Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health by William Davis
Authors: William Davis
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don’t want to replace wheat’s amylopectin A with the rapidly absorbed carbohydrates of powdered rice starch, cornstarch, potato starch, and tapioca starch. In short, don’t replace wheat calories with rapidlyabsorbed carbohydrates of the sort that trigger insulin and visceral fat deposition. And avoid gluten-free foods if you are gluten-free.
Later in the book, I will discuss the ins and outs of wheat removal, how to navigate everything from choosing healthy replacement foods to wheat withdrawal. I provide a view from the trenches, having witnessed thousands of people do it successfully.
But before we get to the details of wheat elimination, let’s talk about celiac disease. Even if you do
not
suffer from this devastating disease, understanding its causes and cures provides a useful framework for thinking about wheat and its role in the human diet. Beyond teaching us lessons about weight loss, celiac disease can provide other useful health insights to those of us without this condition.
So put down that Cinnabon and let’s talk about celiac.
CHAPTER 7
DIABETES NATION: WHEAT AND INSULIN RESISTANCE
I’VE KICKED IT IN THE JAW, beaten it, and called it names. Let’s now look this thing called diabetes square in the eye.
PRESIDENT OF THE SOUP BONE CLUB
When I was a kid growing up in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey, my mother used to point to one person or another and declare him or her the “president of the soup bone club.” That’s the title she gave local people who thought they were big shots in our little town of 5,000. One time, for instance, the husband of a friend of hers droned on about how he could fix all the ills of the country if only he were elected president—though he was unemployed, was missing two front teeth, and had been arrested twice for drunk driving over the past two years. Thus, my mother’s gracious appointment of the man as the president of the soup bone club.
Wheat, too, is the leader of an unenviable group, the worst carbohydrate in the bunch, the one most likely to lead us down the path of diabetes. Wheat is president of its own little soup bone club, chief among carbohydrates. Drunk, foul-mouthed, and unbathed, still wearing last week’s T-shirt, it gets elevated to special “fiber-rich,” “complex carbohydrate,” and “healthy whole grain” status by all the agencies that dispense dietary advice.
Because of wheat’s incredible capacity to send blood sugar levels straight up, initiate the glucose-insulin roller coaster ride that drives appetite, generate addictive brain-active exorphins, and grow visceral fat, it is the one essential food to eliminate in a serious effort to prevent, reduce, or eliminate diabetes. You could eliminate walnuts or pecans, but you will have no impact on diabetic risk. You could eliminate spinach or cucumbers and have no effect on diabetic risk. You could banish all pork or beef from your table and still have no effect.
But you could remove wheat and an entire domino effect of changes develop: less triggering of blood sugar rises, no exorphins to drive the impulse to consume more, no initiation of the glucose-insulin cycle of appetite. And if there’s no glucose-insulin cycle, there’s little to drive appetite except genuine physiologic need for sustenance, not overindulgence. If appetite shrinks, calorie intake is reduced, visceral fat disappears, insulin resistance improves, blood sugars fall. Diabetics can become nondiabetics, prediabet-ics can become nonprediabetics. All the phenomena associated with poor glucose metabolism recede, including high blood pressure, inflammatory phenomena, glycation, small LDL particles, triglycerides.
In short, remove wheat and thereby reverse a
constellation
of phenomena that would otherwise result in diabetes and all its associated health consequences, three or four medications if not seven, and years shaved off your life.
Think about that for a moment: The personal and societal costs of developing
Later in the book, I will discuss the ins and outs of wheat removal, how to navigate everything from choosing healthy replacement foods to wheat withdrawal. I provide a view from the trenches, having witnessed thousands of people do it successfully.
But before we get to the details of wheat elimination, let’s talk about celiac disease. Even if you do
not
suffer from this devastating disease, understanding its causes and cures provides a useful framework for thinking about wheat and its role in the human diet. Beyond teaching us lessons about weight loss, celiac disease can provide other useful health insights to those of us without this condition.
So put down that Cinnabon and let’s talk about celiac.
CHAPTER 7
DIABETES NATION: WHEAT AND INSULIN RESISTANCE
I’VE KICKED IT IN THE JAW, beaten it, and called it names. Let’s now look this thing called diabetes square in the eye.
PRESIDENT OF THE SOUP BONE CLUB
When I was a kid growing up in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey, my mother used to point to one person or another and declare him or her the “president of the soup bone club.” That’s the title she gave local people who thought they were big shots in our little town of 5,000. One time, for instance, the husband of a friend of hers droned on about how he could fix all the ills of the country if only he were elected president—though he was unemployed, was missing two front teeth, and had been arrested twice for drunk driving over the past two years. Thus, my mother’s gracious appointment of the man as the president of the soup bone club.
Wheat, too, is the leader of an unenviable group, the worst carbohydrate in the bunch, the one most likely to lead us down the path of diabetes. Wheat is president of its own little soup bone club, chief among carbohydrates. Drunk, foul-mouthed, and unbathed, still wearing last week’s T-shirt, it gets elevated to special “fiber-rich,” “complex carbohydrate,” and “healthy whole grain” status by all the agencies that dispense dietary advice.
Because of wheat’s incredible capacity to send blood sugar levels straight up, initiate the glucose-insulin roller coaster ride that drives appetite, generate addictive brain-active exorphins, and grow visceral fat, it is the one essential food to eliminate in a serious effort to prevent, reduce, or eliminate diabetes. You could eliminate walnuts or pecans, but you will have no impact on diabetic risk. You could eliminate spinach or cucumbers and have no effect on diabetic risk. You could banish all pork or beef from your table and still have no effect.
But you could remove wheat and an entire domino effect of changes develop: less triggering of blood sugar rises, no exorphins to drive the impulse to consume more, no initiation of the glucose-insulin cycle of appetite. And if there’s no glucose-insulin cycle, there’s little to drive appetite except genuine physiologic need for sustenance, not overindulgence. If appetite shrinks, calorie intake is reduced, visceral fat disappears, insulin resistance improves, blood sugars fall. Diabetics can become nondiabetics, prediabet-ics can become nonprediabetics. All the phenomena associated with poor glucose metabolism recede, including high blood pressure, inflammatory phenomena, glycation, small LDL particles, triglycerides.
In short, remove wheat and thereby reverse a
constellation
of phenomena that would otherwise result in diabetes and all its associated health consequences, three or four medications if not seven, and years shaved off your life.
Think about that for a moment: The personal and societal costs of developing
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