Wheat Belly. William Davis, MD

the most popular dress sizes are now 16 to 18. Blame wheat when you are being crushed in your airline seat by the 280-pound man next to you.

      Sure, sugary soft drinks and sedentary lifestyles add to the problem. But for the great majority of health-conscious people who don’t indulge in these obvious weight-gaining behaviors, the principal trigger for increasing weight is wheat.

      In fact, the incredible financial bonanza that the proliferation of wheat in the American diet has created for the food and drug industries can make you wonder if this “perfect storm” was somehow man-made. Did a group of powerful men convene a secret Howard Hughesian meeting in 1955, map out an evil plan to mass-produce high-yield, low-cost semi-dwarf wheat, engineer the release of government-sanctioned advice to eat plenty of “healthy whole grains,” lead the charge of corporate Big Food to sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of processed wheat food products—all leading to obesity and the “need” for billions of dollars of drug treatments for diabetes, heart disease, and all the other health consequences? It may sound ridiculous, but in a sense that’s exactly what happened. Here’s how.

       WHEAT BELLY DIVA

      Celeste no longer felt “cool.”

      At age sixty-one, Celeste reported that she’d gradually gained weight from her normal range of 120 to 135 pounds in her twenties and thirties. Something happened starting in her mid-forties, and even without substantial changes in habits, she gradually ballooned up to 182 pounds. “This is the heaviest I have ever been,” she groaned.

      As a professor of modern art, Celeste hung around with a fairly urbane crowd. Her weight made her feel self-conscious and out of place. So I got an attentive ear when I explained my diet approach that involved elimination of all wheat products.

      Over the first three months she lost 21 pounds, more than enough to convince her that the program worked. She was already having to reach into the back of her closet to find clothes she hadn’t been able to wear for the past five years.

      Celeste stuck to the lifestyle, admitting to me that it had quickly become second nature, with no cravings, a rare need to snack, just a comfortable cruise through meals that kept her satisfied. She noted that, from time to time, work pressures kept her from being able to have lunch or dinner, but the prolonged periods without something to eat proved effortless. I reminded her that healthy snacks such as raw nuts, flaxseed crackers, and cheese readily fit into her program. But she simply found that snacks weren’t necessary most of the time.

      Fourteen months after adopting the Wheat Belly lifestyle, Celeste couldn’t stop smiling when she returned to my office at 127 pounds—a weight she’d last seen in her thirties. She’d lost 55 pounds from her high, including 12 inches off her waist, which shrank from 39 inches to 27. Not only could she fit into size 6 dresses again, she no longer felt uncomfortable mingling with the artsy set. No more need to conceal her sagging wheat belly under loose-fitting tops or layers. She could wear her tightest Oscar de la Renta cocktail dress proudly, no wheat belly bulge in sight.

      WHOLE GRAINS, HALF-TRUTHS

      In nutrition circles, whole grains are the dietary darling du jour. In fact, this USDA-endorsed, “heart healthy” ingredient, the stuff that purveyors of dietary advice agree you should eat more of, even dominate diet, makes us hungry and fat, hungrier and fatter than any other time in human history.

      Hold up a current picture of ten random Americans against a picture of ten Americans from the early twentieth or preceding century, and you’ll see the stark contrast: Americans are now fat. According to the CDC, 39.6 percent of adults are obese (BMI 30 or greater), another 36 percent are overweight (BMI of 25 to 29.9), leaving only one in four at normal weight. Since 1960, the ranks of the obese have grown the most rapidly, nearly tripling over those sixty years.¹

      Few Americans were overweight or obese during the first two centuries of the nation’s history. (Most actual data collected on BMI that we have for comparison prior to the twentieth century come from body weight and height tabulated by the U.S. military. The average male in the military in the late nineteenth century had a BMI of <23.2, regardless of age; by the 1990s, the average military BMI was well into the overweight range.² We can easily presume that, if it applies to military recruits, it’s worse in the civilian population.) Weight grew at the fastest pace once the USDA and others got into the business of telling Americans what to eat. Accordingly, while obesity grew gradually from 1960, the real upward acceleration of obesity started in the mid-eighties.

      Studies conducted during the eighties and since have shown that, when processed white flour products are replaced with whole grain flour products, there is a reduction in colon cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and less weight is gained. All that is indeed true, an indisputable half-truth.

      According to accepted dietary wisdom, if something that is bad for you (white flour) is replaced by something less bad (whole wheat), then lots of that less-bad thing must be great for you. By that logic, if high-tar cigarettes are bad for you and low-tar cigarettes are less bad, then lots of low-tar cigarettes should be good for you. This is the flawed rationale used to justify the proliferation of grains in our diet. Throw into the mix the fact that wheat has undergone extensive agricultural genetics-engineered changes, and you have devised a formula for creating a nation of fat, unhealthy people. Less bad is not necessarily good.

      Let’s look a bit closer, for instance, at the notion that “healthy whole grains” are part of an effort to maintain a healthy weight. Time and again, studies have demonstrated that people who consume greater proportions of whole grains weigh less than those who consume white flour—no argument here. But look closer: What studies like the Nurses’ Health Study and the Physicians’ Health Study really show is that people who consume white flour products gain substantial weight, while people who consume whole grains gain less weight—but both gain weight. Once again, less bad is not necessarily good. Whole grains have most definitely not been associated with weight loss but with less weight gain.³ Yet, this has been reported as better weight management, with whole grain consumption, trumpeted by the media, doctors, dietitians, and the grain industry, heard by Mary and John Q. Public as “whole grains are part of a healthy weight control program.” (This flawed sequence of logic, by the way, is a problem that shows itself over and over again in nutritional thinking and is responsible for a number of other common misconceptions that I shall touch on later.)

      The USDA and other “official” opinion makers insist that more than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese because we’re inactive and gluttonous. We sit on our fat behinds watching too much reality TV, spend too much time online, and don’t exercise. We drink too much sugary soda and eat too much fast food and junk snacks. Betcha can’t eat just one!

      Certainly these are poor habits that will eventually take their toll on health. But I meet plenty of people who tell me that they follow nutritional guidelines seriously, avoid junk foods and fast foods, exercise an hour every day, all while continuing to gain and gain and gain. Many very seriously adhere to the guidelines set by the USDA food pyramid and food plate (six to eleven servings of grain per day, of which four or more should be whole grain), the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, or the American Diabetes Association. The cornerstone of all these nutritional directives? “Eat more healthy whole grains.”

      Are these organizations in cahoots with the wheat farmers and seed and chemical companies? There’s more to it than that. “Eat more healthy whole grains” is really just the corollary of the “cut the fat” movement embraced by the medical establishment since the sixties. Based on epidemiological observations (as well as misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and concealed, unreported findings to the contrary) suggesting that higher dietary fat intakes are associated with higher cholesterol levels and risk for heart disease, Americans were advised to reduce total and saturated fat intake. Grain-based foods filled the calorie gap left by reduced fat consumption. The blundering logic of whole-grain-is-better-than-white argument further fueled the transition. The low-fat, more-grain message also proved enormously profitable for the processed food industry. It triggered an explosion of processed food products, most requiring just a few nickels’