Article name “ Weighing in on Wheat” Acres issue April 2013.
THIS IS A LONG ARTICLE BUT WELL WORTH THE READ- and most of us have time at present.
Cardiologist William Davis, M.D. and bestselling author of the book “Wheat Belly”, argues more deeply than simply avoiding gluten, in fact, he is a critic of the gluten-free trend and the way it’s being marketed in the food industry. William Davis went down this track to try to look at the cause of heart disease. Along the journey, he studied the glycemic index and how high blood sugar goes after you eat, and the fact that wheat has one of the highest of all glycemic indexes. The glycemic index of whole wheat bread is about 72 and for sucrose or table sugar its 59-65 depending on which study you read. He found when he took his clients off wheat and sugar they came back to him reporting, many improvements such as- substantial weight loss, bowel urgency subsided, Asthma improvements, PMS symptoms gone, Rheumatoid arthritis improvement, ulcer colitis, depression subsided, but very impressive was diabetes and pre-diabetes improvement if not gone.
William started investigating what was in wheat that caused these conditions, what he found was; during the ’60s changes were made to wheat (hybridization) crossing foreign grass species, embryo rescue and so on. This created (and still creating) dwarf strains of high yield products. The problem is that through all these changes introduced by agribusiness there is no paper trail. There’s no paper trail to show us where, how and why a lot of these changes were made. The farmers don’t look at the biochemistry of a plant, they just look at its performance characteristics, either as a crop or its eventual use (wheat flour in baked goods). So if it looks like wheat and performs like wheat in baking tests it must be wheat. This process is not genetic modification but is far worse and labeled mutagenesis. Mutagenesis is induced by chemical mutagenesis, there’s also gamma-ray, x-ray, and ultraviolet mutagenesis.
Clearfield wheat is a product patented by BASF corporation, this wheat allows the farmer to spray weeds with a glyphosate-based weed killer and this product is resistant to this. BASF says that Clearfield wheat “is the product of enhanced traditional breeding methods” not genetic modification. They took the seeds and embryos of wheat and exposed them to a chemical called sodium azide. Sodium azide is an industrial chemical used in very limited processes. If a person was to ingest this substance the poison control people advise not to give CPR and to let a person die. And if the person vomits catch vomit and do not put down the drain as it may explode. As this Clearfield is used widely now there is the “generally recognised as safe” presumption.
Willian Davis noted that when clients stopped wheat and sugars, he not only saw weight loss, but he saw transformations in the way people feel, how they perform and in the way, children performed at school. Also changes in the metabolic markers such as blood sugars, triglycerides and HDL and blood pressure. He questions the fact that “do grains belong in our diet at all”. He noted that the number one cause for heart disease in the US, is not high cholesterol, is not high blood pressure, and it’s not smoking- It’s an excess of the small LDL particles. After doing advanced testing for over 20 yrs and over 10,000 people. There is only one way to get an excess of small LDL particles and that is through the consumption of grains and sugars. We have had people present with a measurement of 1,800 nanomoles, then taking grains and sugars out of their diet and they measure zero. No drugs were used for this only removal of grains and sugars.
William Davis explained about the LDL measurements you get from your doctor, and why they may be deceptive. If you look at your report and, in the panel, you will most likely see CALC or “Calculated”, this means your results are not specific they are a calculated value. Measuring LDL was the most difficult technically, so they developed a method of measuring total cholesterol in all fractions. Then came the birth of the Friedewald equation to calculate the LDL cholesterol, this is a crude approximation at best. It will break down roughly people into low, medium, and high-risk populations. This being used as it is highly profitable for the likes of the pharmaceutical companies. Thousands of Doctors check someone’s LDL cholesterol level and advise prescriptions for the likes of Lipitor because it’s so high. The test William uses is the NMR Lipoprofile.
William noted the gliadin protein of wheat is a subcomponent of gluten. Gliadin is digested in the human gastrointestinal tract down to small proteins, four or five amino acids long. These are small enough to penetrate the bloodstream and also into the brain through the blood-brain barrier, and they bind to the opioid receptors of the brain, this is why they were given the name of exorphins or exogenous morphine-like compounds. Now lots of things bind to opioid receptors like heroin and morphine- those things tend to generate euphoria and pain relief. The exorphins of wheat don’t provide euphoria or pain relief. They only share two real characteristics of other opiates- addictive potential and stimulation of appetite. When the new dwarf wheat hit the shelves there was an across the board increase of calorie intake of 400 to 800 calories per day per person.
This research has uncovered for me, that grains, wheat specifically; oats also are among the most acidifying of all foods. When testing our body PH most people will find that they are very acidic, in most cases not because of eating large amounts of animal products which are acidic, it is in fact that the disruptor is grain consumption. There is a lot of data to show us that when you consume grains there is a net shift in PH to the acid range. There’s also a loss of calcium in the urine (calciurea). So the data has shown the more wheat consumed the more calciurea you have. This shows that consumption of grains especially wheat is disruptive to bones via the pH disrupting effect as well as the calciurea effect.
AGEs (advanced glycation end-products) are the end result of blood glucose’s modification of proteins, particularly long-lived proteins. You and I are always glycating to some degree, so whenever blood sugar ranges above 90—90 milligrams per decilitre- the pace of glycation of proteins proceeds at a more rapid rate. If I have blood sugar for instance that goes to 170, as it typically does after two slices of whole wheat bread, I am glycating very rapidly. I glycate the proteins in the lenses of my eyes, I get opacities- cataracts. If I glycate the cells and proteins in the cartilage of my knees and hips, I get brittle cartilage that leads over time to arthritis. If I glycate the cells and proteins that line my arteries, I get stiff arteries or hypertension (blood pressure). Most of these changes are irreversible, so if I glycate the proteins in the lenses of my eyes that cause opacities its there for life, you eventually have opaque lenses, and cataracts have to be taken out.
There is no doubt that food manufacturers add high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, preservatives and other ingredients that have adverse health effects. The standout adverse effects, however, are still due to the components of modern wheat. For instance, the gliadin protein that acts as, one, an opiate that stimulates appetite via binding to the brain’s opiate receptors, and two, stimulants of abnormal bowel permeability that leads to auto-immune diseases, all remain regardless of the additives included.
Did you know that gluten-free foods made with corn starch, rice starch or rice flour, potato starch, and tapioca starch- are the only foods that raise blood sugar even higher than wheat?
I certainly recommend William Davis’s book “WHEAT BELLY” for anyone interested in improving your health.