William MD - Wheat Belly

Another comment came from Cindy, a woman whose obsession with food was controlling her life. ‘I was in constant turmoil over eating; I couldn’t understand how the educated, intelligent, strongwilled person I believed myself to be could become totally defeated by food. I was completely exhausted by my preoccupation with eating, not eating, dieting, binging, crying, hating myself, dieting again, binging and hating myself more. I was at the end of my rope,’ she said. Then she found Wheat Belly and her life changed. ‘After cutting out the wheat, I could barely believe the feeling of calm that descended upon my life. The weight dropped off, my depression lifted and I too experienced all of the amazing things everyone else had reported. I now love my food, but I rarely think about it anymore.’

Multiply those wonderful stories by several thousand and you get a sense of what unfolded in just the first several months of Wheat Belly ’s publication.

When the original Wheat Belly hit the bookstores, I already knew that this message had the potential to change lives, achieve astounding quantities of weight loss, and turn around conditions such as depression, eating disorders, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol, skin rashes, joint pain, heart disease, fatty liver and hundreds of other conditions. I knew this because I’d already witnessed such transformations in thousands of people in my cardiology practice and online discussions, backed up by a surprising wealth of science already available. What I did not anticipate was the tidal wave of people embracing this message. I credit that to the phenomenon of social media and the awesome potential of shared experiences.

When people tell their stories on Facebook or Twitter, for instance, detailing their 56-pound weight loss over 6 months, relief from the disfigurement and pain of rheumatoid arthritis, and transitioning from barely being able to rise from a chair to running their first half-marathon, well … that makes for the kind of conversation that changes the world. It’s the same process that led to the overturn of despotic governments and the same process that can now make the difference between someone winning and losing a presidential election. We’ve now applied this miraculous, 21st-century formula to nutrition.

If you peel back the layers of the nutritional advice given to Americans by ‘official’ agencies through the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the USDA Food Pyramid or MyPlate, and the legions of dietitians and other providers of conventional dietary advice, we find the agendas of agribusiness, Big Food and other parties who stand to profit from such advice. We do not find objective, unbiased science, interpreted by the rules of logic.

We also find that the darling of all nutritional advice, the proposed centrepiece of every meal, the widest parts of the pyramid and plate – wheat – is something different today than it was 40 years ago. Just one look at a modern stalk of wheat and you will immediately know: this is not the wheat I remember, not the wheat I’ve seen in pictures, certainly not the wheat I saw as a kid. It’s been changed. That fundamental insight – that many of our foods have been changed by the efforts of agribusiness and genetics, whether the methods were ‘genetic modification’ (using gene splicing techniques, as used to create genetically modified corn) or repetitive hybridization and mutagenesis (the purposeful induction of mutations using chemicals, gamma rays and x-rays, used to create new strains of wheat) – is a growing reality in the 21st-century. Contrary to the claim of geneticists and agribusiness, the full implications of the changes introduced into such crops are not known, but are showing themselves in a variety of ways in the humans who consume them.

Some people, understandably wary of a notion as revolutionary and potentially disruptive as doing away with all things wheat, have asked: ‘Is this elimination based solely on anecdote, or is there clinical data to back it up?’ When I first set out to understand why the removal of wheat might result in such extravagant health and weight changes, I talked to agricultural geneticists, studied their experimental data and probed the data generated by physicians to study conditions such as coeliac disease. What I found was that an astounding amount of science had already been collected that showed us the following: 1) Modern wheat has undergone change in several crucial components, such as the gliadin protein and others; 2) These changes have been associated with various effects in humans, such as intestinal inflammation outside of coeliac disease and an astounding array of mind effects; 3) Direct connections between wheat consumption and conditions such as diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, had been conclusively made … but virtually nobody had collected the data into one place nor dared question conventional advice that advocates essentially unrestrained consumption of the new modern strains of wheat.

Alongside my efforts to explore and understand the changes introduced into modern wheat were my efforts to help people rid themselves of this component of diet. One of the experiences I observed was the 38-year-old schoolteacher (whose story I tell in more detail in this book) who, on the eve of her colon-removal surgery, experienced complete relief from her ulcerative colitis, so dramatically improved that she was able to stop her medications as well as not have her colon removed. After twelve years of failed response to drugs, constant abdominal pain, diarrhoea and intermittent intestinal hemorrhage, she was now essentially cured with removal of all wheat from her diet. That experience spurred me on to share this collection of insights, or else people might undergo such awful things as colon removal or worse, never understanding that wheat is what lies at the root of the entire problem.

Thus was born Wheat Belly . And the nutritional world has never been the same.

INTRODUCTION CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication For Dawn, Bill, Lauren and Jacob, my companions on this wheat-free journey In order to protect the privacy of patients, some names and personal details have been changed. Foreword Introduction PART ONE WHEAT: THE UN HEALTHY WHOLE GRAIN Chapter 1 What Belly? Chapter 2 Not Your Gran’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 Coeliac Disease Chapter 7 Diabetes Nation: Wheat and Insulin Resistance Chapter 8 Dropping Acid: Wheat as the Great pH Disrupter Chapter 9 Cataracts, Wrinkles and Dowager’s Humps: Wheat and the Ageing 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 the Skin PART THREE SAY GOODBYE TO WHEAT Chapter 13 Goodbye, Wheat: Create a Healthy, Delicious, Wheat-Free Life Epilogue Appendix A Looking for Wheat in All the Wrong Places Appendix B Healthy Wheat Belly-Shrinking Recipes List of Searchable Terms Acknowledgements References About the Publisher

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-eight dresses and the men sported 32-inch waists. Overweight was something measured only by a few pounds; obesity rare. Overweight children? Almost never. Any 42-inch waists? Not here. Fourteen-stone teenagers? Certainly not.

Why were the typical mums of the fifties and sixties, the stay-at-home housewives, as well as other people of that era, so much skinnier than the modern people we see at the beach, on the high street or in our own mirrors? While women of that era typically weighed in at 7½ to 8 stone, men at 11 or 12 stone, today we carry 4, 5, even 14 stone more .