This is a two-part overview I have prepared to answer the questions I have gotten in 2013 when I started 'back on a mission' about the consumption of 'modern day wheat' and it's effects on illness/wellness. I focus in this topic on William Davis, MD, author of Wheat Belly. There is a video overview of my notes from watching a video I suggest you take the time to at least go start to watch and decide if you want to invest and hour of your time and energy into fully learning from.
The second part is a is blog topic about the food industry lobby response and the marked decline in one year of sales of bread. You will see in the video and my notes about his presentation that he refers to his blog and gives hints on how to find things at it, so I hope by providing ONE topic from his blogsite/website, you will follow out to it as well and explore.
I also have included Wheat Belly in the campaign of early 2013 related to The UltraMind solution, as I felt that Wheat Belly and UltraMind (by Mark Hyman, MD) were a good combination and supported each other for those who wanted to learn more or start to learn, start to change how they eat or continue that process, and potentially find true solutions to why their bodies went from the natural state of wellness to illness or somewhere in between.
Note: Many people who are actually quite not 'well' do not identify the things they have going on in their bodies every day as being 'unwell'. So thing about how well or unwell you actually are. And I encourage you to invest the time, energy and divert money from things that are not in your best interests to things that are.
What I provide in the gut forum related to 'fix your gut and then your mind will get well too'/the UltraMind Solution takes into consideration the budgets that most people are on today out of necessity and those I have worked with over the years, who are about equal in numbers, who have a lot of money to spend on things but haven't opted to invest in FOOD. It is our true medicine.
You will see, below, that Dr Davis says that not a single human can escape the effects of modern day wheat on the body and wellness, and often the symptoms are being handled by the body in a way you're not seeing symptoms. YET. So if you're consuming wheat, no matter how well or ill you think you are, I encourage you to read this over, look into it more via the links I supply and decide how YOU want to vote with your next purchase and what you're going to be putting in your mouth from this moment forward. You will also see he understands this is a hard transition, as do I.
I have made it, as has he. As are increasing numbers of people and so, are you joining us or are you going to keep doing what you've been doing and stay with what you got and what will be ahead for you if you do not commit to doing something for the benefit of YOU! It is, up to you. Let me know if you need help, we do that around here at Lumigrate!
Video at YouTube of a 45 minute presentation with 20 minutes Q&A at "The IHMC".
Wheat: The UNhealthy Whole Grain. 29,561 have viewed so far as of 4/20/13.
Summary notes:
The history of wheat:
Wild wheat was incorporated into the diet in the Middle East 10,000 years ago. This ancestral form of wheat had 14 chromasomes.
Plants are able to mate and combine chromasomes.
By comparison: Humans' have 46 chromasomes and when they mate they mix and the offspring has 46 still.
The original wheat mixed before the time of the bible and Emmer wheat occurred, which is the wheat of The Bible. It has 28 chromasomes.
Emmer then mated with another grass that added another 14. That was the forerunner of our modern wheat.
In the 1960s, we were terrified of world population explosion and world hunger. The US and other governments, research foundations, universities, etcetera explored how to increase crop yield.
A photo in his presentation shows men standing in a field of wheat, a black and white photo, and the wheat was shoulder height . Researchers mated wheat strains with other grasses, literally thousands of experiments to yield the high-yield "modern wheat".
Shown is a 1970 cover of Life Magazine of the researcher who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the high yield semi-dwarf strain. Shows him holding the large seed heads and short, thick stalk of this high yield, semi dwarf wheat which yielded these incredible results, which accounts for why everyone has been consuming it since it was created:
4-10x more per-acre yield than the previous wheat. Once introduced into the third world countries, famine was converted to surplus in one year. Hence his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
This took over the world's wheat supply because of this yield and the realities of market competition. Everyone who wanted to stay in business had to adopt growing and producing this high-yield strain of wheat, and we essentially lost the older forms of wheat from the market's products.
CLEARFIELD wheat is a form of wheat produced in the Pacific Northwest of the US. The seeds and embryos area exposed to a chemical, which accidental comes with warnings for handling that if accidentally ingested, the hazards are so profound nobody is to give CPR because it will put the provider at risk if it gets on the responder. If the ingester vomits, the instructions are to not put it in the sink as it can explode, and he says this has actually occurred.
This is not 'genetic modification of an organism', it is shown in CLEARFIELD's materials to be called "enhanced, traditional plant breeding techniques". These techniques include chemical mutagenesis, gamma/x-ray genesis and other forms of affecting change on the seed and embryo.
No gene slicing was done to insert or remove, so it is technically not "GMO". In Dr Grey's opinion, the techniques of GMO are better than the techniques to generate a lot of the older crops, including 40 years of wheat.
The US Federal Government's Response - The Food Pyramid and now the Food Plate, both of which are heavily about 'grains' which in the US means 'wheat', and "modern wheat", at that, as we are all learning.
So what did the USDA do? They tell us to eat more grains with the food pyramid. "Grains" in N. America is 90% wheat., 10% other grains. The food pyramid instructed for us to get 60% of calories+, from wheat. The new food plate is more than 25% of the plate (plus you also have the beverage they suggest).
Wheat-Free versus Gluten-Free; Similar but very different for the consumer to learn about. In summary of this section, the GF products on the market currently are as bad for you in terms of the effects on blood sugar, worse in fact, than wheat is on the blood sugar, but you'll not get the effects on the gut/intestines and then brain from them so that's a positive. In the future, he forsees new products which will be manufactured with things that will address this issue about blood sugar.
What he says in the video in this portion is:
To clarify, this is NOT about "gluten-free" -- GF is popular today but for the wrong reasons. Celiacs and 8-10% of others in our modern wheat-eating societies have a sensitivity to this protein called 'gluten'. He's not focusing on them in his education, "I'm talking about the other 90%".
"No human could get away with eating this thing called gluten and get away with it" without some impact on their body (including the mind/brain).
So now that we know this is information pertaining to YOU/ME/us all -- What are the details about the wheat of today?
What's wrong with this new wheat? Gluten is a 2 part protein, (Gliadin + Glutenin).Glutenin has the visco-elasticity that almost nothing else has, hence the way a pizza can be hand tossed or pasta holds together and it and breads have that chewy texture so many people realize they enjoy.
The other protein is gliadin. "There's something whacky about gliadin." If you only take away one thing from this, take away that gliadin is whacky.
If they took all the wheat out of the diet of their schizophrenic patients, they improved dramatically. Add back the wheat, they'd get worse. This was reproduced a number of times. NIH asked 'why, what is in breads, pretzels, etc.". They studied it and found it was gliadin. It basically affects the brain like an opiate.
This lead to a whole research undertaking in psyche wards, after they were changed to be locked units where they had complete control over what patients were eating and do controlled studies with a lot of precision. Based on the opiate-like response on the brain of wheat, from the gliadin, studies were done where they gave opiate-blocking drugs, such as naloxone. (Naloxone and related medications are is used to reverse overdose of morphine, it's an opiate-blocking drug.) People consumed about 400 calories less when studied given the opiate-blocking drug.
The FDA application was made (about 2010) for (Naltrexone), a pill version of an opiate blocker, to be used for weight management, as it was shown to reduce weight in people by 26 pounds on average in the first six months.
Diabetes, Obesite
In the mid 80s, we had an explosion of weight in the US. Incredible slide by the CDC Division of Translation - National Diabetes Surveillance System... can be obtained at cdc.gov/diabetes-statistics, per the slide but you can view it in the video at 25 minutes into the video as well.
What does wheat do to people?
Gives them food obsessions in those with eating disorders
Behavioral outbursts - in people with autism and ADD/ADHD
Causes paranoia and hearing voices in people with schizophrenia
Triggers mania in people with bipolar disorder
In all (including those who are "healthy") it stimulates appetite.
Glycemic Index and Wheat/Other Foods
Two slices of whole wheat bread (a 'complex carbohydrate) raises blood sugar more than 6 spoons of white sugar, which is a "simple carbohydrate". Why is that?
The unique complex carbohydrate within wheat is called Amlopectin A and it is highly susceptible to an enzyme we have in our mouth and the rest of our digestive system. So it breaks down very fast in our digestive system (remember, digestion starts with the mouth and chewing.)
"I wish I could say I was the smartest guy in the world for figuring all this out but .... This is clear as day in the data, the wrong questions were being asked." (I paraphrase his exact words, but that was the essence of his statement.) People were just looking at things the wrong way.
(Personally, I think he might be one of the smartest guys in the world in the way that he has systematically peeled the onion about the wheat history and facts and strung it together in the way he presents it. I highly recommend you invest the minutes to at least start watching this video, at the link provided. The presentation is 45 minutes and they do 20 minutes of questions and answer from a great audience of consumers.
So people end up with repetitive high blood sugar because of wheat and therefore the Amlopectin A results in people getting visceral fat. This type of fat encircles the liver, the kidneys, etc. Hence "Wheat Belly" is how he titled the book but fat accumulates elsewhere as well.
Lectins are proteins that are toxic to molds, fungi, etc. Lots of plants have lectins and some are benign, like in spinach, and some are fatal.
"Wheat germ gluten" is a lectin in wheat (confusing a bit, he admits, as this is a different thing than 'wheat gluten', and somewhere in between harmless and poisonous such as the lectin's used in some publicized terrorist activities recently. The lectin of wheat, when fed in high concentrations to laboratory animals, induces change in the intestine similar to celiac disease.
Gliadin protein in wheat is a lot like cholera toxin in it's effect on the body.
The Intelligence of the Intestinal Walls and How Modern Day Wheat's Gliadin Breaches the Security System
The intestinal tract is smart, it decides what can enter the bloodstream. Gliadin breaks through that smartness of the intestine and allows things through the intestines that it wouldn't otherwise. So you'll see GI effects as well as system-wide, including in the brain. At 35 minutes into the video he elaborates on the types of inflammation which includes:
Inflammation in the intestine
joints
brain
thyroid
There is not a single organ that escapes this autoimmune/inflammatory effect.
What is Modern Medicine Doing?Treating the Effects of Modern Wheat Consumption or Finding and Treating the Causes?
What happens when we take this stuff out of the diet?
If there's the least bit of truth in this, the experiment of 1 would be easy. You try it yourself. Easy, right?
It ain't an easy thing to do. Because wheat is in everything.
It's the second ingredient in Twizzlers, notice you can't eat just one?
Campbell's tomato soup. Taco seasoning. Cereals. Granola bars.
Go back to 1960, and ask what foods contain wheat? Bread, pancake mix, pretzels. Pretty straightforward and we were eating much less of it in our diet overall.
In 2012, all the above still have wheat but today soup, salad dressings. Everything.
Why? is it for taste and texture or to stimulate consumption and sales? Why in the world is food in virtually everything?
(He remarks about it being hard to not think it's a conspiracy to push consumers to buy / consume more.)
This is not about switching to eating "gluten free product similars" -- Rice, corn, tapioca, corn are gluten free and the only things that raise blood sugar more than wheat are these grains.
"Nobody should be eating GF foods unless you understand they're not better than jelly beans." he said.
At 33:45 seconds he talks about autoimmune diseases -- So if you feel you have an autoimmune disease, please go to the video and to that point for specifics.
Elimanation of Wheat -- What Do People Experience?
Weight loss, 18-20# in first month in some people.
"Notice I didn't say to cut anything else. Lose the wheat, lose the appetite stimulating effect of the wheat. Just like it used to be when people would eat on something they killed, they'd sate themselves and not be hungry and eat for a couple of days" (again, a paraphrasing of his exact words for readability.)
Eat many small meals throughout the day? -- no human was meant to do that. (My note: But once you've become unwell as so many have from eating as we have our whole lives in these modern wheat times, we have to now compensate in that way until we get things reversed and back to how we are when we are 'well'.)
Bulemia and food obsession disorder, binge, purge, a life-destroying disorder. Their food disorders go away from the gliadin-effect going away when stopping wheat. Not that it is the only thing that helps them, or that everyone has this profound effect but it does occur.
Diabetics will have better blood sugars than when on drugs.
Joint pain in smaller joints, usually fingers and wrists, is gone and sooner than positive effects in larger joints.
By removing the inflammatory response that contributes to low back pain, hip pain, it might not eliminate it like with smaller joints, but you might reduce the pain by a significant amount, require less medication and that's always a good thing, then keep doing other strategies in addition to what you get from removing the inflammatory-inducing item from the diet.
(Note, he is VERY focused exclusively on wheat, I encourage you to look at the list of Nixable Nine I call them, at the topic I created on The UltraMind Solution where I initially mixed in some of the information from Wheat Belly. These two doctors and their books, in my mind, are a wonderful complement to each other but the other 8 things that are on the list of 9 with wheat are also extremely important to eliminate if they're causing inflammation in the body (and brain, thus affecting the mind).
Drops small LDL particulates
Increased energy.
Improved sleep
Less acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome.
What Do You Eat?
- NO G-F foods
- Vegetables
- Raw nuts, all you want, we don't worry about the fat, that's good for us.
- Meats
- Eggs, and the yolk's nutrients are very good for you.
- Oils - olive, coconut, avocado, walnut, flaxseed. Be very prudent to avoid others and I recommend you look at the video for specifics if you're one to have something other than these five in your pantry. And learn about the effects of heat on oils, olive oil heated turns to having bad effects on your body not good.
- Dairy is an uncertainty and for some people has to be avoided, but mostly for today's discussion, don't avoid it because of the fat. Fat is good for humans.
What about at parties?
Re-create common, everyday foods .. "reasonable faxsimiles" he called them
. Easy to make. Find them at
www.wheatbellyblog.com -- Search if you want brownies on the word 'brownie', for instance. The blog is 'horribly disorganized' he admits so cues to use the Search worlds. My personal experience is that most of the substitutes for things are so not what the food was like when made with wheat, I prefer to just 'not go there' and CREATE new things, not re-create modified versions of the old, but then again, I went wheat-free totally for the first time, for years, in 1995.
I regret that I was lulled by information provided by the cutting edge providers of my past who were saying 'once you get the inflammation out of your body, you can go back to eating the things you tested allergic to (in an IgG way). That is true for other foods, perhaps, not modern day wheat. I now know. As my motto says, Live and Learn, Learn and Live Better!
His statement, by the way, about his blog site, makes me feel better about Lumigrate, which is actually fairly well organized as it's not a blog site, it's a forum setup and I have a blog as well on the blog tab. For a middle aged woman who isn't particularly adept with technology and has as many brain injuries and 'hits to my brain' as it's had, I feel pretty good about what I've provided over the past five years since getting the concept off the ground for what became the Lumigrate you now have at your fingertips. I hope it is of service to YOU!
< (see the HOPE?) ... For YOU!
His talk ends at 47 minutes into the video.
Questions and Answers.
Ezekiel bread? Absolutely not.
Organic in wheat is just 'less bad'. No matter what you do to modern wheat, it remains ... modern wheat.
Prescription drugs and their content of wheat. -- There is wheat hidden in many things. This tends to be an issue for only those who are VERY sensitive. But it is worth knowing. Search on gluten, drug name, and you'll come to the website I'm blanking on, there's not a really great database. You can call the manufacturer but the CSR likely doesn't know.
The GF movement and Wheat Belly is helping making the manufacturers put this in the package insert.
What about rice as a starch instead of something with wheat in it? If we replace wheatflour with cornstarch, potato, rice -- those tend to raise blood sugar.
Remember when Swanson TV dinners came out? We cut our fat to eat healthy, whole grains, and we burned out out pancreases, so it's not uncommon to get
An apple or a banana gives many people near diabetic blood sugars.
If you want ideal help, also curtail all the carbohydrates for this high carbohydrate eating for 40 years. Most of us, particularly the middle age, do better by cutting out the rapidly digested carbohydrates.
Is there any amount of wheat that is acceptable? The crowd went 
"hahaha"
Answer: I would say 'no'... about 40% of people will say 'what the heck, I've been good' or you didn't know it was in something you ate. There are re-exposure reactions after you've been off of wheat, and it lasts about 2 days. Others feel fine, but not everything that goes on in the body is perceived by the person.
Even if you don't perceive that it's having a negative effect, it has the effect in the gut.
Another analogy: A good restaurant that 10% of time has a bacteria that you might possibly be affected by. Would you eat at that restaurant?
In 1950 we wouldn't have had this conversation because the wheat that was modified after that.
You're safe if you order most salads, most meats, get in the habit of 'is this breaded'? The more complex sauces can have it. Deserts are hard to find a substitute for at restaurants, you might have to go with fruit.
My note: I say, why bother, if you've been sated by your meal, why would you need desert. Consider carrying with you high quality, small chocolates individually wrapped so if they melt a little in your purse, they're still easy to peel and eat. If you're a man, consider carrying a little folder that would have that type of thing in it or find an adapted case for your reading glasses so many of us have to tote around to restaurants. Encourage restaurants to offer high quality chocolate on their menus.
Dr Davis travels a lot for the book and it's getting much easier to eat without getting wheat in your body, because of the increased awareness. You can't rely on wait staff often, you have to make a nuisance for yourself. If in doubt, don't eat it, it's not worth it.
Is drinkin' beer as bad as eatin' a loaf of bread, one man asks:
This is at 58minutes... the audience again
The French, who are thinner and are getting fatter as they adopt our habits. They eat more fat and have less heart disease, fat is very satiating. French don't eat the bulk of processed versions of so many of our foods. In Asia, wheat exposure is less.
Soba noodles are mostly buckwheat. Forms of wheat vary around the world, some are much worse than others, and I think we have the worst form in Canada. So other forms used in other countries, and cooking of it, do affect people. It's affecting other nations. There's been an explosion of celiac disease, there's been a quadrupling in the US and Canada and also in Europe.
Beer -- that gliadin affect, that affects the mind. Don't drink wheat-based beers. Malt is not so much the issue, Michelob Ultra is low carb and wheat free, Bud Light. Some of the microbreweries come out but they tend to be carb heavy. Redbridge by Budweiser is gluten free. Then we get into the differences of tolerances for it with people related to the carbs and effect on blood sugar.
Best guideline for amount of carbs / meal is 15 net carbs per meal or sitting. Net carbs is total grams of carbs minus grams of fiber.
GMO corn question. Answer: There's more problems, the wheat problem is part of agribusiness which sees fit to change our food. You ought to tell us, do testing and none of that is currently done.
Corn that you can spray Roundup on and it won't kill the corn, but now the data's being generated, the French study .
They studied fats fed traditional corn versus this form of modified corn; those consuming the modified corn developed large tumors, mostly of the breasts.
The public is asking for the simple consession that they be informed about the food they are offered to purchase and consume. And they're not getting it, so we have to raise a stink.
Vote with your wallet or pocketbook. Wheat, corns, soy -- don't buy them. (Note from me, it is generally said in the educational materials I pour over and see for many years that fermented soy is a whole different thing than nonformented, so this statement about not consuming soy might not be so relevant with the FERMENTED soy products.)
What are the best foods? The ones you grow at home, the farmer you know and you know how he raises his animals (or plants, naturally).
TheIHMC was where the talk was given, they have other videos, and again, the link for this video is: www.youtube.com/watch
I am adding it here to encourage you to see the way Dr Davis blogs.
The Wheat Lobby Smokescreen
The Wheat Lobby has been busy.
The Grain Foods Foundation, the Whole Grain Council, and other lobby/trade groups for the wheat industry are in panic mode. After all, a recent 4.5% reduction in bread sales for the year were just reported. While 4.5% is not a big percentage, it is a percentage of a huge number. This is big. Food Business News comments:
According to SymphonyIRI Group (a Chicago-based market research firm), unit sales of fresh bread declined 4.5% in the 52 weeks ended Jan. 22 [2012] . . . The one-year volume decline likely was the steepest in the history of sliced bread. [Emphasis mine.]
So the Wheat Lobby and trade groups have been organizing behind several counterarguments to maintain the “healthy whole grain” franchise, including:
“Wheat is not genetically-modified.”
Dr. Glenn Gaesser of the Grain Foods Foundation recently offered this “counterargument” on a TV interview I did. This statement has also cropped up a number of times in various articles and reports that aim to counter the claims I am making, suggesting that it is part of a concerted, planned defense.
They are correct: Wheat is not genetically-modified. In the language of geneticists, “genetic modification” or genetic engineering refers to the use of gene-splicing technology to insert or remove a gene. While wheat has indeed been extensively genetically-modified in laboratory settings, no genetically-modified strain of wheat is on the open market. And I never said it was.
But that does not mean that the genetics of wheat have not been changed. Its genetics, in fact, have beenextensively changed using techniques that include hybridization, repeating backcrossing (to winnow out specific characteristics like short height or seed head size), embryo rescue (to rescue otherwise fatal mutations), and chemical, gamma ray, and x-ray mutagenesis (induction of mutations, used for instance to create the popularClearfield strain of wheat that is herbicide-resistant). These techniques, as any geneticist will tell you, are far less predictable, less controllable . . . far worse than the act of inserting or removing just one gene. But that is conveniently left out of the sound bites that come from the Wheat Lobby.
“Grains have been eaten by humans for thousands of years.”
Well, humans have been enslaved for thousands of years, children put to work and abused, the strong dominated the weak . . . but that doesn’t justify any of it.
Whole grains of 2012 are also not the whole grains of 1950, the 19th century, the Bible, or pre-biblical times. Modern wheat, in particular, is genetically distant from its predecessors, thanks to the extreme genetic changes (not genetic modification!) inflicted on wheat in the 1960s and 1970s in the name of increased yield-per-acre.
“Healthy whole grains have repeatedly been shown to reduce risk for diabetes, heart disease, and colon cancer.”
That’s is true . . . if whole grains are compared to processed white flour products. It is guilty of the kind of flawed logic that dominates nutritional thinking:
If something bad for you is replaced by something less bad and there is an apparent health benefit, then a whole bunch of the less bad thing is good for you.
This flawed logic is used to justify replacing high-glycemic index foods with low-glycemic index foods (more properly called less-high glycemic index foods), hydrogenated fats with polyunsaturates.
If “healthy whole grains” are compared to no grains, i.e, no wheat, then dramatic turnarounds in health are witnessed. The 1% of people with celiac disease are not the exception; they are the “canaries in the coal mine” telling us that wheat is inappropriate for any human to consume . . . especially the semi-dwarf strains made worse by geneticists.
Surely the experts know all this!
Nope. They are, to an incredible degree, ignorant. I recently debated a PhD Professor of Nutrition at a major university, who was also Director of Research at a major agricultural corporation, who offered up the usual defenses of wheat, while accusing me of ignoring the evidence. So, when I informed him that the wheat of today is a high-yield, semi-dwarf variant that stands around 2-feet tall, with marked changes in its genetic code, he answered with . . . silence.
After a bit of hemming and hawing, he finally blurted, “Well, the farmers did that so they could see over the tops of the fields!” Farmers, of course, did not introduce these changes to create the dwarf strain of wheat. In other words, the fact that modern wheat is the markedly altered product of genetics research was entirely new to this “expert.”
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Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as:
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