Wheat Belly. William Davis, MD

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       INTRODUCTION

      FLIP THROUGH YOUR parents’ or grandparents’ family albums and you’re likely to be struck by how thin everyone looks. The women probably wore size-4 dresses and men sported 32-inch waists. Overweight was something measured by only a few pounds, obesity rare. Overweight children? Almost never. Any 42-inch waists? Not here. Two-hundred-pound teenagers? Certainly not.

      Why were the June Cleavers of the fifties and sixties, the stay-at-home housewives and other people of that era, so much slimmer than modern people we see at the beach, mall, or in our own mirrors? While women of that era typically weighed in at 110 or 115 pounds, men at 150 or 165 pounds, today we carry 50, 75, even 200 pounds more.

      The women of that world didn’t exercise much at all. (It was considered unseemly, after all, like having impure thoughts at church.) How many times did you see your mom put on her jogging shoes to go out for a three-mile run? Exercise for my mother was vacuuming the stairs. Nowadays I go outdoors on any nice day and see dozens of women jogging, riding bicycles, power walking—things we’d virtually never see fifty or sixty years ago. And yet, we’re getting fatter and fatter every year.

      I’ve observed many triathlon and marathon events over the years, as friends and family have engaged in such things. Triathletes train intensively for months to years before a race to complete a 1- to 2½-mile open water swim, a 56- to 112-mile bike ride, and finish with a 13- to 26-mile run. Just completing a race is a feat in itself, since the event requires up to several thousand calories and spectacular endurance.

      Then why are a third of these dedicated men and women athletes overweight? I give them even greater credit for having to cart around the extra 30, 40, or 50 pounds. But, given their extreme level of sustained activity and demanding training schedule, how can they still be overweight?

      If we follow conventional logic, overweight triathletes need to exercise more or eat less to lose weight. I believe that is a downright ridiculous notion. I am going to argue that the problem with the diet and health of most Americans, triathletes to couch potatoes, is not fat, not sugar, not the rise of the Internet and the demise of the agrarian lifestyle. It’s wheat—or what we are being sold that is called “wheat.”

      You will see that what we are eating, cleverly disguised as a bran muffin or toasted ciabatta, is not really wheat at all but the transformed product of genetic research conducted during the mid-twentieth century. Modern wheat is no more real wheat than a chimpanzee is an approximation of a human. While our hairy primate relatives share 99 percent of all genes found in humans, with longer arms, full body hair, and lesser capacity to win the jackpot at Jeopardy!, I trust you can readily tell the difference that 1 percent makes. Compared to its ancestor of only sixty years ago, modern wheat isn’t even that close.

      I believe that the increased consumption of grains—or, more accurately, the increased consumption of this genetically altered thing called modern wheat—explains the contrast between slender, sedentary people of the fifties and overweight twenty-first-century people.

      I recognize that declaring wheat a malicious food is like declaring that Ronald Reagan was a Communist. It may seem absurd, even unpatriotic, to demote an iconic dietary staple to the status of public health hazard. But I will make the case that the world’s most popular grain is also the world’s most destructive dietary ingredient.

      Documented peculiar effects of wheat on humans include appetite stimulation, exposure to brain-active exorphins (the counterpart of internally derived endorphins) with opioid properties, exaggerated blood sugar surges that trigger cycles of satiety alternating with heightened appetite, the process of glycation that underlies disease and aging, inflammatory and pH effects that erode cartilage and damage bone, activation of misguided immune responses, and disruption of the notion that men can be men and women can be women. A complex range of diseases results from consumption of wheat, from celiac disease—the devastating intestinal disease that develops from exposure to wheat gluten—to an assortment of neurological disorders, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, curious rashes, unwanted facial hair, infertility, and the paralyzing delusions of schizophrenia.

      If this thing called wheat is such a problem, then removing it should yield outsize and unexpected benefits. Indeed, that is the case. As a cardiologist who saw and treated thousands of patients at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and the myriad destructive effects of obesity, I have personally observed protuberant, flop-over-the-belt belly fat vanish when patients eliminated wheat from their diets, with typical weight loss totaling 20, 30, or 50 pounds just within the first few months. Rapid and effortless weight loss is usually followed by health benefits that continue to amaze me even today after having witnessed this phenomenon thousands of times.

      I’ve seen dramatic turnarounds in health, such as the thirty-eight-year-old woman with ulcerative colitis, with 24-hour-a-day pain, diarrhea, and hemorrhage, facing colon removal who was cured within days with wheat elimination—colon intact. Or the twenty-six-year-old man, incapacitated and barely able to walk because of joint pain, who experienced complete relief and walked and ran freely again after taking wheat off the menu.

      Extraordinary as these results may sound, there is ample scientific research to implicate wheat as the root cause of these conditions and to indicate that removal of wheat can reduce or relieve symptoms entirely. You will see that we have unwittingly traded convenience, abundance, and low cost for health with wheat bellies, bulging thighs, and double chins to prove it. Many of the arguments I make in the chapters that follow have been proven in scientific studies that are available for one and all to review. Incredibly, many of the lessons I’ve learned were demonstrated in clinical studies decades ago, but somehow never percolated to the surface of medical or public consciousness. I’ve simply put two and two together to come up with some conclusions that you may find startling.

      IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT

      In the movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s character, possessing uncommon genius but harboring demons of past abuse, breaks down in sobs when psychologist Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) repeats, “It’s not your fault” over and over again.

      Likewise, too many of us, stricken with an unsightly wheat belly and all its unpleasant accompaniments, blame ourselves: too many calories, too little exercise, not enough restraint. But it’s more accurate to say that the advice we’ve been given to eat more “healthy whole grains” has deprived us of control over appetites and impulses, making us fat and unhealthy despite our best efforts and good intentions.

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