WHEAT BELLY
by William Davis, M.D.
WHEAT: THE UNHEALTHY WHOLE GRAIN
PANTING AND SWEATING IN THE HEARTLAND
I practice preventive 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 go to 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
240pound 18-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, 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.
Ask the USDA or the Surgeon General's office and they will tell
you that Americans are fat because they drink too many soft
drinks, eat too many potato chips, drink too much beer, and don't
exercise enough. And those things may indeed be true. But that's
hardly the whole story.
Many overweight people, in fact, are quite health conscious. Ask
anyone tipping the scales over 250 pounds: What do you think
happened to allow such incredible weight gain? You may be
surprised at how many do not say "I drink Big Gulps, eat Pop
Tarts, and watch TV all day." Most will say something like "I
don't get it. I exercise five days a week. I've cut my fat and
increased my healthy whole grains. Yet I can't seem to stop
gaining weight!"
THE CREATION OF MODERN WHEAT
Real Wheat
What was the wheat grown ten thousand years ago and harvested by
hand from wild fields like? That simple question took me to the
Middle East-or more precisely, to a small organic farm in western
Massachusetts.
There I found Elisheva Rogosa. Eli is not only a science teacher
but an organic farmer, advocate of sustainable agriculture, and
founder of the Heritage Wheat Conservancy (www.growseed.org), an
organization devoted to preserving ancient food crops and
cultivating them using organic principles. After living in the
Middle East for ten years and working with the Jordanian,
Israeli, and Palestinian GenBank project to collect nearly
extinct ancient wheat strains, Eli returned to the United States
with seeds descended from the original wheat plants of ancient
Egypt and Canaan. She has since devoted herself to cultivating
the ancient grains that sustained her ancestors.
My first contact with Ms. Rogosa began with an exchange of
e-mails that resulted from my request for two pounds of einkorn
wheat grain. She couldn't stop herself from educating me about
her unique crop, which was not just any old wheat grain, after
all. Eli described the taste of einkorn bread as "rich, subtle,
with more complex flavor," unlike bread made from modern wheat
flour, which she claimed tasted like cardboard.
Eli bristles at the suggestion that wheat products might be
unhealthy, citing instead the yield-increasing, profit-expanding
agricultural practices of the past few decades as the source of
adverse health effects of wheat. She views einkorn and emmer as
the solution, restoring the original grasses, grown under organic
conditions, to replace modern industrial wheat.
A Good Grain Gone Bad?
Given the genetic distance that has evolved between modern-day
wheat and its evolutionary predecessors, is it possible that
ancient grains such as emmer and einkorn can be eaten without the
unwanted effects that attach to other wheat products?
I decided to put einkorn to the test, grinding two pounds of
whole grain to flour, which I then used to make bread. I also
ground conventional organic whole wheat flour from seed. I made
bread from both the einkorn and conventional flour using only
water and yeast with no added sugars or flavorings. The einkorn
flour looked much like conventional whole wheat flour, but once
water and yeast were added, differences became evident: The light
brown dough was less stretchy, less pliable, and stickier than a
traditional dough, and lacked the moldability of conventional
wheat flour dough. The dough smelled different, too, more like
peanut butter rather than the standard neutral smell of dough. It
rose less than modern dough, rising just a little, compared to
the doubling in size expected of modern bread. And, as Eli Rogosa
claimed, the final bread product did indeed taste different:
heavier, nutty, with an astringent aftertaste. I could envision
this loaf of crude einkorn bread on the tables of third century
BC Amorites or Mesopotamians.
I have a wheat sensitivity. So, in the interest of science, I
conducted my own little experiment: four ounces of einkorn bread
on day one versus four ounces of modern organic whole wheat bread
on day two. I braced myself for the worst, since in the past my
reactions have been rather unpleasant.
Beyond simply observing my physical reaction, I also performed
fingerstick blood sugars after eating each type of bread. The
differences were striking.
Blood sugar at the start: 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming
einkorn bread: 110 mg/dl. This was more or less the expected
response to eating some carbohydrate. Afterwards, though, I felt
no perceptible effects-no sleepiness, no nausea, nothing hurt. In
short, I felt fine. Whew!
The next day, I repeated the procedure, substituting four ounces
of conventional organic whole wheat bread. Blood sugar at the
start: 84 mg/dl. Blood sugar after consuming conventional bread:
167 mg/dl. Moreover, I soon became nauseated, nearly losing my
lunch. The queasy effect persisted for thirty-six hours,
accompanied by stomach cramps that started almost immediately and
lasted for many hours. Sleep that night was fitful, though filled
with vivid dreams. I couldn't think straight, nor could I
understand the research papers I was trying to read the next
morning, having to read and reread paragraphs four or five times;
I finally gave up. Only a full day and a half later did I start
feeling normal again.
I survived my little wheat experiment, but I was impressed with
the difference in responses to the ancient wheat and the modern
wheat in my whole wheat bread. Surely something odd was going on
here.
My personal experience, of course, does not qualify as a clinical
trial. But it raises some questions about the potential
differences that span a distance of ten thousand years: ancient
wheat that predates the changes introduced by human genetic
intervention versus modern wheat.
..........
TO MY SHOCK, I HAD NO IDEA THAT MODERN SCIENCE HAS GM
(GENETICALLY MODIFIED) WHEAT FOR A NUMBER OF DECADES NOW.
THIS IS THE SHOCKING TRUTH OF THE MATTER AS WILLIAM
DAVIS BRINGS OUT IN THE FIRST 30 PAGES OF HIS BOOK.
THEN HE GOES INTO DETAIL AND GIVES YOU MIND-BENDING
FACTS ON THE WHOLE MESS THAT MODERN SCIENCE HAS
PRODUCED, AND THE STAFF OF LIFE, AS WHEAT WAS CALLED, IS
TODAY THE SOURGE OF LIFE.
YOU NEED TO HAVE THIS BOOK.
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