Wheat Belly. William MD Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ Dohan observed a similar pattern in the hunter-gatherer Stone Age culture of New Guinea. Prior to the introduction of Western influence, schizophrenia was virtually unknown, diagnosed in only 2 of 65,000 inhabitants. As Western eating habits infiltrated the New Guinean population and cultivated wheat products, beer made from barley, and corn were introduced, Dr Dohan watched the incidence of schizophrenia skyrocket sixty-five-fold.² On this background, he set out to develop the observations that established whether or not there was a cause-and-effect relationship between wheat consumption and schizophrenia.

      In the mid-sixties, while working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr Dohan and his colleagues decided to remove all wheat products from meals provided to schizophrenic patients without their knowledge or permission. (This was in the era before informed consent of participants was required, and before the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment became publicised, which triggered public outrage and led to legislation requiring fully informed participant consent.) Lo and behold, four weeks sans wheat and there were distinct and measurable improvements in the hallmarks of the disease: a reduced number of auditory hallucinations, fewer delusions, less detachment from reality. Psychiatrists then added the wheat products back into their patients’ diets and the hallucinations, delusions and social detachment rushed right back. Remove wheat again, patients and symptoms got better; add it back, they got worse.³

      The Philadelphia observations in schizophrenics were corroborated by psychiatrists at the University of Sheffield, with similar conclusions.⁴ There have since even been reports of complete remission of the disease, such as the seventy-year-old schizophrenic woman described by Duke University doctors, suffering with delusions, hallucinations and suicide attempts with sharp objects and cleaning solutions over a period of fifty-three years, who experienced complete relief from psychosis and suicidal desires within eight days of stopping wheat.⁵

      While it seems unlikely that wheat exposure caused schizophrenia in the first place, the observations of Dr Dohan and others suggest that wheat is associated with measurable worsening of symptoms.

      Another condition in which wheat may exert effects on a vulnerable mind is autism. Autistic children suffer from impaired ability to interact socially and communicate. The condition has increased in frequency over the past forty years, from rare in the mid-twentieth century to 1 in 150 children in the twenty-first.⁶ Initial small samples have demonstrated improvement in autistic behaviours with wheat-gluten removal.^{7, 8} The most comprehensive clinical trial to date involved fifty-five autistic Danish children, with formal measures of autistic behaviour showing improvement with gluten elimination (along with elimination of casein from dairy).⁹

      While it remains a topic of debate, a substantial proportion of children and adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may also respond to elimination of wheat. However, responses are often muddied due to sensitivities to other components of diet, such as sugars, artificial sweeteners, additives and dairy.¹⁰

      It is unlikely that wheat exposure was the initial cause of autism or ADHD but, as with schizophrenia, wheat appears to be associated with worsening of the symptoms characteristic of the conditions.

      Though the laboratory rat treatment of the unsuspecting schizophrenic patients in the Philadelphia VA Hospital may send chills down our spines from the comfort of our fully informed and consenting twenty-first century, it is nevertheless a graphic illustration of wheat’s effect on mental function. But why in the world are schizophrenia, autism and ADHD exacerbated by wheat? What is in this grain that worsens psychosis and other abnormal behaviours?

      Investigators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to find some answers.

      EXORPHINS: THE WHEAT–MIND CONNECTION

      Dr Christine Zioudrou and her colleagues at the NIH subjected gluten, the main protein of wheat, to a simulated digestive process to mimic what happens after we eat bread or other wheat-containing products.¹¹ Exposed to pepsin (a stomach enzyme) and hydrochloric acid (stomach acid), gluten is degraded to a mix of polypeptides. The dominant polypeptides were then isolated and administered to laboratory rats. These polypeptides were discovered to have the peculiar ability to penetrate the blood–brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain. This barrier is there for a reason. The brain is highly sensitive to the wide variety of substances that gain entry to the blood, some of which can provoke undesirable effects should they cross into your amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex or other brain structure. Once having gained entry into the brain, wheat polypeptides bind to the brain’s morphine receptor, the very same receptor to which opiate drugs bind.

      Zioudrou and her colleagues dubbed these polypeptides ‘exorphins’, short for exogenous morphine-like compounds, distinguishing them from endorphins, the endogenous (internally sourced) morphine-like compounds that occur, for instance, during a ‘runner’s high’. They named the dominant polypeptide that crossed the blood–brain barrier ‘gluteomorphin’, or morphine-like compound from gluten (though the name sounds to me more like a morphine shot in the butt). The investigators speculated that exorphins might be the active factors derived from wheat that account for the deterioration of schizophrenic symptoms seen in the Philadelphia VA Hospital and elsewhere.

      Even more telling, the brain effect of gluten-derived polypeptides is blocked by administration of the drug naloxone.

      Let’s pretend you’re an inner-city heroin addict. You get knifed during a drug deal gone sour and get carted to the nearest A&E. Because you’re high on heroin, you kick and scream at the staff trying to help you. So these nice people strap you down and inject you with a drug called naloxone, and you are instantly not high. Through the magic of chemistry, naloxone immediately reverses the action of heroin or any other opiate drug such as morphine or oxycodone.

      In lab animals, administration of naloxone blocks the binding of wheat exorphins to the morphine receptor of brain cells. Yes, opiate-blocking naloxone prevents the binding of wheat-derived exorphins to the brain. The very same drug that turns off the heroin in a drug-abusing addict also blocks the effects of wheat exorphins.

      In a World Health Organization study of thirty-two schizophrenic people with active auditory hallucinations, naloxone was shown to reduce hallucinations.¹² Unfortunately, the next logical step – administering naloxone to schizophrenics eating a ‘normal’ wheat-containing diet compared to schizophrenics administered naloxone on a wheat-free diet – has not been studied. (Clinical studies that might lead to conclusions that don’t support drug use are often not performed. In this case, had naloxone shown benefit in wheat-consuming schizophrenics, the unavoidable conclusion would have been to eliminate wheat, not prescribe the drug.)

      The schizophrenia experience shows us that wheat exorphins have the potential to exert distinct effects on the brain. Those of us without schizophrenia don’t experience auditory hallucinations from exorphins resulting from an onion bagel, but these compounds are still there in the brain, no different than in a schizophrenic. It also highlights how wheat is truly unique among grains, since other grains such as millet and flax do not generate exorphins (since they lack gluten), nor do they cultivate obsessive behaviour or withdrawal in people with normal brains or people with abnormal brains.

      So this is your brain on wheat: digestion yields morphine-like compounds that bind to the brain’s opiate receptors. It induces a form of reward, a mild euphoria. When the effect is blocked or no exorphin-yielding foods are consumed, some people experience a distinctly unpleasant withdrawal.

      What happens if normal (i.e., nonschizophrenic) humans are given opiate-blocking drugs? In a study conducted at the Psychiatric Institute of the University of South Carolina, wheat-consuming participants given naloxone consumed 33 per cent fewer calories at lunch and 23 per cent fewer calories at dinner (a total of approximately СКАЧАТЬ