Wheat: The Unhealthy Whole Grain by William Davis (Full Transcript)

It fills the Bible by the way. It’s used for metaphor for salvation, for times of plenty et cetera. It is in the Bible. But in it what you’ve got – it’s Emmer wheat, this 28-chromosome offspring of wild Einkorn wheat that mated with this grass.

Middle Ages – Bread

Okay. Let’s fast forward to Middle Age or so way, way back in time. So bread was a staple back then. It was often the staple of the wealthy but the poor also had in their many forms of bread but bread was a very common food in the Middle Ages.

But what was that? As plants will do, Emmer again mated with yet another grass which in turn contributed 14 more chromosomes, yielding 42 chromosomes and that yields the forerunner of what we have now, the modern Triticum species. So I make these points to show you that what we have now is different. So it’s not Einkorn, it’s not Einkorn of the Bible. It’s not even the wheat of the Middle Ages. It’s something different. Now it’s been taken farther.

1960

How about 1960? So those of you old like me may remember the days where we were terrified — terrified of world population explosion, that we would have billions of hungry people in Asia, in Africa, maybe even US, because we had population explosion that exceeded the capacity for the world to feed them. So that it was a very logical investment in agricultural research. So the US government, other governments, universities, foundations et cetera devoted a lot of money to exploring new ways to increase crop yield.

So this is one such research group. These are grown men standing in a field in Mexico City – East of Mexico City. The guy in the far right is Dr. Norman Borlaug. He is a geneticist trained at Universe of Minnesota, and they’re standing in a field of wheat. These are fully grown men. Notice that this wheat is about shoulder high. So they started with traditional strains of wheat standing shoulder high.

Well, Borlaug was pretty hard working smart guy and he used a variety of techniques because he was kind of the guy who drove lot of this. They repetitively cross-mated different strains of wheat, from different parts of the world, with different characteristics. They would repetitively back cross them to try to select out certain characteristics. They would mate their wheat strains with other grasses to introduce unique genes. They would use different conditions to generate different characteristics. So thousands — literally thousands of genetic experiments to yield variant strains.

And he was successful. So this is the cover of Life Magazine from 1970. This was just after Dr. Borlaug was awarded Nobel Peace Prize for this work. So he’s holding several stalks of his high-yield semi-dwarf strain. Notice that you can’t judge this from where he is holding his hands but notice that the stalks that is the shaft is very thick. Notice that the seed heads are really big and the seed head itself is very large. So this thing yielded four times more per acre, six times more per acre, eight times more per acre as much as 10 times more per acre. So for that reason when this was introduced into the third world like Pakistan or Bangladesh, famine was converted to surplus within one year. So Borlaug was hailed as a hero for helping develop this high yield semi dwarf strain of wheat. Okay, very different outward appearance for a different yield and other characteristics. It doesn’t end there.

By the way, this is my step-son. He was 13 at the time. So this is about 5 miles from my house in Wisconsin and it’s everywhere. So it’s not as if it’s only grown in one place, this stuff has essentially taken over the world’s wheat supply because it was so incredibly prolific. That is if you’re a farmer and you’re getting, let’s say, 8 bushels per acre and your next door neighbor is using this other strain of wheat from seed he purchased and he is getting 85 bushels per acre; how can you compete?

So in a competitive world you adopt this high yield strain. So the world has essentially lost the older forms of wheat and have adapted this high yield semi-dwarf strain of wheat. This is the field just a couple of miles of my house.

Clearfield Wheat

So this went on farther. This is an example of something that’s sold widely and grown widely in about a million acres now in the Pacific Northwest, call Clearfield Wheat. Let me tell you what Clearfield Wheat is. It is a semi-dwarf strain of wheat. So it is just like the stuff that Borlaug came up with but they did some things to it. They exposed the seeds’ embryos to a chemical called azide, which is an industrial toxin.

Let me tell you about sodium azide. There have been instances of accidental human ingestion and the poison control people say, if you witness an accidental ingestion, don’t offer that person CPR, in effect let them die. Because if you offer them CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation), you’re going to die too. And if the victim vomits, don’t throw the vomit in the sink, because it may explode. And that has actually happened.

So you take this chemical sodium azide, you expose wheat embryos or seeds to it, and you induce mutations. This is an ad from the BASF Corporation – that is the patent holder of Clearfield Wheat. It is the “product of enhanced traditional plant breeding methods”. So what they’ve done here is they said, hey, our Clearfield now grown on a million acres in the Pacific Northwest in the US is not the product of nasty genetic modification business. We only use enhanced traditional breeding methods.

Okay. So this is the game. This is the game that agribusiness has been playing with you. That yeah, wheat is not genetically modified; that’s true. In the language of genetics, no gene splicing techniques were used to insert or remove a gene, instead these other techniques like multiple crossings, back crossings, embryo rescue, chemical mutagenesis, that’s what this is called the purposeful induction of mutations using chemicals, gamma mutagenesis, high-dose X-rayed mutagenesis, this is using gamma rays and X-ray induced mutations. These are the techniques used that predate modern genetic modification, very imprecise, crude, unpredictable techniques that are far worse than modern genetic modification. So I am no defender of genetic modification but the techniques of genetic modification or actually substantial improvement over the techniques used to generate lot of the older crops, including 40 years of wheat.

So what does our USDA do with this? They tell us – eat more of it. So we’re told that wheat and grains – they say grains, they don’t say wheat. But how many here have had a breakfast of triticale? How about sorghum or millet? All right. This is a smart crew. For the most part when we talk about wheat right in North America certainly — I’m sorry, when we’re talking about grains, we’re really talking about wheat for the most part. So over 90% of all grains consumed is wheat.

So when the USDA says eat more grains, they really mean eat more wheat. So in the food pyramid they advise us about 60% of calories plus from wheat and the more recent food plate likewise, at least a quarter — more than a quarter of the plate occupied by wheat.

So this thing conceived by people like Dr. Borlaug for good purpose, not evil purpose, to increase yield to help solve world hunger, taken further by agribusiness and then sold and we’re told to eat more.

But why is that so bad? But let me digress just for a moment and make this point. So we’re going to talk about why modern wheat has a few things wrong with it but what this is not about is being gluten-free. I make that point right upfront because you know I’m very grateful that I entered this conversation at a time where gluten-free is starting to be very very popular but for the wrong reasons. So there are people with Celiac disease, that is intestinal destruction from the gluten – this protein in wheat. There’s probably 8%, 9% or 10% of other people who have a lesser form of sensitivity to this protein called gluten. I’m not talking to them. I’m talking about the other 90% of people.

So I’ll make the point that no human — there’s not a single human I’ve ever met who could get away with eating this thing created by the shenanigans of genetics. But it’s separate from the gluten-free discussion in many ways.

So what is so bad about this thing that Dr. Borlaug and BASF and all those people came up with? What is wrong with it?

Gliadin

Well, let’s talk about the protein Gliadin. So gluten – this thing you’ve heard about – a protein in wheat. It is really a two-part protein. It’s got gluten in. You ever all see a Pizza maker do this right with dough? What else does that? Can you do that with corn starch or rice starch? No. You have a mess, right? So the gluten in polymer has that unique what the bakers call viscoelasticity. It gives that stretchy characteristic that almost nothing else has. Well, that’s the gluten in wheat.

Well, the non-stretchy protein is another protein in gluten called Gliadin. And Gliadin is the thing you — if there is one thing you and I take way from all of this is there is something wacky about that Gliadin.

Well, back in the ‘70s it became clear — there were several psychiatric groups here in the UK who made this observation. If they take their — this was years ago, 40 plus years ago when — right now through the hospital, you have a nice private room or semi-private room, right? You ever have days where there were 40 patients with you in the same room? The big hospital wards? Well back in those days, the psychiatric hospitals had closed large wards. So their patients could not come and go as they pleased and everything was controlled. Their medications were controlled, their diet was controlled.

Well several psychiatric groups back then made this observation. If they took all the wheat out of the diet of their schizophrenic patients, they got a bunch better. They were cured but their paranoia, their hallucinations improved dramatically. They’d add back the wheat, they’d get much worse. This is over four week periods. They would take the wheat away, they got better. Added back, they get on again, off again, on again, off again. This was reproduced a number of times.

So the people at the National Institutes of Health asked why? What the heck is in bread or pretzels or cookies that causes schizophrenics to hallucinate? So this group led by Dr. [Christine Z Drew] boiled it down to the Gliadin protein – that protein we’re talking about. And this thing upon digestion enters your brain and it access an opioid. It binds to the opioid receptors of the human brain. So the human brain is filled with so-called opioid receptors. That may not be the nature’s intended effect but that’s how it plays out real-life.

So if I take morphine, it provides relief from pain. If I take heroin, it makes me high, makes me goofy, and I can’t control my thoughts or my behavior. If I take wheat or the Gliadin protein, the breakdown opiates wheat, I don’t get high, I don’t have pain relief. I only get appetite stimulation. So it binds most to the kappa receptor and others, and I don’t get those other effects. I just get appetite stimulation.

So this is one of those opioid proteins from wheat. This is the A5 pentapeptide. This binds to the human brain. So this observation that for the most part by the way was not made much of. There wasn’t much talk about that in the ‘70s. Well this led to a whole series of research where people asked, what gee, if that’s true with wheat as an opiate, what if we give nice people opiate blocking drugs, not take away the wheat, doesn’t make any money. Let’s give them opiate blocking drugs.

So this is a small study where nice normal people came into a laboratory. And they were told – don’t eat breakfast. We will feed you lunch and dinner. So they come in, they skip breakfast and they have lunch, and they’re told – eat all you want. And if you’re looking at that left most bar, that white bar, you’ll see they took in about — those are calories – they took in about 1000 calories. They waited several hours and then had dinner. And they‘re told, go ahead, eat all dinner you want. And they ate about 800 calories. So about 1800 calories.

Well these same nice people are brought back sometime later, some weeks later. This time same deal but this time they get injection of a drug called Naloxone. Anybody works in an ER or a hospital has used Narcan – naloxone to reverse unintentional overdose on morphine risk. It blocks the drug’s effect within seconds. So it’s an opiate blocking drug. So you give these people injection of Narcan or naloxone and they’re told, go ahead, have all the lunch you want. Well this time they eat about 700 calories for lunch and then for dinner about 700 calories, or about 1400 calories over the course of the day, or approximately 400 calories less after injection of an opiate blocking drug.

So wouldn’t you know someone who is enterprising on this – the FDA application was made about two years ago, still pending, for the drug Naltrexone, which is the oral equivalent of naloxone. It’s an opiate blocking drug and in the clinical trials it reduces calorie intake by about 400 calories per day and people lose about 26 pounds over the first six months. These are non-heroin addicted, non-morphine addicted, these are just normal everyday people who have a weight problem. And they’re brought in, they’re given this drug and they lose weight even though they’re not addicted to opiates, at least not the kind you take the drug for.

Well, this is not proof of cause-effect but I find it very very interesting, if you look at what’s happened to Americans – North Americans, since this stuff made it to your store shelves. So this thing was invented in the ‘70s and you saw Borlaug getting the Nobel Peace Prize 1970, but it really didn’t reach your store shelf to about ’82 to ’85 or so. By 1985 everything — everything you bought came from bread, pasta, cookies, came from the high yield semi-dwarf strain. Okay. This spawn of Dr. Borlaug’s work.

So what happened to weight? Well you know, anybody watch the headlines know that starting in about mid — early to mid 80’s we had an explosion in weight. You’ve been to Walmart, haven’t you? What if I gained 40 pounds, fifty-pounds, seventy pounds, what do I get? I get diabetes. There’s a lag right, if I gained 30 pounds on Tuesday,, I gained it over for months or years, so there’s a lag between gaining weight or having your appetite stimulating, gaining weight and developing diabetes. So the number of diabetics of course followed suit and these are data from the CDC only till 2009, if I include 2011, that is last year for which we have data you will see the curve is now vertical.

So now I can’t prove to you cause and effect with these data but I’ll show you why I think it’s very very suspicious, it smells awfully bad that we’ve been fed an appetite stimulant.

So wheat via its Gliadin protein is an opiate and by the way there’s lot more to this Gliadin, and because of the time allotted, I can’t go with all of that. But it has other effects.

So if it’s appetite stimulant, what does it do to people with a tendency with an eating disorder, like bulimia or binge eating? It gives them food obsessions. What does it do to a child with ADHD or autism? It gives them behavioral outbursts and difficulty with attention span? What does it do to a schizophrenic? Well, you know causes paranoia and hearing voices. What does it do to a person with bipolar illness? It triggers the high mania. So it has mind effects but in nice normal everyday people it only stimulates calorie intake, appetite.

Wheat & Blood Sugar

Okay. Let’s talk about – that’s Gliadin protein – let’s talk about blood sugar. What does wheat do to blood sugar? We’re told to eat more of it, right? So what does that do to blood sugar? Well you’ve heard of low glycemic index foods and high glycemic index foods, right? So high glycemic index foods raise blood sugar very high. Low glycemic index foods raise blood sugar less high — not low, less high.

So where does wheat fall into that scheme? Well if we look at all — I’m sorry about this slide but look at all the years and years where this question has been studied all the way back in 1981 when Dr. David Jenkins at University of Toronto generated these data. He just wanted to know what happens to people with diabetes when they eat different foods. So he took normal slender volunteers and fed them different foods. And he generated a curve for how much their blood sugar went up, called the glycemic index. So if you feed these nice skinny kids sucrose, if they get a high blood sugar, no surprise. You feed table sugar, they had high blood sugar. So the glycemic index was 59 for sucrose.

What was it for whole grain bread – whole wheat bread? 72. Now this is the original slide — original table from Dr. Jenkins from 1981. But it’s been corroborated thousands of times since. It’s in all the tables of glycemic index. Two slices of whole wheat bread raised blood sugar higher than 6 teaspoons of table sugar.

Now wait a minute – why would that be? Why in the world would healthy whole grains with complex carbohydrates raise blood sugar? Because of the dieticians and the nutritional community all agree: We should eat more complex carbohydrates and less and fewer simple sugars. Well, what they didn’t tell you is the unique complex carbohydrate — complex meaning a long chain or branching chain as opposed to a simple sugar. So the so-called complex carbohydrate of wheat is something called Amylopectin-A.

Amylopectin-A

Amylopectin-A has a unique branching structure that is highly susceptible to the enzyme Amylase. You and I have Amylase in our mouth and our stomach and you put a piece of bread in your mouth, it starts to digest right away and raises your blood sugar. So it’s uniquely digestible, as opposed say to the Amylopectin-C in beans, which is very inefficiently digested, and that’s why you and I get you know what — when we eat beans, because we don’t digest it but the back here in our colon throw a party when they see that undigested carbohydrate. So different foods have different forms of Amylopectin but the Amylopectin-A of wheat is very unique and it’s uniquely digestible, raises blood sugar sky-high.

So we have literally thousands of studies. This looks astounding about a lot of this is I wish I could tell you I’m the smartest guy around and nobody else can figure — this is clear as day in the data the wrong questions were being asked. So there have been since thousands of studies showing that wheat raises — this is one such study from Finland, there’s thousands of others. If you give people a whole wheat bread, they have sky-high blood sugars, sky-high insulins. What does that do? So what if I have whole wheat bagels for breakfast and I have my Wheat Thins for snack, and I have my low-fat turkey breast or my two slice of whole wheat bread for lunch and on and on. So wheat for breakfast, wheat for lunch, wheat for dinner, wheat for snacks, what do I do? I have repetitive high blood sugars, high blood insulin.

What does that do to us? What does that do to us over five years, 10 years, 20 years? It gives us visceral fat, right? And you can see that on the CAT scan it’s the fat, it’s the dark black stuff that encircles the intestinal tract, the liver, the kidneys. It even by the way encircles the heart which is a terrible thing for your heart.

So repetitive high blood sugar, repetitive high blood insulin because of Amylopectin-A, driven further by the Gliadin protein that stimulates your appetite, what do you get? You get — you can see why I call it a Wheat Belly.

Lectins

Let’s talk about Lectins. You know I don’t think this was all — I think it is just a series of big blunders but sometimes — and by the way this is the abbreviated, I can give it – there is more. But it’s as if a bunch of evil scientists got together and said, hey, how we screw up these nice Americans, make them fat, make them hungry and cause health, they would come up with wheat. It’s as if they did not. There is no such thing. There was no such to my knowledge. A purposeful effort — it was just a series of incredible blunders but you can see where this led us.

So let’s talk about Lectins. So if a bacteria or a virus invades your body, what does your body do? It has immunity, right? You’ve got antibodies, lymphocytes, T-cells. You have multiple layers of complex responses that fight off that invader.

What do plants do? Plants don’t have any of that stuff. They have something called lectins. Lectins are proteins that are toxic to molds, fungi, insects et cetera. So they have a simpler form of immunity of protection.

Well, this is the Lectin of wheat. It’s a four-part complex molecule. Lots of plants have lectins. Spinach has a lectin. But it’s benign. So lots of lectins are in plants and they might be harmful to a mold or fungus but they are not harmful to us.

But Ricin is also a lectin. So if you follow the news, you know that about a dozen terrorist attacks have been made with the lectin, ricin, it’s a neuro toxin. So some lectins are benign like in spinach. Some lectins are very toxic; they’re fatal to humans who are exposed. Wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) is someplace in between.

What happens if I isolate wheat germ agglutinin, give it to a laboratory rat? Well, it induces changes in the intestinal tract, almost identical to celiac disease. So this is not gluten. This is wheat germ agglutinin (WGA). They sound kind of alike but they’re very different.

So I give a milligram to a rate, it destroys its small intestine. And that’s what the picture at the very bottom is. It lost those little fingers that lie in your intestinal tract just like people of celiac disease do.

Well, you know human eats purified wheat germ agglutinin, but what does an average American eat — you know their bread and pasta et cetera, how much they get? 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams in an average day.

So we have – sorry about this complex slide – but we have this peculiar two-fisted effect of wheat. This was discovered in 1990, by the way, University of Maryland, Dr. Alessio Fasano that Gliadin protein we talked about has the peculiar capacity to unlock the normal intestinal barrier. So we have smart intestines. Believe or not, your intestines is really smart. When you eat something, not everything that goes in here — think if you’re kidding right — should end up in your bloodstream. So the intestinal tract is smart and it decides what should be allowed to enter your bloodstream, where the Gliadin protein disables that mechanism. It in effect opens those tight junctions, the barriers between cells and allows foreign substances entry into your bloodstream. That’s the presumed reason why people who eat wheat have more rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and other autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

Well, it’s a two-way street. If you open those intestinal barriers, water can also get out, you get watery diarrhea. It doesn’t end there.

So the Gliadin protein disables the normal intestinal barriers, it also allows foreign things through, such as wheat germ agglutinin. So Gliadin joins the party – Gliadin proteins; wheat germ agglutinin joins the party and they get access to your bloodstream and other foreign substances gain access to your bloodstream, all because of this effect that wheat has.

So if you read the science that comes from all of this – that is this Gliadin effect of opening the intestinal barriers, you’ll see that the scientists say you know what, this seems an awful lot like cholera toxin. Remember Haiti, the cholera, right? So this is a cholera hospital in Bangladesh. See those beds, these overlying beds. You might notice there is a little hole in the bottom. That’s where the diarrhea goes.

So when you have cholera, you have such terrible intractable diarrhea, they can’t stop it and just pours out of you so that they just catch it in a bucket underneath your bed. So the scientists who have done this work say, you know what the Gliadin protein in wheat is an awful lot like cholera toxin.

So what does that do, if you allow the entry of foreign substances into your bloodstream, because of that Gliadin effect, wheat germ agglutinin effect and the inflammatory, you get bowel inflammation. You get Irritable bowel syndrome, bowel urgency, watery diarrhea, acid reflux, worsening – not cause but worsening ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. You get inflammation of joints. The most typical joints inflamed from wheat are the fingers and wrists, elbows followed by shoulders and then the big joints, less common but still can be a pain.

You get inflammation of the airway, asthma. You get inflammation of the brain. You get inflammation of thyroid. So in fact, there is probably not a single organ that escapes this inflammatory or autoimmune effect of the various components of modern wheat.

Well, you know I’ll make this point. The inflammatory, the health destroying effects of modern wheat are so far reaching that I ask what are we doing in health care? Are we treating consumption of modern wheat?

So let’s talk about what happens when we take this stuff out? If there’s even the least bit of truth in all of this, well the experiment is easy, right? If you or your little experiment with a subject of one, how do you find out? Well you try it yourself, right? So what happens when you take wheat out of the diet? It ain’t easy thing to do. If you take wheat out of the diet and you look at the foods you’re going to eat, you’re going to say to me, well, you know what it’s not as easy as I thought, because wheat is in everything.

It’s in Twizzlers, it’s the second ingredient. You ever know that you can’t eat just one? Yeah, I’m going to have just one. Just two; okay, three. Okay. I will exercise more tomorrow and I will cut my calories and fat, and I’ll have the bag, right? Campbell’s tomato soup. Taco seasoning, all frozen dinners, cereals, granola bars, you name it, wheat is there.

Now why would that be? Now I’m going to — so we’ve talked about science. So I am going to resort that a raw speculation. Let me ask a question. Now wait a minute here. 1960, you and I walk down the supermarket aisles. We ask, what foods contain wheat? It’s pretty obvious, right? It’s in bread, pancake mix and bread crumbs. 2012, we walk down the aisles, we ask what foods contain wheat? We see it in pancake mix and bread, right? But we see it in the Twizzlers, soup mixes, salad dressings, virtually every – Why?

Well, is it necessary for taste and texture, or is it there to stimulate your appetite and to stimulate sales? I have no proof of that but it sounds of a conspiracy theorist, I know it does.

But why in the world is wheat in virtually every processed food?

And of course, this is not being gluten-free. This was never about gluten-free. So it’s – going gluten-free is a good thing, because you avoid gluten, you avoid wheat, you avoid Gliadin, right, naturally. You avoid wheat germ agglutinin. You avoid Amylopectin-A, so you void all those nasty things in modern wheat.

But we have people who say, gee, I am going to be gluten-free. I am going to eat gluten-free foods. Well, what do the food manufacturers choose as their replacements for wheat flour? They choose rice starch, corn starch, tapioca starch, or potato starch. Okay. Among the only foods that raise blood sugar higher than even the Amylopectin-A of wheat. That doesn’t make any sense, right?

So yeah, it is good to be gluten-free but we eat no commercial gluten-free foods at least as they’re currently conceived. There is going to be a time, I think, soon where you and I can actually buy healthy gluten-free foods. That time hasn’t really yet arrived. No manufacturers is distributing nationally but we’re getting there. But right now nobody — nobody should be eating gluten-free foods unless you understand that they are no better than jelly beans.

So what happens? If there is any truth at all to this, if we buy this notion that the Gliadin protein of wheat is an appetite stimulant via its opiate binding effects, if we buy this notion that wheat germ agglutinin is a direct intestinal toxin and causes body-wide inflammation, if we buy any all this stuff, what happens when you take wheat out of the diet?

Well, there is weight loss. There is rapid weight loss, that some of it’s water, because if you lose inflammation, you do lose water but you do lose fat very rapidly. It’s not uncommon to see 7, 8 pounds in two weeks, 10 pounds, even 15 pounds in two weeks. I’ve seen many people lose 18, 20 pounds in a month. It slows down, it doesn’t continue on that course forever. But you can lose a lot of weight.

Now notice I never said to anybody to cut your calories. I never said push the plate away, cut your fat, cut – no, no, lose the wheat, lose the appetite stimulant. Okay. That’s the crucial point here. It’s not the calories. It’s not the carbohydrates necessarily. It’s the appetite stimulating effect of the Gliadin protein of wheat. So you lose weight.

You have this wonderful relief from appetite, so that constant hungry at 9 after breakfast at 7, hungry at 11 after your snack at 9, counting the minutes till lunch time, hungry at 2, that grazing after dinner, all that stuff goes away just like it used to be the old days where people would just eat, they set themselves on that wild boar they caught. And then not be hungry for a day or two. So that’s what happens to your appetite. Appetite ratchets down dramatically.

This notion of eat many small meals all throughout the day every two hours? No, no, no, no human was meant to do that. And food obsessions and people susceptible to them go away. I’ve had a lot of people who had, for instance, bulimia and binge eating disorder who have 24-hour day food obsessions, they can’t shake and can’t stop and wake up at the middle of night, they still think about food, they can’t help themselves. So they binge, they go in private, right? Lose it, they lose their teeth — it’s a life destroying, relationship destroying disease.

But their food obsessions go away, not all the time but in many of them when they lose the wheat — lose the Gliadin protein of wheat. There is a blood sugar reduction. That’s really easy. Right, the Amylopectin-A goes away. The Gliadin effect of stimulating appetite goes way, you lose weight. Blood sugar goes down. I have lots and lots of former diabetics who started with insulin and three drugs who were on, nothing now with better blood sugars and A1Cs than they had on drugs.

Joint pain, we talked about, mostly fingers and wrists, goes away. I am seeing — as this experience gets longer and longer I am seeing more and more goes away — things like my low back pain, my knee pain, my hip pain, it took six months but it’s getting better. I don’t think if you have bone on bone arthritis in your hip it’s going to regrow bone, I can’t – we can’t say that. But I think what it does is it removes the inflammatory response that’s on top of that bone on bone irritation. So I think it makes you feel better but if you get 50% relief with no Vioxx, Celebrex or Naproxen, well, gee, I will take it.

If you measure inflammatory measures, they go down. Blood pressure goes down, not right away, it takes a few weeks or months, because as you lose weight, you mobilize all those fatty acids from your tummy into the bloodstream, it keeps your blood pressure up as those blood sugar at first, then they all drop over time. And the cholesterol panel, your triglycerides go down, HDL goes way up. Small LDL particles – the number one cause for heart disease in the US today drops like a stone, and it ain’t high cholesterol by the way — high cholesterol is a fiction, it’s a convenience of measurement. It serves the drug industry, very, very – $227 billion a year. So we don’t say it drops cholesterol. It drops small LDL particles very effectively.

I do this every day. It can drop small LDL particles from 1800 nmol/L split it down to 0. You have more energy. Your sleep is better. You move is better. You think it’s cleared.

Acid reflux, gone in easily over 90% of people, the bowel urgency, irritable bowel syndrome very — it’s a uncommon person who says I went wheat free and didn’t get relief. Most people get substantial relief.

So what does that mean?

If you’re going to get rid of wheat and we’re going to reject this growing notion of gluten-free foods, what do you eat? Well, real single ingredient foods, just like people used to do. Okay, we eat vegetables, that is the plant, products of plants. We eat nuts all you want and by the way I don’t worry about fat. We don’t cut our fat. I don’t cut the meat, the fat off of meat. I don’t throw away the skin on the chicken. That’s good fat. It’s good calories, good fat.

If you’re starving human living in the Savannah, you say I’m not going to eat that but I haven’t eaten in three weeks, but I am not going to eat that fat, see that lean part. You’re going to eat dead animal — we eat meats, we eat eggs and don’t throw the yolk away, eat the yolks. Eat 5 a day if you like.

Have oils – don’t be frightened of oils. Oil is good for you, not all oils. We don’t eat hydrogenated oils of course. We don’t polyunsaturated oils and fried oils, we avoid.

Dairy is a little bit of uncertainty for some people but in general, don’t be – surely don’t avoid dairy because it has fat in it. So it’s a return to real single ingredient foods. Now I get this and I take care of real human beings in the office. People say well it’s all fine, but what about that party I was going to have on Saturday? How about the packer party I was going to throw one Sunday? How about holidays? What am I supposed to put on my turkey?

So in a real-world it’d be wonderful all we did was eat real single ingredient foods. But I’ve also –one of the things I also do is show you how to recreate common everyday fun foods like cupcakes and pizza and cakes and pecan streusel coffee cake. So you can make reasonable facsimiles that are tasty, fun and healthy, that are wheat free, sugar free and don’t have all the health consequences of their wheat containing counterparts. And if anybody wants those recipes, there are 35 in the book but I put them on my blog, Wheat Belly blog. The blog is miserably disorganized. So if you’re thinking about a recipe, enter a search. If you want to search say for brownies, put brownies in your search you’ll find a recipe for brownies. I make them, I am not a chef, I’m not a gourmet. I just want to eat good things. And so when my fourteen year old says hey how about some pizza, that’s how I do it. And that you’ll find those recipes on the blog.

Okay. That’s all I had to say.

I believe we preserve some time for questions.

Male Speaker: Yes, we have time for a few questions.

Question-and-Answer Session

Audience Question: Can you eat Ezekiel Bread?

William Davis: Well of course I’m not going to stand at your kitchen door and watch what you eat. So I am not going to stop anybody from eating these things. But I would say, should you eat Ezekiel Bread – I would say absolutely not. So if I take high-yield semi-dwarf wheat and I take the seeds and I soak them and let them sprout. We still have Gliadin. We still have gluten. We still have Amylopectin-A at a lower level because the sprouting process we still have wheat germ agglutinin. In other words, if I told you, hey I got a secret. It’s 20 percent less tar nicotine. Is it better? Well, yeah, it’s — but it’s just less bad, right? So that’s the game we’ve been playing in nutrition.

Nutrition is not a science, it’s fairytales most of the time. And yeah it’s better but it’s really just less bad. You’re going to find this many, many times in nutrition. Organic is better. No, it’s just less bad. That is of wheat. Organic is a good concept but in wheat in particular it’s just less bad. So no matter what you do to modern wheat, it remains modern wheat.

Audience Question: How concerned you have to be with prescription drugs and their content of wheat and where could you check out resources to find out if there is wheat in prescription drugs?

William Davis: Yeah, that’s kind of tough. So there is wheat hidden in many things. This tends to be an issue only for the truly very sensitive. So a lot of people – yeah, we don’t want the Gliadin appetite stimulation, the high blood sugar et cetera. But the tiny quantities in pills are really only issues for a truly very sensitive. But it is worth at least knowing if your pills have wheat in some form in them. There is a database, I am blank on the name. If you put gluten and your drug name. The gluten and Zyprexa, gluten and LAMADOL, whatever, do the search and you come either the manufactures website and/or that website, I am blank on that, and it will tell you if there’s any wheat in there. There really is not a really great database. So it’s one of the things I think we probably should do, so people have that and it’s content it changes to, and you could call the manufacturer but the nice lady on the other end often has no idea what you’re talking about. So it’s not — you can try it, doesn’t hurt but don’t be surprised if you don’t get a productive answer but your best bet is to look at the information from manufacturer. And you know what one of the things that Wheat Belly and the gluten-free movement have done is raise awareness. So it is becoming more – a lot of the manufacturers are putting them in the package insert, putting them in their information. So it’s becoming little easier. So even in the last couple years it’s becoming a lot easier.

Audience Question: What’s the possibility of say substituting corn bread or something for regular bread, or how about rice as a skews not as a start instead of something with wheat –

William Davis: Well my preference is healthy. Let’s be healthy. So what happens – so if we replace wheat flour and all its terrible effects with corn starch, rice starch, tapioca starch, potato starch, so they’re very common flours used in gluten-free food but also in other foods like corn breads and rices. Those things tend to raise — here’s another part of this conversation. So you and I have lived through forty years of overexposure to carbohydrates, right? Remember when Swanson TV dinners came out and mom says, hey, I don’t have to cook. I just got to shove this thing into oven, take it out 30 minutes later and give it to the kids, done.

And when we had Tricks and Coco Pops, and mom puts peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread with Ho-Ho’s, Ding Dongs, Scooter Pies and then we get older, we have resin bread or Wheat Chex and I cut my fat, eat only healthy whole grains. What have we done with forty years of that? We have burned out our pancreas. Okay. So our pancreatic function is no longer what it used to be. So it’s not uncommon to get – you’re forty, fifty, sixty years-old and have 75% residual pancreatic beta cells function, produce insulin. So an apple, to a lot of adults now, gives them diabetic or near diabetic blood sugars. A banana – a whole banana gives you a near diabetic or diabetic blood sugars. So if I said you eliminate wheat, you have and you do it, that is a big step.

But if you say, but yet that’s good. I feel better, I’ve lost 28 pounds but I want ideal health. I don’t want those high blood sugars. Well then most people, not everybody, do better by also curtailing all those carbohydrates because of this legacy of high carbohydrate eating for forty, fifty years. So most adults – you’re a 22-year-old pre-menopausal marathon runner, so maybe she doesn’t have to but most of us have to. And you’re better off cutting those rapidly digested carbohydrates.

Audience Question: Is there any amount of wheat that’s acceptable?

William Davis: You know that’s actually very good question, because it’s a very common dilemma. I would say no. But let me tell you why. So about 40% of people — so let’s say you’ve been wheat free for four weeks, about 40% of people will say, what the heck – I have been good, right? Or you didn’t know it. And it was in your whatever, right? And you have it — next thing you have is mind fog, anxiety, asthma, diarrhea, bloating. In other words, you get rash, so they are very common wheat exposure reactions. So if I have wheat now and I have been wheat free for years. If I have wheat now, I get that GI distress. I can’t think straight. I truly can’t function for about 48 hours. So for me it’s not worth it.

Now how about somebody who says I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about? I have two slice of bread. I was over in my laws and I had – yet so she was serving and I felt fine. Yeah, you felt fine but not everything is perceived. So high blood sugars, the Gliadin opiate effect that stimulates appetite. You go home and you get hungry. Man, I’m still hungry. So even though you may have perceived effects, this stuff is so powerful that it has — analogy for you is – I have a restaurant, it’s a nice restaurant but we’re kind of sloppy about washing our hands after use the bathroom. And we don’t like to clean up the counter after we cut some raw chicken. And so 90% of the time you eat in my restaurant – it’s make believe, I don’t have restaurant – 90% of the time you eat in my restaurant, you will be fine but 10% of the time you’re going to have some staphylococcus in your kitchen and your chicken, or you’re going to have some E-coli in your salad. Okay, would you eat at my restaurant if I offer it for free? I don’t think so. So with those low odds, I don’t think it’s worth it. So cutting back for – in other words, if I said just eat at my restaurant once a month, you could still get sick. So I just don’t — this stuff when you see the effects, I’ve done this now many thousands of times and you see the effects of removing entirely, you start to realize this is not just a little bit bad, it’s really bad stuff.

You know I think if this was 1950, we couldn’t have this conversation. I think you would say yeah I took all the wheat out of my diet. I lost three pounds, big deal. I think that’s what we’d say but this is 2012, and the wheat we have today is very different. I think that’s what we’re talking about to a large degree, that is we remove this thing called modern wheat. And that’s why we see this extravagant effects. It’s a modern phenomenon.

Audience Question: You’ve convinced me. I’m not eating at your restaurant. But what do you do about eating out?

William Davis: Yeah, it’s becoming easier. It’s become much easier thanks to the popularity of these ideas. So you’re safe if you order most salads. Ask the croutons be set aside, you’re fine with most meats of course. It’s a good habit to get into ask – is this breaded? I’ve stubble but I forgot to ask and the chicken – but it is becoming a lot easier. Go for the simplest foods, the foods that have more complex sauces and preparation of the ones that might have a little bit and you’re among the very sensitive you can have a reaction. So go for salads, go for the meats. Desserts are problem. You will have trouble with desserts. You might have to restrict yourself to the fruit or to the simplest desserts. I’ve been traveling a lot for the book. I can tell you it’s gotten a lot easier. I was in Calgary two weeks ago and the staff were incredibly accommodating. I was shocked – now they were trying to replace the wheat rolls with gluten-free rolls. And you know that may not be perfect but it’s a step in the right direction.

So I think it’s becoming easier but it pays to be vigilant. You can’t rely on wait staff often, know that nice kid often doesn’t know and you have to make a nuisance of yourself. I would say if you’re among those people who have perceived problem, like a severe gastrointestinal distress, if in doubt don’t eat it. It’s just not worth it.

Audience Question: Yes, Doctor, I read your book and I very much enjoyed it. I have been passing around. One question I had is Europeans have a diet high in pasta and bread and yet don’t have our obesity, is there a reason for that? My second question is – is drinking beer as bad as eating a loaf of bread?

William Davis: You know it varies from country to country. So the issues in France are different from the issues in Malaysia, are different from the issues in Beijing, right? So it’s going to vary from location to location. Several issues – the French for instance who are thinner – by the way they are catching up to us, they’re not all skin. They are getting fatter as they adopt our habits, have more fat. They have less heart disease, they eat more fat. So a lot of fat like butter and the fat on your meat blunts some of these carbohydrates, because it’s very satiating, right? The French do eat bread. They don’t eat in the quantities we have and they don’t consume the bulk of processed foods like we do. So they don’t have breakfast cereal. They don’t have granola bars, all these processed versions of wheat flour. So they do have wheat in their croissants, in their rolls et cetera. But they don’t have the same kind of exposure that we have.

In Asia, the wheat exposure is actually rather small. They have more rice of course like in Japan but they have less of a wheat exposure. Like Soba noodles might be a little bit wheat, it’s mostly buckwheat. So there is a lesser exposure to wheat. There is probably also differences – this is a little bit tough to winnow out though. Difference among what I call cultivar strains of wheat. So there may be forms that are much worse than others. I think we probably have the worst form here and Canada. But there may be more benign but less harmful strains of wheat elsewhere. There may be also issues with preparation. So there is probably lots and lots of differences. We’d have to go on a nation by nation basis to fully understand the issues. But I think it is an issue for the world because it’s not just about weight of course, right?

The explosion in diabetes for instance is a worldwide phenomenon. Yes, it’s not affecting Ethiopia. But it’s affecting virtually all other modern nations — developed nations. So it is not just a matter of weight also, there are other health problems. There has been an explosion of celiac disease for instance. I try to avoid talking about celiac disease but it is kind of the canary in the coalmine, right? If we have an explosion of celiac disease, we know there is something wrong with the wheat and there has been a quadrupling of celiac disease in the US and Canada. And this is also true in Europe. So it’s not like we’re the only ones exposed, it is a worldwide phenomenon.

With the beer, you know I fear — I worry about that Gliadin effect, that is that appetite stimulating mind fog effect, things that affect your mind. And so I think you’re best of not drinking wheat-based beers. Now this is not a gluten-free conversation. So malt is probably not the issue that is for the people who do it because they have celiac disease. So the malt is probably not a big deal. Bud Light is wheat free. Michelob Ultra is wheat free and low carb by the way, 2.6 grams carbs per 12 ounces. Some of the microbreweries are coming out with some interesting wheat-free beers. But they tend to be very carb heavy. There is Redbridge made by Anheuser-Busch. I think it has about 16 grams carbohydrates per 12-ounce bottle which now we’re getting kind of high in carbohydrates. By the way this often comes up – how many carbohydrates can I tolerate, what difference, right? If you’re a 300-pound sedentary diabetic truck driver or a 22-year old pre-menopausal 105 pound marathon runner, you’re going to have two very different tolerances to carbohydrates. But speaking generally most adults can tolerate about 15 grams net carbohydrates per meal or per sitting. Net meaning total carbohydrates minus fiber. They count fibers as carbohydrate, you can subtract that part. So 15 grams or so most can tolerate, so if Redbridge beer has 16 grams net per 12-ounce bottle, we’re starting to toe that line, right? You have three, ooh, ooh, you’re really way over, you have blood sugar effects.

Audience Question: Thank you, doctor. You’ve addressed and made us much more aware of wheat. Has anybody addressed the effects of genetically modified corn?

William Davis: Yeah, well you know this is really — so wheat is a problem. Did you catch that? But you know what there is more problems. And the wheat issue is really part of a much bigger issue and that is agribusiness sees fit to change our food, well, that’s fine, except that you ought to tell us. You ought to put it on the label. You ought to give us some information. You ought to do some testing beforehand, and the problem is none of that is currently done. So companies like Monsanto of course released glyphosate resistant corn — Roundup Ready corn. So you folks know what that is. So it’s corn, a farmer can spray Roundup or glyphosate on and it kills the weed but not the corn. Well Monsanto has been selling it a decade, right? They’ve been telling us it’s just fine. Well now the data is being generated, not by Monsanto, by other organizations, showing it ain’t so fine. That French study out four weeks ago where the rats were fed glyphosate resistant corn versus traditional corn. I will tell you real quick.

So rats fed with traditional corn lived normal two-year long rat lives. The glyphosate resistant corn fed rats died younger of large tumors mostly of the breast. Now this is corn. This is not radiation, this is not chemotherapy. It’s corn. So that’s just one study, were conducted for two years. So we have other data. So it’s all bashed by agribusiness and of course you know this Proposition 37 in front of California right now and there is the Truth in Labeling Act in front of Congress that’s stalled for over two and a half years. So what’s happened is – so last I checked my bank account, I don’t have $2 billion in there. So they have incredible resources to fight these initiatives. So I think virtually all everybody in the public says we want – if you’re going to change it, we’re probably not going to shut you down, not going to fine you or penalize you, you just tell us if you did it. So we can make our own choice but even that simple concession is not being given to us.

So what we have to do is we have to raise a stick. And of course easiest thing of all, go with your wallet or pocketbook and if you think something has genetically modified, which is going to be grains for the most part, right, wheat, corn, soy, don’t buy it. Buy foods – you know the best food is – that tomato you grow in your vine, in your backyard, reach out from your kitchen window, the basil plant sitting on your windowsill, the farmer, you know how he raises his pigs, or the farmers market. So that’s a way to avoid a lot of that nonsense.

Male Speaker: On that good advice let’s thank our speaker.

William Davis: Thank you. Thank for listening.

 

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