Wheat Belly. William Davis, MD

PAST, a prominent belly was the domain of the privileged, a mark of wealth and success, a symbol of not having to clean your own stables or plow your own field. In this century, you don’t have to plow your own field. Today, obesity has been democratized: Everybody can have a big belly. Your dad called his rudimentary mid-twentieth-century equivalent a beer belly. But what are soccer moms, kids, and two-thirds of your friends and neighbors who don’t drink beer doing with a beer belly?

      I call it “wheat belly,” though I could have just as easily called this condition pretzel brain or bagel bowel or biscuit face since there’s not an organ system unaffected by wheat. But wheat’s impact on the waistline is its most visible and defining characteristic, an outward expression of the grotesque distortions humans experience with consumption of this grain.

      A wheat belly represents the accumulation of fat that results from years of consuming foods that trigger insulin, the hormone of fat storage. While some people store fat in their buttocks and thighs, most people collect ungainly fat around the middle. This “central” or “visceral” fat is unique: Unlike fat in other body areas, it provokes inflammatory phenomena, distorts insulin responses, and issues abnormal metabolic signals to the rest of the body. Visceral fat is responsible for effects as varied as cancer, knee arthritis, and infertility. In the unwitting wheat-bellied male, visceral fat also produces estrogen and other hormonal distortions that create “man breasts.” In susceptible females, the same inflammatory fat causes abnormally high testosterone levels, male-like facial hair, and infertility.

      The consequences of wheat consumption are manifested on the body’s surface but also reach deep down into virtually every organ of the body, from the intestines, liver, heart, and thyroid gland all the way up to the brain. In fact, there’s hardly an organ that is not affected by wheat in some potentially damaging way.

      PANTING AND SWEATING IN THE HEARTLAND

      I practiced cardiology in Milwaukee. Like many other midwestern cities, Milwaukee is a good place to live and raise a family. City services work pretty well, the libraries are first-rate, my kids attended quality public schools, and the population is just large enough to enjoy big-city culture, such as an excellent symphony and art museum. The people living here are a fairly friendly bunch. But … they’re fat.

      I don’t mean a little bit fat. I mean really, really fat. I mean panting-and-sweating-after-one-flight-of-stairs fat. I mean 240-pound eighteen-year-old women, SUVs tipped sharply to the driver’s side, double-wide wheelchairs, hospital equipment unable to accommodate patients who tip the scales at 350 pounds or more. (Not only can’t they fit into the CT scanner or other imaging device, but you wouldn’t be able to see anything even if they could. It’s like trying to determine whether the image in the murky ocean water is a flounder or a shark.)

      Once upon a time, an individual weighing 250 pounds or more was a rarity; today it’s a common sight among the men and women walking the mall, as humdrum as selling jeans at the Gap. Retired people are overweight or obese, as are middle-aged adults, young adults, teenagers, even children. White-collar workers are fat, blue-collar workers are fat. The sedentary are fat and so are athletes. White people are fat, black people are fat, Hispanics are fat, Asians are fat. Carnivores are fat, vegetarians are fat. Americans are plagued by obesity on a scale never before seen in the human experience. No demographic has escaped the weight-gain crisis.

      Wheat Belly Success Story: Katie

      “Down ninety-five pounds, lower than my goal weight. Normal blood pressure and no meds. Depression-free. Pain-free. Full of energy and loving the acne-free skin I am in!

      “Today my blood pressure is normal. Today my acne is gone. Today my depression is gone. Today I wear a size two instead of a size sixteen/eighteen. Another new discovery: my tonsils are normal. I’ve had abnormally large tonsils my entire life. Stayed sick as a kid with strep and tonsillitis, and have snored all my life as well. I realized in the mirror a few days ago my tonsils are almost gone. I barely had a space in my throat my whole life and now they have disappeared. And I no longer snore!

      “Two years ago I was put on blood pressure meds. I did a random check yesterday, and it was 102/62—but without meds! My body didn’t just change with this way of eating. My physical health has changed. My mental health has changed. My entire life has changed.

      “Every day I find somethinng new. Every day I feel better than the one before. Every day I am so thankful!”

      Ask the USDA or the Surgeon General’s office and they will tell you that Americans are fat because they drink too many soft drinks, eat too many potato chips, drink too much beer, and don’t exercise enough. And those things may indeed be part of the truth. But that’s hardly the whole story.

      Many overweight people, in fact, are quite health conscious. Ask anyone tipping the scales over 250 pounds: What do you think happened to allow such incredible weight gain? You may be surprised at how many do not say “I drink Big Gulps, eat Pop Tarts, and watch TV all day.” Most will say something like “I don’t get it. I exercise five days a week. I’ve cut my fat and increased my healthy whole grains. Yet I can’t seem to stop gaining weight!”

      HOW DID WE GET HERE?

      The national trend to reduce fat and cholesterol intake and increase carbohydrate calories has created a peculiar situation in which products made from wheat have not just inflated their presence in our diets; they have also come to dominate our diets. For most Americans, every single meal and snack contains foods made with wheat flour. It might be the main course, it might be the side dish, it might be the dessert—and it’s probably all of them.

      Wheat has become the national icon of health: “Eat more healthy whole grains,” we’re told, and the food industry happily jumped on board, creating “heart healthy” versions of all our favorite wheat products chock-full of whole grains.

      The sad truth is that the proliferation of wheat products in the American diet parallels the expansion of our waists. Advice to cut fat and cholesterol intake and replace the calories with whole grains that was issued by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute through its National Cholesterol Education Program in 1985 coincides precisely with the start of a sharp upward climb in body weight for men and women. Ironically, 1985 also marks the year when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began tracking body weight statistics, tidily documenting the explosion in obesity and diabetes that began that very year.

      Of all the grains in the human diet, why pick on wheat? Because wheat, by a considerable margin, is the worst of the bunch, the ringleader of dietary ne’er-do-wells. Unless they’re Euell Gibbons, most people don’t eat much rye, barley, spelt, triticale, bulgur, kamut, or other less common grains; wheat consumption overshadows consumption of most other grains by more than a hundred to one. Wheat also has unique attributes those other grains do not, attributes that make it especially destructive to our health, which I will cover in later chapters. And it’s not just about gluten—modern wheat is an impressive collection of dozens of dietary toxins. Once you come to appreciate just how toxic many of the components of modern wheat truly are, you will be amazed that most people even survive its consumption. While I mostly focus on wheat, the worst offender, I will also discuss how and why other grains that are, after all, genetic cousins, will not be left off the hook, either. Grains—really just seeds of grasses—are also uncommonly promiscuous, readily sharing genes across species. It means that, although wheat is the worst, genetically related grasses like rye, oats, or corn are not blameless.

      The health impact of Triticum aestivum, common bread wheat, and its genetic brethren ranges far and wide, with curious effects from mouth to anus, brain to pancreas, Appalachian housewife to Wall Street arbitrageur. But recognize that this food, blessed by virtually all who provide dietary advice, star of nutritionally bankrupt “healthy whole grains,” lies at the foundation of struggles with weight, visceral fat, and, oh, just a few hundred common health conditions, and you will be on your way to undoing the entire mess.

      If it sounds crazy, bear with me.