Wheat Belly Total Health: The effortless grain-free health and weight-loss plan
Copyright
Thorsons
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This edition published by Thorsons 2015
FIRST EDITION
© William Davis 2015
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Source ISBN: 9780008145859
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008145880 Version: 2015-06-18
To all the readers who have the boldness, courage and conviction to rebel against conventional dietary advice and discover what real nutrition can do for human health
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Part I: No Grain is a Good Grain: Grazed, Grass-Fed and Fattened
Chapter 1 Liberate Your Inner Cow: Life Ungrained
Chapter 2 Let Them Eat Grass
Chapter 3 The Reign of Grain
Chapter 4 Your Bowels Have Been Fouled: Intestinal Indignities from Grains
Chapter 5 Grains, Brains and Chest Pains
Part II: Living Grainlessly: Restoring the Natural State of Human Life
Chapter 6 Grainless Life: Beginnings
Chapter 7 Grainless Living Day-to-Day
Part III: Be a Grainless Overachiever: The Next Steps to Reclaiming Grain-Free Total Health
Chapter 8 Correct Nutritional Deficiencies Caused by Grains
Chapter 9 Full Recovery from Post-Traumatic Grain Gut Syndrome
Chapter 10 Grainless Metabolic Mastery: Regain Control over Blood Sugar, Cholesterol, Bone Health and Inflammation
Chapter 11 The Annoyed Thyroid: Booby Trap for Weight and Health
Chapter 12 Endocrine Disruption: Trouble in the Gland Scheme of Things
Chapter 13 End the Self-Defeat: Recovering from Autoimmunity
Chapter 14 What If the Weight Doesn’t Come Off?
Chapter 15 Clearer, Smarter, Faster: Grain-Free Performance
Epilogue
Appendix A Recipes for Total Health
Appendix B Grain Pain: Watch Out for Hidden Sources of Grains
Appendix C A Grain-Free Shopping List
Appendix D Resources
Endnotes
List of Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
Other Books by William Davis
About the Publisher
Introduction
You’ve been grained.
Beaten, demoralized, discouraged, your life and health have been bankrupted by ‘healthy whole grains’. The worst of the bunch is modern wheat: the Judas of dietary ‘wisdom’, despot of the breakfast bowl, tyrant of the bakery cabinet, the semi-dwarf darling of agribusiness. Your eyes were sprouting cataracts, your arteries were stiffening, your skin was wrinkling and plagued with rashes, your joints were sore and arthritic, your organs were inflamed, your belly fat was expanding, your blood sugar was climbing and man breasts may even have been sprouting. Your mind was clouded by fog, your medication list was growing and your schedule was fouled by mad scrambles for the nearest bathroom – all while you were being driven to consume more and more of the food that all official providers of nutritional advice advised you to consume . . . until you put an end to the whole mess as a result of the revelations made in Wheat Belly.
You boldly removed foods that enjoy the blessings of agencies in the business of dispensing dietary advice. You defied the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its MyPlate and MyPyramid. You scoffed at the urgings of the Surgeon General’s office. You thumbed your nose at the advice of the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. You sniggered at the antics of the wheat lobby and wheat trade groups as they desperately launched wave after wave of damage control. You removed grains like a festering abscess that refused to heal until lanced, and you discovered that health and vigour began to reappear.
I’ve experienced this personally. When I removed all ‘healthy whole grains’ from my life, it reversed my diabetes until I became confidently nondiabetic, I was freed from mind fog that persisted no matter how many cups of coffee I drank and I found relief from the annoying symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. My triglyceride level dropped from 350 to 42 mg/dl, my HDL increased from 27 to 97 mg/dl, and the dark thoughts and moods that I had struggled with for many years were simply erased. I did the opposite of widely accepted health advice and experienced a transformation in health.
Coming to the realization that conventional nutritional advice has as much value as old chewing gum stuck on the pavement can’t help but make you sceptical about whether most sources of health advice are objective, unbiased and based on science in the first place. At best, dietary advice was driven by incomplete or misinterpreted data, an army of dietitians and ‘experts’ unwittingly doing the dirty work of distributing the information. At worst, it was advice that served the ambitions of agribusiness and other powerful interests, all working to commoditize the human diet – yes, commoditize, or derive maximal financial gain by persuading us that the human diet should be dependent on foods that are inexpensive, indifferent to quality, blind to source, traded and arbitraged on a massive scale, and hungrily desired by the masses. Yes, you were grained.
When we peel back the veneer of marketing, trumped-up science, the appeal of convenience, and the yank of addiction, we find that, as a civilization, we made an enormous dietary blunder about 10,000 years ago: we mistook the seeds of grasses – first consumed in desperation – as food. We then allowed this mistake to balloon, not only perceiving this mistake as the discovery of a dietary staple, but as a food ideal for human consumption. Recognizing the ills of modern wheat in Wheat Belly was the first step, but now we can take another major step and eliminate all grains. Once that is accomplished, we proceed even further along the path towards total health by identifying and undoing all the harmful effects we’ve accumulated during our grain-consuming years and that can persist even in the aftermath of grain removal. That’s why I call this approach ‘Total Health’.
In Wheat Belly Total Health, we are going to explore in greater detail why this dietary detour has caused more human disease and suffering than all the wars of the world combined. We’ll discuss why and how experts joined in on this mass hysteria, even co-opting government agencies and policies into the delusion and creating an example of collective madness larger than the Salem witch trials or the fearmongering of the Red Scare, making absurd practices such as bleeding with leeches or frontal lobotomies seem quaint. We will then take this journey of discovery further, discussing how, after you undo this grain-induced mess, you can pick up the pieces and reconstruct diet and correct weight, hormonal status and other facets of health you may have thought were out of reach.
There are aspects of life that are beyond your influence – genetics, family and shoe size, for instance – but most of the factors that colour your day-to-day existence are indeed under your control. Removing grains is the courageous first step, but there are plenty more steps to climb to fully undo the years of health abuse you’ve endured. In this book, there are wonderfully empowering strategies for you to consider to heal the wounds received during your grain-consuming days and unravel the tangle of health problems that developed. Once you’re grain-free, you may be left with disruptions of bowel flora and digestive function, nutritional deficiencies, and chronic conditions like osteoporosis. These will all need to be addressed. You may find that medications previously prescribed to treat a long list of grain-related health conditions are no longer necessary. Some people take their diets on other unhealthy detours, such as by introducing gluten-free grains or unhealthy sweeteners, and discover that, while they may not be as bad off as when they consumed grains, they’re striking compromises in health that needn’t be struck. All these issues must be addressed to find your path back to total health, ungrained.
Brace yourself for revelations about diet and health that you’ve probably never heard, even if you were an avid reader of the original Wheat Belly. In Wheat Belly Total Health, I follow a no-holds-barred, sacred-cows-be-damned, reach-for-the-skies attitude. My goal is not to titillate, nor to astound, but to inform without the influence of agribusiness interests or the bias of flawed epidemiology. I’m going to ask tough questions while discarding preconceived notions to get to the root of dietary wisdom. There we discover that, minus grains, not only does a long list of chronic health conditions dissolve, but you are also capable of achieving new heights of health and life performance that you had only previously imagined were possible.
We relieve this emperor of his new clothes while watching his huge wheat belly and man breasts shrink, his swollen joints flex and his seborrhoeic skin clear. We observe his further health gains by dodging all other grains, then reclothe him in fabrics truly fit for a king. That king will be you, in all your noble, grain-free glory.
The Grain-Free Experience: A Crowd Pleaser
I could not have written Wheat Belly Total Health three years ago when the original Wheat Belly book came out. So many people have engaged in this lifestyle change, so many doctors and health-care professionals have come to embrace these concepts, so many new lessons have been learned as the worldwide rejection of the ‘healthy whole grain’ message has grown that have crowd-sourced a steady stream of new and unexpected lessons. Wheat Belly Total Health distils the wisdom gained from the millions of people who have embraced grain-free living and rediscovered what it means to be fully healthy and alive. We are collectively undoing what humans have managed to botch for 300 generations, and we are doing it while dietitians, the USDA and other defenders of the status quo harrumph, protest and cast insults as they watch their last 40 years of work crumble beneath their feet.
The Information Age explodes with the empowered wisdom of crowds, shared at lightning speed and dispelling conventional ‘wisdom’ as fast as sexting can take down a congressional career. We’ve learned, for instance, that wheat intolerance really means intolerance to all grains since, after all, they are all genetically related grasses. (Yes, grasses, just like the stuff in your backyard or what’s munched on by goats and horses. We will discuss the implications of this simple biological realization in some detail.) We learned that virtually everyone benefits from reestablishing healthy bowel flora after removing grains. We learned that iodine deficiency is making a comeback and can impair weight loss and health improvement efforts. Many removed wheat and enjoyed increased energy but didn’t experience the full return of youthful vigour because synthetic perchlorate fertilizer residues and brominated flour whiteners from bagels and pizza impaired thyroid function, leaving them with less-than-perfect ability to control weight, a head of prematurely thinning hair and sluggish bowel function. As more and more people have said no to grains, we have recognized that, while grain elimination is powerful, there may be metabolic derangements that block weight loss and must therefore be addressed, no matter how meticulous the diet. We gained a better understanding that autoimmune, inflammatory and neurological conditions require additional efforts to maximize the potential for a rebound to total health. We’ve come to appreciate that the entire package of benefits from grain elimination goes beyond, say, weight loss, and adds up to an astoundingly powerful collection of health-restoring, anti-ageing, youth preserving, performance-enhancing and life-prolonging practices.
Even if you’ve already enjoyed a major health success by eliminating wheat, understanding the strategies articulated in Wheat Belly Total Health and putting them to use can take your health efforts several steps further. If you are among the many people who have shed 2, 4, 8 or even more stones of wheat-induced visceral fat and reversed one or more health conditions, there are still many more steps you can take to further improve your health.
Or you may be among those who, minus wheat, failed to enjoy a full return to health. You may find yourself still struggling with 4 or more stones of weight you want to shed, plus joint pains, skin rashes and other health problems; you may be left wondering if there is something you can do, short of prescription medications and procedures, to restore your health. Or perhaps you now realize just how good you feel minus wheat and are motivated to achieve total health in as many ways as possible to ensure long-term ideal health. Or you may be brand new to the wheat-free message. If so, this is your ultimate guide to going grain-free. Regardless of which category you fall into, you have come to the right place for answers.
We are reminded that humans are truly adaptable, resilient, fit and vigorous, and have a natural, innate capacity to be healthy, slender and happy – provided that no grains are permitted entry into our bodies and all health disruptions are corrected in their wake.
Life Ungrained: Unrestrained High Performance
Despotic governments oppress their people. Burdensome health-care costs weigh down our economy. One hundred extra pounds of body fat overtax hips, knees and feet that are ill-equipped to bear such loads, and they groan, creak and erode away under the burden. Likewise, the mix of components in grains undermines human functioning from head to toe. Unload such crushing burdens and people are freed, the economy is boosted, joints are relieved and human functioning is liberated.
Minus the health- and life-impairing effects of grains, we venture into discussions about performance: how well you perform emotionally, mentally, professionally and physically once the major impediments have been removed. This applies to accomplishments in school, at work, in relationships, in sports – in virtually every setting we encounter in life. It means aiming to maximize how good you feel and look to get that extra boost of mojo that can make the difference between getting through your day or blasting through your day. Total health is outwardly evident; you see it in smoother skin, a flatter tummy, freedom from leg swelling, an easy gait, and ease and vigour of motion in all directions. It’s also reflected internally through deeper sleep, less-turbulent menstrual cycles, freedom from headaches and problem-free digestion.
In addition to less-disruptive menstrual cycles, women can enjoy improved fertility and reductions in perversely high oestrogen levels, and they get reacquainted with the concept of feeling good most or all of the time, rather than just once in a while or not at all. Male sexual performance improves as men enjoy lower levels of oestrogen, higher levels of testosterone and reductions of embarrassingly large breasts.
Total health can, in many instances, be measured. You can aim for perfect metabolic health as it’s reflected in triglycerides and cholesterol panels, blood sugars, haemoglobin A1c (long-term blood sugar), thyroid tests, and screenings to determine levels of various nutrients. It can also be reflected in measures such as blood pressure and body fat percentage.
While you may be able to walk, run or jump more easily, faster, farther and higher minus the aches, pains and energy impairment of grains, high-performance competitors enjoy similar benefits, and a growing number of professional athletes are embracing the grain-free lifestyle. In this book, we discuss how to gain an even greater competitive edge with strategies that go beyond eliminating grains. Sometimes the additional steps are wonderfully simple, such as correcting iodine and iron deficiencies; at other times the solutions are more elaborate, such as the strategies required to restore and maintain bowel health and undo the effects of endocrine disruption. But the goal is to unmask your individual potential and achieve the highest levels of performance in health and life in as many ways as reasonably possible. We aren’t trying to create a race of superhuman grain-free men and women, but we can achieve levels of life performance that we previously enjoyed only fleetingly, if at all.
Many of these efforts may not have been necessary had we not been blindsided by these nutritional blunders in the first place. Had we grown up without exposure to Frankengrains with unique, health-disruptive effects, or without thyroid and sex hormone disruption from grains that are compounded by the ocean of endocrine gland–impairing industrial chemicals we swim in, things might be different. Had we also enjoyed the luxury of living outdoors in a semitropical climate and getting a full night of restorative sleep each and every night and had we not been exposed to the chronic, unrelenting stress of modern life, well, maybe we would have enjoyed peak functioning all along. But that is simply not the case for the majority of people. Thankfully, once we understand what went wrong, we can right the situation and, in most cases, fully restore your innate capacity for high levels of life performance.
Achieving Ungrained Total Health in Three Steps: No More, No Less
Wheat Belly Total Health is presented in three parts that are a logical and necessary sequence that must occur if your goal is total health. Like learning to crawl before you walk or studying algebra before cracking the code on calculus, total health unfolds in a natural progression.
You cannot, for instance, regain health as long as grains remain a part of your diet: health cannot be perfect as long as multigrain buns, rye toast or tacos made from genetically modified cornflour remain a part of your dietary experience. You might not even be aware that grains are exerting their harmful effects while you go about your business working, sleeping, sitting in the drive-thru or watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. You might be unaware, for instance, that an abnormally increased degree of intestinal permeability is boiling away beneath the surface, waiting to eventually trigger an autoimmune condition in your body that will result, for instance, in the stumbling speech, incoordination and muscle weakness of multiple sclerosis. Or opacities may be accumulating in the lenses of your eyes, obscuring your vision with milky blurriness, waiting to be diagnosed as cataracts when you’re 53, despite the ‘balanced diet’ and exercise programme you’ve been following for the last 30 years. Or a gradual impairment of mind function may develop beneath your awareness until one day you find that you can’t remember where you parked your car, your way home or who that unfamiliar stranger is that you share your bed with. Just because you fail to perceive it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s there regardless of how good you feel, and it needs to be corrected before you can even begin to hope for total health.
In Part I, I discuss why the elimination of all grains, wheat and otherwise, is essential if you are to begin your journey back to total health. It is essential because no amount of other healthy foods, nutritional supplements, exercise or drugs can fully overcome the health-thwarting effects of grains should they remain in your diet. Grain elimination is evolutionarily appropriate for a member of the species Homo sapiens; it is consistent with your physiology and metabolism, and it begins – but does not complete – your journey back to total health.
In Part II, we deal with just how to accomplish this journey, including how you can survive the process of withdrawal from the opiates in grains – probably the most challenging hurdle to overcome in your journey back to health and the one that, if you are not properly coached and equipped, can backfire and set you back to your former grain-consuming ways. I teach you how to know when you’ve been reexposed to closely related proteins that force your body to revisit the havoc you thought you’d eliminated and threaten to undo everything you’ve accomplished. I also discuss how your body adapts to this new situation in life without grains, and why and how adaptation may not be complete until you take the reins and make it complete.
In Part III, I discuss how to pursue health as far as possible once you have removed all the health destruction of grains: how to achieve new heights of energy, sleep, mental clarity, mood, bowel function, endocrine health, metabolic health, exercise and physical functioning. We’ll apply all of the lessons we’ve learned along the way as we discover that, minus grains, life and health are actually quite wonderful.
Too many of us, forced to accept this mantra of ‘healthy whole grains’, have never been shown the path to easily and effortlessly accomplish total health. Once the health disruptions of grains are exorcised from your life and you recognize their purported health benefits for the fictional notions they are, everything gets so much better. Without grains, wondrous things begin to happen in just about every way. That is what ‘total health’ means.
Chapter 1
Liberate Your Inner Cow: Life Ungrained
Goldfish do not eat sausages. John Cleese, ‘How to Feed a Goldfish’, Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Since you are reading this book, I take it that you are a member of the species Homo sapiens. You are probably not a giraffe, toad or woodpecker. Nor are you a ruminant, those taciturn creatures that graze on grass.
Ruminants, such as goats and cows, and their ancient, wild counterparts, ibex and aurochs, enjoy evolutionary adaptations that allow them to consume grasses. They have continuously growing teeth to compensate for the wear generated by coarse, sandlike phytolith particles in grass blades; cows produce in excess of 100 litres of saliva per day; have four-compartment stomachs that host unique microorganisms to digest grass components, including a compartment that grinds and then regurgitates its contents up as a cud to rechew; and a long, spiral colon that’s also host to microorganisms that further digest grassy remains. In other words, ruminants have a gastrointestinal system uniquely specialized to consume grasses.