Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health by William Davis Page A
Authors: William Davis
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diabetes are substantial. On average, one personwith diabetes incurs $180,000 to $250,000 in direct and indirect health care costs if diagnosed at age fifty 1 and dies eight years earlier than someone without diabetes. 2 That’s as much as a quarter of a million dollars and half the time spent watching your children grow up that you sacrifice to this disease, a disease caused in large part by food—in particular, a specific list of foods. President of this soup bone club: wheat.
The clinical data documenting the effects of wheat elimination on diabetes are somewhat blurred by lumping wheat into the larger category of carbohydrates. Typically, health-conscious people who follow conventional dietary advice to reduce fat and eat more “healthy whole grains” consume approximately 75 percent of their carbohydrate calories from wheat products. That’s more than enough hobnobbing with the soup bone club to take you down the road to the increased medical costs, health complications, and shortened life span of diabetes. But it also means that, if you knock off the top dog, the pack disperses.
PASSING WATER THAT TASTES LIKE HONEY
Wheat and diabetes are closely interwoven. In many ways, the history of wheat is also the history of diabetes. Where there’s wheat, there’s diabetes. Where there’s diabetes, there’s wheat. It’s a relationship as cozy as McDonald’s and hamburgers. But it wasn’t until the modern age that diabetes became not just a disease of the idle rich but of every level of society. Diabetes has become Everyman’s Disease.
Diabetes was virtually unknown in the Neolithic Age, when Natufians first began to harvest wild einkorn wheat. It was certainly unknown in the Paleolithic Age, the millions of years preceding the agricultural ambitions of Neolithic Natufians. The archaeological record and observations of modern hunter-gatherer societies suggest that humans almost never developed diabetes nor died ofdiabetic complications before grains were present in the diet. 3, 4 The adoption of grains into the human diet was followed by archaeological evidence of increased infections, bone diseases such as osteoporosis, increased infant mortality, and reduction in life span, as well as diabetes. 5
For example, the 1534 BC Egyptian “Eber’s papyrus,” discovered in the Necropolis of Thebes and harking back to the period when Egyptians incorporated ancient wheat into their diet, describes the excessive urine production of diabetes. Adult diabetes (type 2) was described by the Indian physician Sushruta in the fifth century BC , who called it
madhumeha,
or “honey-like urine,” due to its sweet taste (yes, he diagnosed diabetes by tasting urine) and the way the urine of diabetics attracted ants and flies. Sushruta also presciently ascribed diabetes to obesity and inactivity and advised treatment with exercise.
The Greek physician Aretaeus called this mysterious condition diabetes, meaning “passing water like a siphon.” Many centuries later, another urine-tasting diagnostician, Dr. Thomas Willis, added “mellitus,” meaning “tasting like honey.” Yes, passing water like a siphon that tastes like honey. You’ll never look at your diabetic aunt the same way again.
Starting in the 1920s, diabetes treatment took a huge leap forward with the administration of insulin, which proved lifesaving for diabetic children. Child diabetics experience damage to the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, impairing its ability to make insulin. Unchecked, blood glucose climbs to dangerous levels, acting as a diuretic (causing urinary water loss). Metabolism is impaired, since glucose is unable to enter the body’s cells due to lack of insulin. Unless insulin is administered, a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis develops, followed by coma and death. The discovery of insulin earned Canadian physician Sir Frederick Banting the Nobel Prize in 1923, spawning an era in which all diabetics, children and adults,
The clinical data documenting the effects of wheat elimination on diabetes are somewhat blurred by lumping wheat into the larger category of carbohydrates. Typically, health-conscious people who follow conventional dietary advice to reduce fat and eat more “healthy whole grains” consume approximately 75 percent of their carbohydrate calories from wheat products. That’s more than enough hobnobbing with the soup bone club to take you down the road to the increased medical costs, health complications, and shortened life span of diabetes. But it also means that, if you knock off the top dog, the pack disperses.
PASSING WATER THAT TASTES LIKE HONEY
Wheat and diabetes are closely interwoven. In many ways, the history of wheat is also the history of diabetes. Where there’s wheat, there’s diabetes. Where there’s diabetes, there’s wheat. It’s a relationship as cozy as McDonald’s and hamburgers. But it wasn’t until the modern age that diabetes became not just a disease of the idle rich but of every level of society. Diabetes has become Everyman’s Disease.
Diabetes was virtually unknown in the Neolithic Age, when Natufians first began to harvest wild einkorn wheat. It was certainly unknown in the Paleolithic Age, the millions of years preceding the agricultural ambitions of Neolithic Natufians. The archaeological record and observations of modern hunter-gatherer societies suggest that humans almost never developed diabetes nor died ofdiabetic complications before grains were present in the diet. 3, 4 The adoption of grains into the human diet was followed by archaeological evidence of increased infections, bone diseases such as osteoporosis, increased infant mortality, and reduction in life span, as well as diabetes. 5
For example, the 1534 BC Egyptian “Eber’s papyrus,” discovered in the Necropolis of Thebes and harking back to the period when Egyptians incorporated ancient wheat into their diet, describes the excessive urine production of diabetes. Adult diabetes (type 2) was described by the Indian physician Sushruta in the fifth century BC , who called it
madhumeha,
or “honey-like urine,” due to its sweet taste (yes, he diagnosed diabetes by tasting urine) and the way the urine of diabetics attracted ants and flies. Sushruta also presciently ascribed diabetes to obesity and inactivity and advised treatment with exercise.
The Greek physician Aretaeus called this mysterious condition diabetes, meaning “passing water like a siphon.” Many centuries later, another urine-tasting diagnostician, Dr. Thomas Willis, added “mellitus,” meaning “tasting like honey.” Yes, passing water like a siphon that tastes like honey. You’ll never look at your diabetic aunt the same way again.
Starting in the 1920s, diabetes treatment took a huge leap forward with the administration of insulin, which proved lifesaving for diabetic children. Child diabetics experience damage to the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, impairing its ability to make insulin. Unchecked, blood glucose climbs to dangerous levels, acting as a diuretic (causing urinary water loss). Metabolism is impaired, since glucose is unable to enter the body’s cells due to lack of insulin. Unless insulin is administered, a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis develops, followed by coma and death. The discovery of insulin earned Canadian physician Sir Frederick Banting the Nobel Prize in 1923, spawning an era in which all diabetics, children and adults,
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