Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (26 page)

HERE’S WHERE WE
get down to the real, practical nitty-gritty: Like trying to rid your bathing suit of sand, it can be tough to remove this ubiquitous food from our eating habits, this thing that seems to cling to every nook, crack, and cranny of American diets.

My patients often panic when they realize how much of a transformation they will need to make in the contents of their cupboards and refrigerators, in their well-worn habits of shopping, cooking, and eating. “There’s nothing left to eat! I’ll starve!” Many also recognize that more than two hours without a wheat product triggers insatiable cravings and the anxiety of withdrawal. When Bob and Jillian patiently hold the hands of
Biggest Loser
contestants sobbing over the agony of losing only three pounds this week, you have an idea of what wheat elimination can be like for some people.

Trust me, it’s worth it. If you’ve gotten this far, I assume that you are at least contemplating a divorce from this unfaithful and abusive partner. My advice: Show no mercy. Don’t dwell on the good times from twenty years ago, when angel food cake and cinnamon rolls provided consolation after you were fired from your job, or the beautiful seven-layer cake you had at your wedding. Think of the health beatings you’ve taken, the emotional kicks in the stomach you’ve endured, the times he begged you to take him back because he has really changed.

Forget it. It won’t happen. There is no rehabilitation, only elimination. Spare yourself the divorce court theatrics: Declare yourself free of wheat, don’t ask for alimony or child support, don’t look back or reminisce about the good times. Just
run.

Forget everything you’ve learned about “healthy whole grains.” For years we’ve been told they should dominate our diet. This line of thinking says that a diet filled with “healthy whole grains” will make you vibrant, popular, good-looking, sexy, and successful. You will also enjoy healthy cholesterol levels and regular bowel movements. Stint on whole grains and you will be unhealthy, malnourished, succumb to heart disease or cancer. You’ll be thrown out of your country club, barred from your bowling league, and ostracized from society.

Instead, remember that the need for “healthy whole grains” is pure fiction. Grains such as wheat are no more a necessary part of the human diet than personal injury attorneys are to your backyard pool party.

Let me describe a typical person with wheat deficiency: slender, flat tummy, low triglycerides, high HDL (“good”) cholesterol, normal blood sugar, normal blood pressure, high energy, good sleep, normal bowel function.

In other words, the sign that you have the “wheat deficiency syndrome” is that you’re normal, slender, and healthy.

Contrary to popular wisdom, including that of your friendly neighborhood dietitian, there is no deficiency that develops from elimination of wheat—provided the lost calories are replaced with the right foods.

If the gap left by wheat is filled with vegetables, nuts, meats, eggs, avocados, olives, cheese—i.e.,
real
food—then not only won’t you develop a dietary deficiency, you will enjoy better health, more energy, better sleep, weight loss, and reversal of all the abnormal phenomena we’ve discussed. If you fill the gap left by excising wheat products with corn chips, energy bars, and fruit drinks, then, yes, you will simply have replaced one undesirable group of foods with another undesirable group; you’ve achieved little. And you may indeed become deficient in several important nutrients, as well as continue in the unique American shared experience of getting fat and becoming diabetic.

So removing wheat is the first step. Finding suitable replacements to fill the smaller—remember, wheat-free people naturally and unconsciously consume 350 to 400 fewer calories per day—calorie gap is the second step.

In its simplest form, a diet in which you eliminate wheat but allow all other foods to expand proportionally to fill the gap, while not perfect, is still a far cry better than the same diet that includes wheat. In other words, remove wheat and just eat a little more of the foods remaining in your diet: Eat a larger portion of baked chicken, green beans, scrambled eggs, Cobb salad, etc. You may still realize many of the benefits discussed here. However, I’d be guilty of oversimplifying if I suggested that all it takes is removing wheat. If
ideal
health is your goal, then it does indeed matter what foods you choose to fill the gap left by eliminating wheat.

Should you choose to go further than just removing wheat, you must replace lost wheat calories with
real
food. I distinguish real food from highly processed, herbicided, genetically modified,
ready-to-eat, high-fructose corn syrup-filled, just-add-water food products, the ones packaged with cartoon characters, sports figures, and other clever marketing ploys.

This is a battle that needs to be fought on all fronts, since there are incredible societal pressures to not eat real food. Turn on the TV and you won’t see ads for cucumbers, artisanal cheeses, or locally raised cage-free eggs. You
will
be inundated with ads for potato chips, frozen dinners, soft drinks, and the rest of the cheap-ingredient, high-markup world of processed foods.

A great deal of money is spent pushing the products you need to avoid. Kellogg’s, known to the public for its breakfast cereals ($6.5 billion in breakfast cereal sales in 2010), is also behind Yoplait yogurt, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Lärabar health bars, Keebler Graham Crackers, Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies, Cheez-It crackers, as well as Cheerios and Apple Jacks. These foods fill supermarket aisles, are highlighted at aisle end caps, are strategically placed at eye level on the shelves, and dominate daytime and nighttime TV. They comprise the bulk of ads in many magazines. And Kellogg’s is just one food company among many. Big Food also pays for much of the “research” conducted by dietitians and nutrition scientists, they endow faculty positions at universities and colleges, and they influence the content of media. In short, they are everywhere.

And they are extremely effective. The great majority of Americans have fallen for their marketing hook, line, and sinker. It’s made even more difficult to ignore when the American Heart Association and other health organizations endorse their products. (The American Heart Association’s heart-check mark stamp of approval, for instance, has been bestowed on more than 800 foods, including Honey Nut Cheerios and, until recently, Cocoa Puffs.)

And here you are trying to ignore them, tune them out, and march to your own drummer. It’s not easy.

One thing is clear:
There is no nutritional deficiency that develops when you stop consuming wheat and other processed foods.
Furthermore,
you will simultaneously experience reduced exposure to sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial food colorings and flavors, cornstarch, and the list of unpronounceables on the product label. Again, there is
no genuine nutritional deficiency
from any of this. But this hasn’t stopped the food industry and its friends at the USDA, the American Heart Association, the American Dietetic Association, and the American Diabetes Association from suggesting that these foods are somehow necessary for health and that doing without them might be unhealthy. Nonsense. Absolute, unadulterated, 180-proof, whole grain nonsense.

Some people, for instance, are concerned that they will not consume sufficient fiber if they eliminate wheat. Ironically, if you replace wheat calories with those from vegetables and raw nuts, fiber intake goes
up.
If two slices of whole wheat bread containing 138 calories are replaced by a calorically equivalent handful of raw nuts such as almonds or walnuts (approximately 24 nuts), you will match or exceed the 3.9 grams of fiber from the bread. Likewise, a calorie-equivalent salad of mixed greens, carrots, and peppers will match or exceed the amount of fiber in the bread. This is, after all, how primitive hunter-gatherer cultures—the cultures that first taught us about the importance of dietary fiber—obtained their fiber: through plentiful consumption of plant foods, not bran cereals or other processed fiber sources. Fiber intake is therefore not a concern if wheat elimination is paired with increased consumption of healthy foods.

The dietary community assumes that you live on taco chips and jelly beans, and you therefore require foods “fortified” with various vitamins. However, all those assumptions fall apart if you don’t exist on what you can obtain from a bag at the local convenience store but consume real foods instead. B vitamins, such as B
₆
, B
₁₂
, folic acid, and thiamine, are added to baked, processed wheat products; dietitians therefore warn us that forgoing these products will yield vitamin B deficiencies. Also untrue. B vitamins are present in more than ample quantities in meats, vegetables, and
nuts. While bread and other wheat products are required by law to have added folic acid, you’ll exceed the folic acid content of wheat products several times over just by eating a handful of sunflower seeds or asparagus. A quarter cup of spinach or four asparagus spears, for instance, matches the quantity of folic acid in most breakfast cereals. (Also, the
folates
of natural sources may be superior to the
folic acid
in fortified processed foods.) Nuts and green vegetables are, in general, exceptionally rich sources of folate and represent the way that humans were meant to obtain it. (Pregnant or lactating females are the exception and may still benefit from folic acid or folate supplementation to meet their increased needs in order to prevent neural tube defects.) Likewise, vitamin B
₆
and thiamine are obtained in much greater amounts from four ounces of chicken or pork, an avocado, or ¼ cup of ground flaxseed than from an equivalent weight of wheat products.

In addition, eliminating wheat from your diet actually enhances B vitamin absorption. It is not uncommon, for instance, for vitamin B
₁₂
and folate, along with levels of iron, zinc, and magnesium, to increase with removal of wheat, since gastrointestinal health improves and, along with it, nutrient absorption.

Eliminating wheat may be inconvenient, but it is certainly not unhealthy.

Thankfully, eliminating all wheat from your diet is not as bad as setting up mirrors and scalpels to remove your own appendix without anesthesia. For some people, it’s a simple matter of passing up the bagel shop or turning down the sweet rolls. For others, it can be a distinctly unpleasant experience on par with a root canal or living with your in-laws for a month.

In my experience, the most effective and, ultimately, the easiest way to eliminate wheat is to do it abruptly and completely. The
insulin-glucose roller coaster caused by wheat, along with brain-addictive exorphin effects, makes it difficult for some people to gradually reduce wheat, so abrupt cessation may be preferable. Abrupt and complete elimination of wheat will, in the susceptible, trigger the withdrawal phenomenon. But getting through the withdrawal that accompanies abrupt cessation may be easier than the gnawing fluctuations of cravings that usually accompany just cutting back—not much different from an alcoholic trying to go dry. Nonetheless, some people are more comfortable with gradual reduction rather than abrupt elimination. Either way, the end result is the same.

By now, I’m confident you’re attuned to the fact that wheat is not just about bread. Wheat is ubiquitous—it’s in everything.

Many people, on first setting out to identify foods containing wheat, find it in nearly all the processed foods they have been eating, including the most improbable places such as canned “cream” soups and “healthy” frozen dinners. Wheat is there for two reasons: One, it tastes good. Two, it stimulates appetite. The latter reason is not for
your
benefit, of course, but for the benefit of food manufacturers. To food manufacturers, wheat is like nicotine in cigarettes: the best insurance they have to encourage continued consumption. (Incidentally, other common ingredients in processed foods that increase consumption, though not as potent as wheat’s effect, include high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, cornstarch, and salt. These are also worth avoiding.)

Removing wheat does, without question, require some forethought. Foods made with wheat have the inarguable advantage of convenience: Sandwiches and wraps, for example, are easily carried, stored, and eaten out of hand. Avoiding wheat means taking your own food to work and using a fork or spoon to eat it. It may mean you need to shop more often and—heaven forbid—cook. Greater dependence on vegetables and fresh fruit can also mean going to the store, farmers’ market, or greengrocer a couple of times a week.

However, the inconvenience factor is far from insurmountable. It might mean a few minutes of advance preparation, such as cutting and wrapping a hunk of cheese and putting it in a baggie to bring along to work, along with several handfuls of raw almonds and vegetable soup in a container. It might mean setting aside some of your spinach salad from dinner to eat the following morning for breakfast. (Yes: dinner for breakfast, a useful strategy to be discussed later.)