The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (9 page)

Throughout the book, Davis attributes negative qualities to “wheat” but then proceeds to demonstrate and reference the negative effects of white flour, a highly processed form of whole wheat. His lack of precision here is confusing and not scientific. The more finely you grind a grain into flour, the higher its glycemic load becomes. Whole wheat pastry flour, for instance, has a higher glycemic index than coarsely ground whole grains, which are more glycemic than intact whole grains such as boiled wheat kernels, sprouted wheat, or wheat berries. Davis is not making it clear if wheat is the issue, or the way we process and manufacture flour.

The claim that wheat is the villain is misleading because most of the data Davis presents to vilify wheat demonstrates that it’s actually white flour that’s the problem—not all wheat. For example, he presented data from the China-Cornell-Oxford Project to show a correlation between increasing consumption of wheat flour and modern disease, but he failed to mention that people in the study were eating products made from white flour, not whole grains.

Contrary to Davis’s claims, wheat hasn’t morphed into a toxic monster food. It is simply too often overly processed and overly ground,
which jacks up its glycemic levels. It then quickly empties out its calories into the body, spiking our insulin levels. Bagels, pancakes, muffins, bread, rolls, cake, pretzels, pizza, breakfast cereals, and pasta are all made from white flour, which is absorbed into the bloodstream as quickly as sugar. White flour and other processed grains promote diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Add these to all the soda, sweets, oils, cheeses, meats, and other processed junk food that Americans consume, and it’s no wonder our population is sick and overweight.

However, Davis contends that even a little whole wheat product in the diet is too immune-system stimulating and can keep you from weight loss and optimal health. Is that the case? Is wheat more glycemic than all the other grains? Is even a moderate amount of real whole grain wheat really so bad for the majority of people who have no problem with gluten? That is clearly a fairy tale. As long as whole grains are in the same form, their glycemic effect is very similar. Davis implicates wheat as the villain because it contains more of the starch amylopectin A, which is more glycemic than amylopectin B and C. But the study he references for this data actually shows that all the other measured whole grains—oats, brown rice, and barley—share similar amounts of rapidly digestible amylopectin A.

Davis also states that wheat is more glycemic than pure sugar. This is more nonsense. In fact, the glycemic load of sucrose (200 calories) is 37.2, while the glycemic load of whole wheat bread (200 calories, three slices) is 26.1. What’s more, whole wheat kernels, the preferred way to consume wheat, have a relatively low glycemic load of 13.5.

Davis makes a number of other unsubstantiated claims to boost his contention that wheat is dangerous. While pointing out the very real health hazards of wheat to people with gluten intolerance and celiac disease, he fails to qualify his statement against the extremely low number of people in these two categories. The prevalence of wheat allergies in the United States, for instance, is found in only 0.4
percent of the population, while celiac disease is found in less than 1 percent of the population.
²²
Nonceliac gluten sensitivity doesn’t yet have a distinct definition, but the current estimate is 6 percent of Americans.
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Without quantifying the number of people who have these difficulties, Davis ends up only inciting in the wider public an irrational and unsubstantiated fear of wheat. Certainly, people with celiac disease or gluten intolerance can experience severe health problems if they eat wheat, but that is ancillary to the core message of his book—mainly, that wheat makes us fat and is dangerous to our health, even though Davis doesn’t present the science to back up such claims.

To make matters worse, he compounds his errors by advocating a diet of unlimited helpings of meat, oil, eggs, and fish, just as his partners in the Paleo and other high-animal-protein diets do. He even goes so far as to claim that animal products and saturated fat are only tangentially associated with heart disease, telling his readers that they can eat all the high-saturated-fat meats and cheeses they want as long as they cut out wheat entirely from their diet. I was flabbergasted. While Davis also urges his readers to make “vegetables, in all their wondrous variety,” a centerpiece of their diets, he fails to make room for “the best foods on the planet earth” (as we agree vegetables are) next to the unlimited helpings of meat, eggs, cheese, and oils. I guess he doesn’t see that readers will have to reduce the intake of some other less desirable foods significantly in order to eat lots of vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, and fruit.

Davis takes the extreme position that wheat and processed foods are the singular villains, ignoring how the deadly combination of processed wheat, processed foods,
and
too much animal products are scientifically shown to lead to weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, premature aging, and dementia. Like everyone else behind almost every fad diet, Davis has to exaggerate and misrepresent the data on hand to make them fit his biases.

Low-Fat Fallacies

Antiscientific thinking also permeates the vegan community, perpetuated by some well-known vegan health authors and respected authorities within its ranks. Unfortunately, most authorities have their own predetermined biases. People interested in true science-based nutrition have no predetermined dietary agenda and are open to modifying future recommendations for improvement; they inquisitively seek out and admit problems that may develop, changing recommendations accordingly. All too often, vegans in positions of authority look for and report only scientific support for veganism, ignoring evidence or clinical experience that contradicts their teachings. Similar to the resistant high-protein crowd, vegan leaders too often hang their reputations on past pronouncements and are therefore reticent to change them as better science and more conclusive evidence becomes available. This resistance perpetuates disagreements within the health science community and slows education about and acceptance of healthful eating.

It also leaves some individuals who are following their recommendations unsatisfied and not adequately cared for. These people do not thrive when trying to avoid all fats in an attempt to maintain a fat percent of below 10 percent in their diet. Some individuals have unique digestive and absorptive requirements that call for slight modifications in their dietary standards. Most commonly, a small percentage of individuals have higher fat needs or higher protein needs, as do many rapidly growing children, serious athletes, and pregnant and nursing women. Importantly, genetic differences in fatty acid metabolism also need to be recognized.

About thirty years ago, for instance, some vegan health enthusiasts hypothesized that the benefits of a vegan diet stemmed from the fact that this diet was so low in fat. An extremely low-fat vegan diet quickly began to receive significant media exposure as it was clinically demonstrated to prevent and reverse heart disease. Fat, then, became
the dietary
villain du jour
. The more fat you could avoid, the leaders of this community argued, the better. This viewpoint seemed reasonable at the time, largely because the scientific studies on fat consumption back then (showing negative health effects) always investigated the effects of consuming processed oils and animal fats. (They had yet to investigate the results of populations consuming more fat from whole seeds and nuts.) It therefore wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the main benefit of a vegan diet came from the avoidance of fat in general. Many vegans embraced a low-fat vegan diet, eschewing all oils and almost all seeds and nuts, trying to keep their fat intake below 10 percent of calories.

A report in 1990 seemed to confirm the value of this way of eating. Dean Ornish, a physician and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, published the Lifestyle Heart Trial, which showed that 82 percent of the experimental group following a very low-fat, mostly vegan diet had demonstrated regression of their obstructive coronary atherosclerotic lesions.
²⁴
This means that for the majority of subjects, this diet style reversed heart disease. This landmark study forced people to accept the reality that heart disease can be reversed with aggressive nutritional intervention. Ornish and his colleagues showed that comprehensive lifestyle changes can help reduce even severe coronary atherosclerosis after only one year, all without the use of lipid-lowering drugs. Soon, others around the country, such as Caldwell B. Esselstyn, M.D., started using similar extremely low-fat vegan diets with impressive results.
²⁵

Even though these physicians advocating extremely low-fat vegan diets have helped thousands of people and revolutionized the treatment of heart disease, some questions remain. Is it helpful to scare people with heart disease away from eating a few walnuts? Does this advice to avoid unsalted nuts and seeds offer any added benefit to the vegan diet style? And, can excluding all nuts and seeds even be harmful for some people? Accumulating evidence from scientific clinical
trials, epidemiological studies, and my clinical findings led me to take a slightly different approach.

Following these well-publicized protocols, I was called on to care for many in this newfound community of low-fat vegan dieters with advanced heart disease. Hundreds of them came to me for additional guidance because they had complaints and questions. Some of them exhibited symptoms of fatty acid deficiency such as depression, dry skin, fatigue, poor recovery after exercise, and cardiac arrhythmias like premature ventricular contractions. I even examined patients who developed atrial fibrillation after adopting this extremely low-fat vegan approach to eating.

A certain amount of essential fatty acids is required for hormonal production and healthy cell membranes. They are also necessary to maintain cell integrity, permeability, shape, and flexibility; and they are critical for the development and functioning of the heart, brain, and nervous system. A deficiency in fat can compromise the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and minerals, such as carotenoids, vitamin E, zinc, and manganese as well as the anticancer phytochemicals found in vegetables. This deficiency can also exacerbate the general poor absorption of zinc that can result from a vegan diet because whole grains, nuts, and legumes bind to zinc, inhibiting its absorption.

By incorporating nuts and seeds back into my vegan patients’ diets, as well as by supplementing these diets with low doses of DHA—a long-chain omega-3 fatty acid usually found in fish but also available as an algae-derived vegan supplement—I was able to generally cure their symptoms and bring up the low levels of these fatty acids shown in their blood tests.

Thousands of my patients, clients, and readers reclaimed their favorable weights and reversed their atherosclerosis. Many are now thriving in their eighties and nineties, with no signs of slowing down. Their cholesterol is low. They aren’t hypertensive. Their hearts are in great condition, and they’re all off medications for heart disease.

My protocol worked, but unfortunately, some people who adopted the extremely low-fat vegan diet felt so poorly they eventually went back to eating excessive amounts of animal products again. These experiences were reported to me by some of these individuals, and one can find such complaints across the Internet and in articles and books. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to work with many of these people and turn them around to healthful eating with a diet that worked well for them. With a slight tweak of their diets, they were able to remain vegan.

Over the past thirty years, evidence on the benefits of consuming nuts and seeds has accumulated. It is now too definitive to ignore. Scores of studies have demonstrated that nuts and seeds help decrease dramatically the occurrence of cancer, heart disease, and strokes, while significantly increasing the average person’s life expectancy.

I recently made a list of seventy-seven new studies on nuts and seeds. They all show positive effects on weight, health, and longevity. While these studies are far too intensive to discuss in full here, I will highlight some interesting points. As people ate more fat calories from seeds and nuts, instead of cooked carbohydrates such as potatoes, rice, and bread, their blood glucose levels dropped. So did their weight. In other words, people who ate more nuts and seeds demonstrated a lower weight and thinner waist than those eating fewer calories.
²⁶
Certainly, one shouldn’t eat too many nuts because they are rich in calories. In reasonable quantities, however, they increase stool fat (the amount of fat the body doesn’t absorb) and help control overeating.

In fact, the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, which involved more than ten thousand women, now followed for more than thirty-five years, found that nuts and seeds shared the strongest link to longevity. Eating two small handfuls a week, according to the study, had as many lifespan-enhancing benefits as jogging four hours a week.
²⁷

This evidence was also clear in a study of Seventh-Day Adventists published in 2001.
²⁸
The study, which followed thirty-four thousand
vegans and near-vegans for twelve years, found that the people who lived the longest regularly consumed nuts and seeds. Those who didn’t had a higher rate of all-cause mortality. Even those whose diet included a small amount of animal products and also used seeds and nuts outlived vegans who did not eat seeds and nuts.

And yet there are still two extremes. On one side are people who believe that eating an excess of animal products and animal fat is the only way to survive. On the other are people who resist eating
any
type of fat. It seems you can be only for or against fat—a startling polarity that cheats both camps from getting the most nutritional benefit from eating healthier. Both extremes may also result in potential health difficulties later in life.