Why Life is Better Without Wheat

If you are given the kindergarten version of a healthy diet, well, you can expect mediocre results at best, disastrous results at worst. 

Why not graduate to a higher level of dietary understanding? But don't count on obtaining such insights from conventional sources. Here are some cold, hard facts about the consumption of wheat and grains that everyone should be aware of. 

Transcript

The Case Against Modern Wheat

William Davis, MD 0:00

Let's talk about why life and health are far better without wheat in your life. Now I started this conversation a number of years ago in my Wheat Belly books, and despite its wide distribution and the millions of people who've read it worldwide, there's still lots and lots of people who've not heard this. And of course, we continue to hear that you should eat lots of healthy whole grains or similar types of messaging to be healthy. And of course, that's we're going to talk about that is complete nonsense. And of course, wheat flour in some form and other ingredients are common ingredients in processed and ultra-processed foods. And so pretzels, chips, etc., all almost always have wheat, flour, or a relative like corn flour or cornstarch in it. So why is life better without wheat? Now I'm talking specifically about modern wheat, and that's important to know. Not to say that traditional strains of wheat are harmless. They are not harmless, they're less harmful. But what we're being sold today called wheat in all its varied forms pasta, breads, rolls, cakes, cookies, pretzels, all those varied forms are nearly all, 99% of the time, are derived from something called high-yield semi-dwarf wheat. That is a strain of wheat that was essentially created in a laboratory many years ago with good intentions, not evil intentions. So there were scientists, the U.S. government, the Mexican government, the Rockefeller Foundation, funded a large research effort, oddly, east of Mexico City. And they did it there because there it's warm. And they had two growing seasons, so the process of growing crops and experimenting was faster. Well, they succeeded with wheat, and especially Dr. Norman Borlog, an agricultural scientist from Minnesota, was kind of the lead guy on that, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing this high-yield semi-dwarf wheat. Because up until that time, you know, there's still starvation in the world. But back then, 50, 60, 70 years ago, starvation was much worse. Well, when they invented this high-yield semi-dwarf wheat, it increased yield per acre about four to eight fold, which is a lot for farmers. And so that meant that agencies like the World Health Organization and others who tried to respond to parts of the world that were suffering from hunger and starvation, like Ethiopia or Sudan, they would send in large piles of food, mostly wheat, flour, wheat seed, corn, and soy. And they knew, by the way, when they shipped in the wheat, that they would have to supplement iron and zinc in the children, or else children will experience growth retardation and learning impairments. They actually knew this, they've known this for decades. And that's because there's something called phytates in wheat that have been enriched in the modern form of wheat. And those phytates bind minerals like iron and zinc, as well as magnesium, manganese, and calcium, and it causes you to pass those things out in the toilet. So it causes mineral deficiency. So this becomes a real issue with children. So the World Health Organization has been well aware of this and they try to compensate for it. Well, so modern wheat is a much larger problem than traditional wheat was because a lot of the efforts they introduced, a lot of the change they introduced, amplified a lot of the problems that were present in traditional strains of wheat. They just made them worse. So let's list some of the reasons why your life improves when you buck national guidelines and national trends and you banish wheat and grains from your life. Well, when you do so, you banish something called the gliodin protein. People say gluten, but it's the gliodin within gluten that is the problem, most of the problems in autoimmune diseases and inflammation. So that gliodin protein has been worsened by those agricultural scientific experiments, and it made it more immunogenic, that is, more likely to provoke immune responses, including autoimmune diseases. So we have good evidence. Dr. Alessio Fasano's data, for instance, from University of Maryland, now Harvard, he generated elegant, detailed evidence to show us that it's the gliden protein that initiates the autoimmune process, leading to, say, rheumatoid arthritis or type 1 diabetes. And so all the other autoimmune diseases like lupus and autoimmune hepatitis have not all fully been studied, but it's likely they probably share the same kind of initiating factor, that is, exposure to the gliden protein. Gliotin also, it's a protein, of course, in wheat, and you don't have the digestive enzymes that allow you to fully break down that protein. You can only break it down to four or five amino acid long peptides. Very much unlike, say, other proteins in an egg or a piece of pork or a piece of beef or salmon. Those proteins your body breaks down into single amino acids so that it can convert those amino acids into the proteins of your body. When you consume the gliden protein of wheat, you don't have the enzymes to break it down to single amino acids, so you break them down only into four or five amino acid-long peptide fragments. Now, those peptide fragments are very unique in that they have opioid properties. They cross into the brain and bind to the opioid receptors. Now, there's many different kinds of opioid receptors, not all opioids have the same effect. For instance, this doesn't have the same effect, say, as morphine. What it does is it activates appetite. It increases appetite. So when you go wheat-free and thereby gliadin-free, most people experience a dramatic reduction in appetite. It may take a few days because there's also kind of a modest opioid withdrawal syndrome, nausea, vomiting, headache, depression, disrupted sleep, nightmares. It lasts three to five days, and most people, some people don't get it at all. Don't know why, but uh about half the population who does this gets those uh withdrawal symptoms. And then you're completely freed of this impulsive hunger feeling, that gnawing, desperate hunger that made you hungry all the time, even an hour or two after eating, or after filling yourself up with a big bowl of pasta, but you're still hungry. Those are all due to the opioid appetite triggering effect of those polypeptide fragments from the gliden protein. How about wheat germaglutinin? It sounds like gluten, it's unrelated, it's another protein unrelated in wheat. It's called a glutinin because when wheat germaglutin is exposed to blood, it causes agglutination, blood clot formation. And we know that when you eat anything that contains some wheat germaglutinin, which all wheat products do, a little bit is absorbed into the bloodstream. We know this for with confidence because many people, most people have antibodies to that protein, to wheat germaglutin. Now, how much of a role does wheat germagglutinin play in causing diseases or conditions involving blood clot formation like heart attack or stroke or pulmonary embolus or deep vein thrombosis? This has not been fully explored, but it's likely that plays something of a role, but that needs to be explored further. Or you could just say, I'm not going to eat anything that has wheat germaglutin in it. Another problem is the amylopectin A of wheat. That's the carbohydrate unique to wheat. So a lot of the problems from wheat and related grains are due to the proteins that are not fully digestible. The amylopectin A carbohydrate, unique to wheat and grains, is different. It is highly digestible, including in the mouth. Any place where the enzyme amylase is present. So your saliva has plenty of this enzyme, amylase. And when you put anything made of wheat in your mouth, the salivary amylase begins the process of breaking that amylopectin A into sugar, into glucose molecules. And that's why we know that tooth decay explodes in people who consume wheat and thereby source of the amylopectin A. And this was true both in the modern world and it was true with traditional strains of wheat also. When humans first began to adopt wheat for the first time, so we didn't eat wheat for the first 99% of our time on this planet. We added wheat relatively recently, speaking evolutionarily and anthropologically. We added wheat very recently, and that's when we saw an explosion in tooth decay. Tooth decay went from something that was very uncommon, 1 to 3% of all teeth recovered, to very common, 16 to 49% of all teeth recovered after the in and we started consuming wheat in the modern diet in the Middle East about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. So we know this with confidence. So the amylopectin A causes tooth decay and other dental problems. It also promotes formation of small LDL particles. That's the real cause, one of the real causes of coronary disease and heart attack. The world is obsessed with this nonsense about LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol and statin drugs and saturated fat. This is a waste of time. It's nonsense. It should have been discarded. Those concepts should have been discarded decades ago. We now know with confidence. One of the main drivers, there's others, one of the main drivers of caron rate disease, carnivore athertoch plaque, is an excess of small LDL particles. It's very uncommon to not have an abundant quantity of small LDL particles. If you did a nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR lipoprotein panel, you would typically see something like 1800 or 2400 nanomoles per liter, particle count per volume, of small LDL particles, comprising something like 70, 80, or 100% of all LDL particles. Not LDL cholesterol, the crude indirect marker for lipoproteins, but the actual lipoproteins themselves. And the amylopectin A in wheat and grains is a potent stimulant for the formation of small LDL. If you want to know more about that, see my other videos, my uh Define Health podcasts, my books, of course, where I talk about how the amylopectin A provides the fuel for your liver's production of small LDL particles. This is a kind of a complex pathway that has been worked out that shows us how that happens. That amylopectin A is also responsible for extravagant rises in blood glucose. So if you ate, say, a sandwich with two slices of whole grain bread, your blood glucose is going to go sky high. If you look at any table of glycemic indexes, that is a table that shows how high blood glucose goes after consumption of some food, you see that at the top of the list is anything made of wheat. It could be white flour products like white flour bread, it could be whole grain products or whole wheat. It doesn't make a difference. They're all at the top. The only foods that are higher than wheat are cornstarch, rice flour, tapioca starch, and potato starch. The ingredients in these awful gluten-free foods. You can see how confusing this gets for some people who say, okay, I went wheat and grain free, now I eat gluten-free, and I buy gluten-free processed foods. That's why I became a type 2 diabetic, gained 27 pounds, my waist expanded by six inches. So don't do that. Don't fall for the trickery of the food industry who are willing, they're standing right there waiting for you to trip up and waiting to sell you garbage products because you didn't know the full story. So don't fall for the nonsense where we replace wheat, grains, and gluten with gluten-free process foods. Now there are other problems in wheat, but that those are the big ones. The glide in protein of wheat that initiates autoimmune diseases and yields gliden-drive opioid peptides that drive appetite, that stimulate appetite. Wheat germaglutin, it's a bowel toxin, has other effects like blood clot formation, the phytates that bind minerals, the amylopectinate that raises blood glucose, triggers formation of small LDL particles, and leads to heart attack and sudden cardio death. I mean, think about that. These are pretty darn serious things. And yet you can get rid of them. And if you were to track biomarkers, blood markers, if you were to track your NMR lipoproteins, but specifically tracking small LDL particle number. If you were to track some of the values in a standard cholesterol panel, as you know, if you before my conversation, you know I say, don't pay any attention to LDL cholesterol, total cholesterol. But the HDL and the triglycerides do mean something. You'll see HDL go way up, you'll see triglycerides go way down, achieve, for instance, our triglyceride target level of 60 milligrams per deciliter or less. If you follow fasting glucose, you'll see that plummet. If you follow hemoglobin A1C, that measure of long-term blood glucose, you'll see that drop, though it may take six months because it's very slow to respond, because hemoglobin A1C is essentially a 90-day moving average, so that takes longer, but you'll see that drop. You'll see blood pressure drop. You may see other wonderful things happen. In other words, life without wheat, it's not just about losing a few pounds. It's not just being about gluten-free and eating gluten. You can see how many layers of misinformation are possible if you don't understand the whole range of issues involved. So if you want more on this, of course, my wheat bullet books, as old as they are, 15 years old, you'll see all this laid out, references, scientific rational, whole thing. And of course, if you want the modern version of this, join my conversations and all the things I mentioned. My YouTube channel, of course, my Define Health Podcast, my thousands of blog posts, William DavisNB.com. But if you need support and conversation, then I invite you to join our conversations in my inner circle.dr Davis Infinite Health.com.