Wheat Belly. William Davis, MD

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       CHAPTER 1

       WHAT BELLY?

      The scientific physician welcomes the establishment of a standard loaf of bread made according to the best scientific evidence. … Such a product can be included in diets both for the sick and for the well with a clear understanding of the effect that it may have on digestion and growth.

      —MORRIS FISHBEIN, MD, EDITOR, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, 1932

      IN CENTURIES PAST, a prominent belly was the domain of the privileged, a mark of wealth and success, a symbol of not having to clean your own stables or plow your own field. In this century, you don’t have to plow your own field. Today, obesity has been democratized: Everybody can have a big belly. Your dad called his rudimentary mid-twentieth-century equivalent a beer belly. But what are soccer moms, kids, and two-thirds of your friends and neighbors who don’t drink beer doing with a beer belly?

      I call it “wheat belly,” though I could have just as easily called this condition pretzel brain or bagel bowel or biscuit face since there’s not an organ system unaffected by wheat. But wheat’s impact on the waistline is its most visible and defining characteristic, an outward expression of the grotesque distortions humans experience with consumption of this grain.

      A wheat belly represents the accumulation of fat that results from years of consuming foods that trigger insulin, the hormone of fat storage. While some people store fat in their buttocks and thighs, most people collect ungainly fat around the middle. This “central” or “visceral” fat is unique: Unlike fat in other body areas, it provokes inflammatory phenomena, distorts insulin responses, and issues abnormal metabolic signals to the rest of the body. Visceral fat is responsible for effects as varied as cancer, knee arthritis, and infertility. In the unwitting wheat-bellied male, visceral fat also produces estrogen and other hormonal distortions that create “man breasts.” In susceptible females, the same inflammatory fat causes abnormally high testosterone levels, male-like facial hair, and infertility.

      The consequences of wheat consumption are manifested on the body’s surface but also reach deep down into virtually every organ of the body, from the intestines, liver, heart, and thyroid gland all the way up to the brain. In fact, there’s hardly an organ that is not affected by wheat in some potentially damaging way.

      PANTING AND SWEATING IN THE HEARTLAND

      I practiced cardiology in Milwaukee. Like many other midwestern cities, Milwaukee is a good place to live and raise a family. City services work pretty well, the libraries are first-rate, my kids attended quality public schools, and the population is just large enough to enjoy big-city culture, such as an excellent symphony and art museum. The people living here are a fairly friendly bunch. But … they’re fat.

      I don’t mean a little bit fat. I mean really, really fat. I mean panting-and-sweating-after-one-flight-of-stairs fat. I mean 240-pound eighteen-year-old women, SUVs tipped sharply to the driver’s side, double-wide wheelchairs, hospital equipment unable to accommodate patients who tip the scales at 350 pounds or more. (Not only can’t they fit into the CT scanner or other imaging device, but you wouldn’t be able to see anything even if they could. It’s like trying to determine whether the image in the murky ocean water is a flounder or a shark.)

      Once upon a time, an individual weighing 250 pounds or more was a rarity; today it’s a common sight among the men and women walking the mall, as humdrum as selling jeans at the Gap. Retired people are overweight or obese, as are middle-aged adults, young adults, teenagers, even children. White-collar workers are fat, blue-collar workers are fat. The sedentary are fat and so are athletes. White people are fat, black people are fat, Hispanics are fat, Asians are fat. Carnivores are fat, vegetarians are fat. Americans are plagued by obesity on a scale never before seen in the human experience. No demographic has escaped the weight-gain crisis.

      Wheat Belly Success Story: Katie