Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health by William Davis Page B
Authors: William Davis
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were administered insulin.
While the discovery of insulin was truly lifesaving for children, it sent the understanding of adult diabetes off course for manydecades. After insulin was discovered, the distinction between type 1 and type 2 diabetes remained blurred. It was therefore a surprise in the fifties when it was discovered that adult type 2 diabetics don’t lack insulin until advanced phases of the disease. In fact, most adult type 2 diabetics have high quantities of insulin (several times greater than normal). Only in the eighties was the concept of insulin resistance discovered, explaining why abnormally high levels of insulin were present in adult diabetics. 6
Unfortunately, the discovery of insulin resistance failed to enlighten the medical world when the eighties’ notion of reducing fat and saturated fat in the diet led to a nationwide open season on carbohydrates. In particular, it led to the idea that “healthy whole grains” would salvage the health of Americans believed to be threatened by overconsumption of fats. It inadvertently led to a thirty-year experiment in what can happen to people who reduce fats but replace lost fat calories with “healthy whole grains” such as wheat.
The result: weight gain, obesity, bulging abdomens of visceral fat, prediabetes and diabetes on a scale never before witnessed, affecting males and females alike, rich and poor, herbivores and carnivores, reaching across all races and ages, all “passing water like a siphon that tastes like honey.”
WHOLE GRAIN NATION
Adult diabetes through the ages was mostly the domain of the privileged who didn’t have to hunt for their food, farm the land, or prepare their own meals. Think Henry VIII, gouty and obese, sporting a fifty-four-inch waistline, gorging nightly on banquets topped off with marzipan, loaves of bread, sweet puddings, and ale. Only during the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, when sucrose (table sugar) consumption increased across all societal levels, common laborer on up, did diabetes become more widespread. 7
The transition of the nineteenth into the twentieth century therefore witnessed an increase in diabetes, which then stabilized for many years. For most of the twentieth century, the incidence of adult diabetes in the United States remained relatively constant—until the mid-eighties.
Then things took an abrupt turn for the worse.
Percentage of US adults with diabetes, 1980-2009. The late 1980s marked a sharp upward trend, with the most dramatic spikes in 2009 and2010 (not shown).
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Today diabetes is epidemic, as common as tabloid gossip. In 2009, twenty-four million Americans were diabetic, a number that represents explosive growth compared to just a few years earlier. The number of Americans with diabetes is growing faster than any other disease condition with the exception of obesity (if you call obesity a disease). If you’re not diabetic yourself, then you likely have friends who are diabetic, coworkers who are diabetic, neighbors who are diabetic. Given the exceptionally high incidence in the elderly, your parents are (or were) likely to be diabetic.
And diabetes is just the tip of the iceberg. For every diabetic, there are three or four people with prediabetes (encompassing the conditions impaired fasting glucose, impaired glucose tolerance,and metabolic syndrome) waiting in the wings. Depending on whose definition you use, an incredible 22 to 39 percent of all US adults have prediabetes. 8 The combined total of people with diabetes and prediabetes in 2008 was eighty-one million, or one in three adults over eighteen years of age. 9 That’s more than the total number of people, adults and children, diabetic and nondiabetic, living in the entire United States in 1900.
If you also count the people who don’t yet meet full criteria for prediabetes but just show high after-meal blood sugars, high triglycerides,
While the discovery of insulin was truly lifesaving for children, it sent the understanding of adult diabetes off course for manydecades. After insulin was discovered, the distinction between type 1 and type 2 diabetes remained blurred. It was therefore a surprise in the fifties when it was discovered that adult type 2 diabetics don’t lack insulin until advanced phases of the disease. In fact, most adult type 2 diabetics have high quantities of insulin (several times greater than normal). Only in the eighties was the concept of insulin resistance discovered, explaining why abnormally high levels of insulin were present in adult diabetics. 6
Unfortunately, the discovery of insulin resistance failed to enlighten the medical world when the eighties’ notion of reducing fat and saturated fat in the diet led to a nationwide open season on carbohydrates. In particular, it led to the idea that “healthy whole grains” would salvage the health of Americans believed to be threatened by overconsumption of fats. It inadvertently led to a thirty-year experiment in what can happen to people who reduce fats but replace lost fat calories with “healthy whole grains” such as wheat.
The result: weight gain, obesity, bulging abdomens of visceral fat, prediabetes and diabetes on a scale never before witnessed, affecting males and females alike, rich and poor, herbivores and carnivores, reaching across all races and ages, all “passing water like a siphon that tastes like honey.”
WHOLE GRAIN NATION
Adult diabetes through the ages was mostly the domain of the privileged who didn’t have to hunt for their food, farm the land, or prepare their own meals. Think Henry VIII, gouty and obese, sporting a fifty-four-inch waistline, gorging nightly on banquets topped off with marzipan, loaves of bread, sweet puddings, and ale. Only during the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, when sucrose (table sugar) consumption increased across all societal levels, common laborer on up, did diabetes become more widespread. 7
The transition of the nineteenth into the twentieth century therefore witnessed an increase in diabetes, which then stabilized for many years. For most of the twentieth century, the incidence of adult diabetes in the United States remained relatively constant—until the mid-eighties.
Then things took an abrupt turn for the worse.
Percentage of US adults with diabetes, 1980-2009. The late 1980s marked a sharp upward trend, with the most dramatic spikes in 2009 and2010 (not shown).
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Today diabetes is epidemic, as common as tabloid gossip. In 2009, twenty-four million Americans were diabetic, a number that represents explosive growth compared to just a few years earlier. The number of Americans with diabetes is growing faster than any other disease condition with the exception of obesity (if you call obesity a disease). If you’re not diabetic yourself, then you likely have friends who are diabetic, coworkers who are diabetic, neighbors who are diabetic. Given the exceptionally high incidence in the elderly, your parents are (or were) likely to be diabetic.
And diabetes is just the tip of the iceberg. For every diabetic, there are three or four people with prediabetes (encompassing the conditions impaired fasting glucose, impaired glucose tolerance,and metabolic syndrome) waiting in the wings. Depending on whose definition you use, an incredible 22 to 39 percent of all US adults have prediabetes. 8 The combined total of people with diabetes and prediabetes in 2008 was eighty-one million, or one in three adults over eighteen years of age. 9 That’s more than the total number of people, adults and children, diabetic and nondiabetic, living in the entire United States in 1900.
If you also count the people who don’t yet meet full criteria for prediabetes but just show high after-meal blood sugars, high triglycerides,
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