Wheat Belly (Revised and Expanded Edition) Read online

  This book is intended as a reference volume only, not as a medical manual. The information given here is designed to help you make informed decisions about your health. It is not intended as a substitute for any treatment that may have been prescribed by your doctor. If you suspect that you have a medical problem, we urge you to seek competent medical help.

  Mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities in this book does not imply endorsement by the author or publisher, nor does mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities imply that they endorse this book, its author, or the publisher.

  Copyright © 2011, 2019 by William Davis, MD

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Rodale Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  rodalebooks.com

  RODALE and the Plant colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover and paperback in the United States by Rodale, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2011 and 2014 respectively.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781984824943

  Ebook ISBN 9781984824950

  Progress photos provided by the subjects

  Cover design by Amy C. King

  Cover photograph © Getty Images

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE WHEAT: THE UNHEALTHY WHOLE GRAIN

  CHAPTER 1 WHAT BELLY?

  CHAPTER 2 NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S MUFFINS: THE CREATION OF MODERN WHEAT

  CHAPTER 3 WHEAT DECONSTRUCTED

  PART TWO WHEAT AND ITS HEAD-TO-TOE DESTRUCTION OF HEALTH

  CHAPTER 4 HEY, MAN, WANNA BUY SOME EXORPHINS? THE ADDICTIVE PROPERTIES OF WHEAT

  CHAPTER 5 YOUR WHEAT BELLY IS SHOWING: THE WHEAT/OBESITY CONNECTION

  CHAPTER 6 HELLO, INTESTINE. IT’S ME, WHEAT. WHEAT AND CELIAC DISEASE

  CHAPTER 7 SWALLOW: IT CAN’T BE ALL THAT BAD…OR CAN IT?

  CHAPTER 8 DIABETES NATION: WHEAT AND INSULIN RESISTANCE

  CHAPTER 9 CATARACTS, WRINKLES, AND DOWAGER’S HUMPS: WHEAT AND THE AGING PROCESS

  CHAPTER 10 MY PARTICLES ARE BIGGER THAN YOURS: WHEAT AND HEART DISEASE

  CHAPTER 11 IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD: WHEAT AND THE BRAIN

  CHAPTER 12 BAGEL FACE: WHEAT’S DESTRUCTIVE EFFECT ON SKIN

  CHAPTER 13 DROPPING ACID: WHEAT AS THE GREAT pH DISRUPTER

  PART THREE SAY GOOD-BYE TO WHEAT

  CHAPTER 14 GOOD-BYE, WHEAT: CREATE A HEALTHY, DELICIOUS, WHEAT-FREE LIFE

  CHAPTER 15 LIFE WITHOUT WHEAT GETS EVEN BETTER

  CHAPTER 16 MR. AND MRS. WHEAT BELLY

  CHAPTER 17 WHEAT BELLY-SHRINKING RECIPES

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX A Looking for Wheat in All the Wrong Places

  APPENDIX B A Beginner’s Guide to Fermentation

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  References

  FOREWORD

  HAVE YOU EVER come home from the grocery store with a fresh container of milk, opened it and immediately realized that it was bad—sour-smelling, curdled, unfit to drink?

  Feed it to the cat? Probably not. Lighten your coffee? I don’t think so. Pour it down the drain—yeah, that’s the ticket. Or maybe go back to the store with some of the curdled remains and ask for your money back.

  That is what your reaction to conventional dietary advice should be. You should wrinkle your nose at the bad smell that emanates from advice that creates an astonishingly long list of health problems—from eczema to obesity, from Plantar fasciitis to colon cancer. Blessed by food manufacturers, extolled by dietitians, positioned on the most visible eye-level shelves in grocery stores, wheat is elevated to top of the list of foods to include in every meal by most doctors. Consensus dietary opinion has gotten us into a heap of trouble, creating an epidemic of bulging bellies and a market for insulin injections and toxic drugs designed to address the autoimmune conditions of people who waddle, limp, or ride scooters in XXL pants and dresses. This situation is unprecedented in human history.

  Should we accept the common judgment that the largest epidemic of chronic health issues in history is due to laziness, sloth, moral weakness, failure to tally calories in and calories out, mysterious and unidentified viral infections, as is often done by the medical community? Or might official dietary advice itself be the cause?

  Something big—really big—was sparked with the publication of Wheat Belly. I believe it helped restore a sense of smell to the public, helping many to realize that there indeed was something wrong in our diets that, despite long-term blessings from “official” sources of dietary wisdom, created a stink you couldn’t block out, no matter how many times you plugged your nose. The wheat might have been seven-grain, organic, and rich in fiber, but there was so much wrong with following the dictates of conventional advice, even when followed to a T. It prompted people to quote Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” after doctors admonished them for gaining weight, experiencing higher blood sugars, and feeling awful while following a diet low in fat and rich in “healthy whole grains.” “You need to try harder,” they’d be told. If not insanity, this was at least blatant irrationality.

  Several years after the initial publication of Wheat Belly and millions of readers later, it has become clear that our species made a huge blunder: seeds of grasses, i.e., wheat and its genetic cousins, do not belong in the human diet, let alone be promoted as healthy or necessary. You can’t eat the leaves, stalks, or husks of grasses—so why should we be able to consume the seeds?

  Not eating this thing called wheat, celebrated by virtually all who offer dietary advice, is a revelation as big as recognizing that trafficking humans is a bad idea or that enslaving populations for cheap labor is not right. You think I’m pushing the comparisons too far? I predict that, as you get into this book, you will soon recognize how deep, disabling, and prevalent the consequences of consuming wheat are for us, and that a comparison to enslavement is really not that far off. It’s not just a matter of avoiding gluten or reducing calories. You have to make healthy additions as well. If you were to disapprove of a lion’s lifestyle because you watched it tear open the abdomen of a wildebeest, then consume its liver, intestines, and heart, and then, out of disgust, replace its diet with kale and spinach—you would have a dead lion in short order. Restoring the human diet to its natural state, one programmed into our genetics, is like giving the lion another serving of wildebeest: It is lifesaving. Recognizing the fundamental error we made as a species by viewing the seeds of grasses as food is just as big a mistake, but one that we have barely started to recover from with wheat and related grains comprising 70 percent of all worldwide human calories. This is no small economic matter, either. Think of all the farmers, millers, bakers, food companies, dietitians, and multinational Big Agribusiness conglomerates that play a role in an industry created around this awful collection: seeds of grasses misconstrued as food. Undoing this mistake will be messy.

  Wheat Belly began as my modest effort to help people with heart disease stop relying on the revolving door of angioplasty, stents, and bypass surgery. The lifestyle that evolved from this effort did indeed bring a halt to chest pa
in and heart attacks, converting my procedural practice into one that was purely preventive with virtually no need for heart procedures or hospitals. But it proved to accomplish far more than that. Drugs to reduce blood sugar or blood pressure? Gone. Drugs for acid reflux or diarrhea? Flushed down the toilet. Statin drugs with all-expenses-paid trips to Orlando for the prescriber? Phooey. These efforts evolved into a comprehensive program that addressed a long list of common modern health conditions, from excess weight to type 2 diabetes, from autoimmune conditions to irritable bowel syndrome, along with hundreds of others. The explosive success of this approach, not just in the reduction of heart disease, but in improvements in so many other areas of health, means that the world of nutrition and health will never be the same.

  This new and expanded edition of Wheat Belly contains the latest version of this lifestyle, so readers can follow the strategies within as a stand-alone program. I detail the nutritional supplement program that compensates for nutrients deficient in former grain-eaters, as well as nutrients to compensate for deficiencies arising from living modern life. I introduce an in-depth discussion of the hormonal disruptions introduced by consuming “healthy whole grains” that I call Mr. and Mrs. Wheat Belly, showing how readers can take back personal control over hormonal health. I’ve updated the advice and added new recipes to incorporate all the lessons learned along the way as this lifestyle has been adopted by millions of people, making the message even more powerful and effective.

  This book includes material never before published in any of the books in the Wheat Belly series. After all, we are trying to unlearn the many lessons drilled into us, now realizing it was all wrong, learning new lessons along the way. And, you know what? It is liberating, exhilarating, and enormously empowering. The problem all along was not you.

  Now put down that onion bagel and dive in—your life, health, and appearance will never be the same, even minus the schmear.

  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.

  I liken the widely accepted advice to eat healthy whole grains to telling an alcoholic that, if a drink or two won’t hurt, nine or ten may be even better. Taking this advice will have disastrous repercussions on health.

  It’s not your fault.

  If you find yourself carrying around a protuberant, uncomfortable wheat belly; unsuccessfully trying to squeeze into last year’s jeans; reassuring your doctor that, no, you haven’t been eating badly, but you’re still overweight and prediabetic with high blood pressure and cholesterol and a fatty liver; or desperately trying to conceal a pair of humiliating man breasts or itchy red rashes on various body parts, consider saying good-bye to wheat.

  Eliminate the wheat, eliminate the problem.

  What have you got to lose except your wheat belly, your man breasts, or your bagel butt?

  PART ONE

  WHEAT: THE UNHEALTHY WHOLE GRAIN

  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