveness, are due to gluten. While wheat is mostly carbohydrate and only 10 to 15 percent protein, 80 percent of that protein is gluten. Wheat without gluten would lose all its unique qualities that transform dough into bagels, pizza, or focaccia.

      Glutens are the storage proteins of the wheat plant, a means of storing carbon and nitrogen for germination of the seed to create new wheat plants. Leavening, the “rise” process created by the marriage of wheat with yeast, does not occur without gluten, and is therefore unique to wheat flour.

      The term “gluten” encompasses two primary families of proteins, the gliadins and the glutenins. Gliadins, the protein group that most vigorously triggers the immune response in celiac and other diseases, has three subtypes: α/β-gliadins, γ-gliadins, and ω-gliadins. Importantly, gliadin proteins are responsible for effects beyond celiac disease, such as initiating autoimmune diseases, direct intestinal injury, and opiate effects on the brain, effects we shall discuss later. Glutenin proteins are long repeating structures, or polymers, of more basic units. The strength of dough is due to the large polymeric glutenins, a genetically programmed characteristic purposefully selected by plant breeders.¹³ Glutenins are likewise a source of health problems for unwitting humans consuming them.

      Gluten from one wheat strain can be quite different in structure from that of another strain. Gluten proteins produced by einkorn wheat, for example, are distinct from the gluten proteins of emmer, which are, in turn, different from the gluten proteins of the thousands of strains of Triticum aestivum.^{14, 15} Because fourteen-chromosome einkorn has the smallest chromosomal set, it codes for the fewest number and variety of glutens. Twenty-eight-chromosome emmer codes for a larger variety of gluten. Forty-two-chromosome Triticum aestivum has the greatest gluten variety, even before any human manipulation. Breeding efforts of the past sixty years have generated numerous additional changes in gluten-coding genes in Triticum aestivum.¹⁶ Because breeding efforts focus only on agricultural and baking interests and not on human health, genes contained in modern wheat are most frequently pinpointed as the source of glutens that trigger celiac disease, effects amplified compared to traditional strains.¹⁷