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. T
he 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’ worth of basic materials. Wheat flour, cornstarch, high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and food coloring are now the main ingredients in thousands of products that fill the interior aisles of any modern supermarket. (Non-grain foods such as vegetables, meats, and dairy tend to be at the perimeter.) Revenues for Big Food companies swelled. Breakfast cereals alone generate nearly $8 billion per year built on claims of fiber, bowel regularity, B vitamins, better school performance, and part of a “healthy breakfast to start your day.”
Just as the tobacco industry created and sustained its market with the addictive property of cigarettes, so does wheat in the diet make for a helpless, hungry consumer. From the perspective of the seller of food products, wheat is a perfect processed food ingredient: The more you eat, the more you want. The situation for the food industry has been made even better by the glowing endorsements provided by the U.S. government urging Americans to eat more “healthy whole grains.”
GRAB MY LOVE HANDLES: THE UNIQUE PROPERTIES OF VISCERAL FAT
Wheat triggers a cycle of insulin-driven satiety and hunger, paralleled by the ups and downs of euphoria and withdrawal, distortions of neurological function, and addictive effects, all leading to fat deposition.
The extremes of blood sugar and insulin are responsible for growth of fat specifically in the visceral organs. Experienced over and over again, visceral fat accumulates, creating a fat liver, two fat kidneys, a fat pancreas, fat large and small intestines, as well as its familiar surface manifestation, a wheat belly. (Even your heart gets fat, but you can’t see this through the semi-rigid ribs.)
So the Michelin tire encircling your or your loved one’s waistline represents the surface manifestation of visceral fat contained within the abdomen and encasing abdominal organs, resulting from months to years of repeated cycles of high blood sugar and high blood insulin, followed by insulin-driven fat deposition. Not so much fat deposition in the arms, buttocks, or thighs, but the saggy ridge encircling the abdomen accompanied by bulging fatty internal organs. (Exactly why disordered glucose-insulin metabolism preferentially causes visceral fat accumulation in the abdomen and not your left shoulder or the top of your head is a question that continues to stump medical science.)
Buttock or thigh fat is precisely that: buttock or thigh fat—no more, no less. You sit on it, you squeeze it into your jeans, you lament the cellulite dimples it creates. While wheat consumption adds to buttock and thigh fat, the fat in these regions is comparatively quiescent, metabolically speaking.
Visceral fat is different. While it might be useful as “love handles” grasped by your partner, it is also uniquely capable of triggering a universe of inflammatory phenomena. Visceral fat filling and encircling the abdomen of the wheat belly sort is a unique, twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week metabolic factory. It produces inflammatory signals and abnormal cytokines, or cell-to-cell hormone signal molecules, such as leptin, resistin, and tumor necrosis factor.4, 5 The more visceral fat present, the greater the quantities of abnormal signals released into the bloodstream, the “louder” the blare of inflammation throughout the body.
All body fat is capable of producing another cytokine, adiponectin, a protective molecule that reduces risk for heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension. However, as visceral fat increases, its capacity to produce protective adiponectin diminishes (for reasons unclear).6 The combination of lack of adiponectin along with increased leptin, tumor necrosis factor, and other inflammatory products underlies abnormal insulin responses, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.7 The list of other health conditions triggered by visceral fat is growing and now includes dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, and colon cancer.8 This is why waist circumference is proving to be a powerful predictor of all these conditions, as well as for mortality.9
Visceral fat not only produces abnormally high levels of inflammatory signals but is also itself inflamed, containing bountiful collections of inflammatory white blood cells (macrophages).10 The endocrine and inflammatory molecules produced by visceral fat empty directly into the liver (via the portal circulation draining blood from the intestinal tract), which then responds by producing yet another collection of inflammatory signals and abnormal proteins.
In other words, in the human body, all fat is not equal. Wheat belly fat is an especially bad fat. The belly is not just a passive repository for excess pizza calories; it is, in effect, an endocrine gland much like your thyroid gland or pancreas, albeit a very large and active endocrine gland. (Ironically, Grandma was correct forty years ago when she labeled an overweight person as having a “gland” problem.) Unlike other endocrine glands, the visceral fat endocrine gland does not play by the rules, but it follows a unique playbook that works against the body’s health.
So a wheat belly is not just unsightly, it’s also dreadfully unhealthy.
GETTING HIGH ON INSULIN
Why is wheat so much worse for weight than other foods?
The essential phenomenon that sets the growth of the wheat belly in motion is high blood sugar (glucose). High blood sugar, in turn, provokes high blood insulin. (Insulin is released by the pancreas in response to the blood sugar: The higher the blood sugar, the more insulin must be released to move the sugar into the body’s cells, such as those of muscle, liver, and fat cells.) When the pancreas’s ability to produce insulin in response to blood sugar rises is exceeded, diabetes develops. But you don’t have to be diabetic to experience high blood sugar and high insulin: Non-diabetics can easily experience the high blood sugars required to cultivate their very own wheat belly, particularly because foods made from wheat so readily convert to sugar.
High blood insulin provokes visceral fat accumulation, the body’s means of storing excess energy. When visceral fat accumulates, the flood of inflammatory signals it produces causes tissues such as muscle and liver to respond less to insulin. This so-called insulin resistance means that the pancreas must produce greater and greater quantities of insulin to metabolize the sugars. Eventually, a vicious cycle of increased insulin resistance, increased insulin production, increased deposition of visceral fat, increased insulin resistance, etc., etc., ensues.
Nutritionists established the fact that wheat increases blood sugar more profoundly than table sugar forty years ago. As we’ve discussed, the glycemic index, or GI, is the nutritionist’s measure of how much blood sugar levels increase in the 90 to 120 minutes after a food is consumed. Whole wheat bread has a GI of 72, while plain table sugar has a GI of 59 (though some labs have gotten results as high as 65). In contrast, kidney beans have a GI of 51, grapefruit comes in at 25, while non-carbohydrate foods such as salmon, eggs, and walnuts have GIs of zero: Eating these foods has no effect on blood sugar. In fact, with few exceptions, few foods have as high a GI as foods made from wheat. Outside of dried fruits such as dates and figs, the only other foods that have GIs as high as wheat products are dried, pulverized starches such as cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, and tapioca starch. (It is worth noting that these are the very same carbohydrates used to make “gluten-free” foods. More on this peculiar and maddening situation later.)
Because wheat and grain carbohydrate, the uniquely digestible amylopectin A, causes a greater spike in blood sugar than virtually any other food—more than a candy bar, table sugar, or ice cream—it also triggers greater insulin release. More amylopectin A means higher blood sugar, higher insulin, more visceral fat deposition…bigger wheat belly. Or rye belly, barley belly, corn belly, and oat belly.
Throw in the inevitable drop in blood sugar (hypoglycemia) that is the natural aftermath of high insulin levels, and you see why irresistible hunger so often results, as the body tries to protect you from the dangers of low blood sugar. You scramble for something to eat to increase blood sugar, and the cycle is set in motion again, repeat
ing every two hours.
Factor in your brain’s response to the euphoric exorphin effects induced by wheat (and the potential for withdrawal if your next “fix” is missed), and it’s no wonder the wheat belly encircling your waist continues to grow and grow.
MEN’S LINGERIE IS ON THE SECOND FLOOR
Wheat belly is not just a cosmetic issue, but a phenomenon with real health consequences. In addition to producing inflammatory hormones such as leptin, visceral fat is also a factory for estrogen production in both sexes, the very same estrogen that confers female characteristics on girls beginning at puberty, such as widening of the hips and growth of the breasts. Estrogen levels are oddly jacked up by visceral fat of the wheat belly and peculiar and unwanted effects in both women and men follow.
Until menopause, adult females have high levels of estrogen. Surplus estrogen, however, produced by visceral fat adds considerably to breast cancer risk, since estrogen at high levels stimulates breast tissue.11 Thus, increased visceral fat on females has been associated with as much as fourfold increased risk for breast cancer. Breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women with the visceral fat of a wheat belly is double that of slender, non-wheat-belly-bearing postmenopausal females.12 Despite the apparent connection, no study—incredibly—has examined the results of a wheat-free, lose-the-visceral-fat-wheat-belly diet and its effect on the incidence of breast cancer. If we simply connect the dots, a marked reduction in risk would be predicted.
Wheat Belly (Revised and Expanded Edition) Page 8
