Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (30 page)

Vegetable dips—All you need are some precut veggies such as peppers, raw green beans, radishes, sliced zucchini, or scallions, and some interesting dips, such as black bean dip, hummus, vegetable dip, wasabi dip, mustards such as Dijon or horseradish, or cream cheese-based dips, all of which are widely available premade.

Despite the fact that removing wheat and other “junk” carbohydrates from the diet can leave a big gap, there is truly an incredible range and variety of foods to choose from to fill it. You may have to venture outside of your usual shopping and cooking habits, but you will find plenty of food to keep your palate interested.

With the newly reawakened taste sense, reduced impulse eating, and reduced calorie intake that accompanies the wheat-free experience, many people also describe a heightened appreciation for food. As a result, the majority of people who choose this path actually enjoy food more than during their wheat-consuming days.

On the wheat-free diet plan, you’ll find that you spend more time in the produce aisle, farmers’ market, or vegetable stand, as well as the butcher shop and dairy aisle. You will rarely, if ever, wander into the chip, cereal, bread, or frozen food aisles.

You may also find that you are no longer cozy with the Big Food manufacturers or their New Age acquisitions or branding.
New Age name, organic this or that, “natural” looking label, and—bam! Huge multinational food corporation now looks like small, environmentally conscious group of ex-hippies trying to save the world.

Social gatherings, as many celiac sufferers will attest, can amount to extravagant wheat-fests, with wheat products in anything and everything. The most diplomatic way to pass up any dish you know is a wheat bomb is to claim that you have a wheat allergy. Most civilized people will respect your health concern, preferring your deprivation to an embarrassing case of hives that could ruin the festivities. If you have been wheat-free for more than a few weeks, turning down the bruschetta, bread crumb-stuffed mushrooms, or Chex Mix should be easier, since the abnormal exorphin-crazed impulse to stuff your mouth full of wheat products should have ceased. You’ll be perfectly content with the shrimp cocktail, olives, and crudité.

Eating outside the home can be a land mine of wheat, corn-starch, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and other unhealthy ingredients. First, there’s temptation. If the waiter brings a basket of warm, fragrant rolls to your table, you’ve just got to turn them away. Unless your dinner partners insist on bread, it’s easiest not to have it sitting right in front of you, teasing you and eroding your resolve. Second, keep it simple. Baked salmon with a ginger sauce is likely to be a safe bet. But an elaborate, multi-ingredient French dish has more potential for unwanted ingredients. This is a situation in which it helps to ask. However, if you have an immune-mediated wheat sensitivity such as celiac disease or some other severe wheat sensitivity, then you may not even be able to trust what the waiter or waitress tells you. As any celiac sufferer will attest, virtually everyone with celiac disease has had it triggered by inadvertent gluten exposure from a “gluten-free” dish. More and more restaurants are now also advertising a gluten-free menu. However, even that is no guarantee of no problems if, for instance, cornstarch or other gluten-free ingredients are used that
trigger blood sugar issues. In the end, eating out of the home presents hazards that, in my experience, can only be minimized, not eliminated. Whenever possible, eat food that you or your family prepare. That way, you can be certain of what is contained in your meal.

The reality is that, for many people, the best protection against wheat is staying free from it for some time, since reexposure can invite all manner of peculiar phenomena. While it may be hard to turn down a piece of birthday cake, if you pay for the indulgence with several hours of stomach cramps and diarrhea, it makes it hard to indulge with any frequency. (Of course, if you have celiac disease or any history of abnormal celiac markers, you should
never
indulge in any wheat- or gluten-containing food.)

Our society has indeed become a “whole grain world,” with wheat products filling the shelves in every convenience store, coffee shop, restaurant, and supermarket, and entire stores devoted to them, such as bakeries and bagel and donut shops. At times you may have to search and dig through the rubble to find what you need. But, along with sleep, exercise, and remembering your wedding anniversary, eliminating wheat can be viewed as a basic necessity for long life and health. A wheat-free life can be every bit as fulfilling and adventurous as, and certainly healthier than, the alternative.

THERE IS NO QUESTION
that the cultivation of wheat in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago marked a turning point in the course of civilization, planting the seeds for the Agricultural Revolution. Cultivation of wheat was the pivotal step that converted nomadic hunter-gatherers to fixed, nonmigratory societies that grew into villages and cities, yielded food surplus, and allowed occupational specialization. Without wheat, life today would surely be quite different.

So, in many ways, we owe wheat a debt of gratitude for having propelled human civilization on a course that has led us to our modern technological age. Or do we?

Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book,
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
believes that “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”
¹
Dr. Diamond points out that, based on lessons learned through modern paleopathology, the conversion from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society was accompanied by reduced stature, a rapid spread of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and bubonic plague, and a class structure from peasantry to royalty, and it also set the stage for sexual inequality.

In his books
Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture
and
Health and the Rise of Civilization,
anthropologist Mark Cohen of
the State University of New York argues that, while agriculture yielded surplus and allowed division of labor, it also entailed working harder and longer hours. It meant narrowing the wide variety of gathered plants down to the few crops that could be cultivated. It also introduced an entirely new collection of diseases that had previously been uncommon. “I don’t think most hunter-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity,” he writes.

The standard modern notion of preagricultural hunter-gatherer life as short, brutish, desperate, and a nutritional dead end may be incorrect. The adoption of agriculture in this revisionist line of thinking can be viewed as a compromise in which convenience, societal evolution, and food abundance were traded for health.

We have taken this paradigm to the extreme, narrowing our dietary variety down to popular catchphrases such as “Eat more healthy whole grains.” Convenience, abundance, and inexpensive accessibility have all been achieved to a degree inconceivable even a century ago. Fourteen-chromosome wild grass has been transformed into the forty-two-chromosome, nitrate-fertilized, top-heavy, ultra-high-yield variety that now enables us to buy bagels by the dozen, pancakes by the stack, and pretzels by the “family size” bag.

Such extremes of accessibility are therefore accompanied by extremes of health sacrifice—obesity, arthritis, neurological incapacity, even death from increasingly common diseases such as celiac. We have unwittingly struck a Faustian bargain with nature, trading abundance for health.

This idea that wheat is not only making people ill, but killing some of us—some quickly, others more slowly—raises unsettling questions: What do we say to the millions of people in Third World countries who, if deprived of high-yield wheat, might have less chronic illness but greater likelihood of near-term starvation? Should we just accept that our far-from-perfect means justifies the net reduced mortality end?

Can the shaky United States economy endure the huge shakedown that would be required if wheat were to experience a downturn in demand to make way for other crops and food sources? Is it even possible to maintain access to cheap, high-volume food for the tens of millions of people who presently rely on high-yield wheat for $5.00 pizza and $1.29 loaves of bread?

Should einkorn or emmer, primordial wheat that predates the thousands of hybridizations leading to modern wheat, replace our modern version but at the price of reduced yield and increased cost?

I won’t pretend to have the answers. In fact, it may be decades before all these questions can be adequately answered. I believe that resurrecting ancient grains (as Eli Rogosa is doing in western Massachusetts) may provide a small part of the solution, one that will grow in importance over many years in the same way that cage-free eggs have gained some economic traction. For many people, I suspect that ancestral wheat represents a reasonable solution, not necessarily entirely free of human health implications, but at least far safer. And, in an economy in which demand ultimately drives supply, reduced consumer interest in modern genetically altered wheat products will cause agricultural production to gradually shift to accommodate changing tastes.

What to do with the thorny issue of helping to feed the Third World? I can only hope that improved conditions in the coming years will also introduce wider choice in food that will allow people to move away from the “It’s better than nothing” mentality that presently dominates.

In the meantime, you have the freedom to exert your proclamation of Wheat Belly emancipation with the power of your consumer dollars.

The message to “eat more healthy whole grains” should accompany other mistakes, such as substituting hydrogenated and poly-unsaturated fats for saturated fats, substituting margarine for butter, and substituting high-fructose corn syrup for sucrose, in
the graveyard of misguided nutritional advice that has confused, misled, and fattened the American public.

Wheat is
not
just another carbohydrate, no more than nuclear fission is just another chemical reaction.

It is the ultimate hubris of modern humans that we can change and manipulate the genetic code of another species to suit our needs. Perhaps that will be possible in a hundred years, when the genetic code may be as readily manipulated as your checking account. But today, genetic modification and hybridization of the plants we call food crops remain crude science, still fraught with unintended effects on both the plant itself and the animals consuming them.

Earth’s plants and animals exist in their current form because of the end result of millions of years of evolutionary coddling. We step in and, in the absurdly brief period of the past half century, alter the course of evolution of a plant that thrived alongside humans for millennia, only now to suffer the consequences of our shortsighted manipulations.

In the 10,000-year journey from innocent, low-yield, not-so-baking-friendly einkorn grass to high-yield, created-in-a-laboratory, unable-to-survive-in-the-wild, suited-to-modern-tastes dwarf wheat, we’ve witnessed a human engineered transformation that is no different than pumping livestock full of antibiotics and hormones while confining them in a factory warehouse. Perhaps we
can
recover from this catastrophe called agriculture, but a big first step is to recognize what we’ve done to this thing called “wheat.”

See you in the produce aisle.

WHILE THE FOLLOWING
lists may be daunting, sticking to wheat- and gluten-free foods can be as easy as restricting yourself to foods that don’t require a label.

Foods such as cucumbers, kale, cod, salmon, olive oil, walnuts, eggs, and avocados have nothing to do with wheat or gluten. They are naturally free of such things, natural and healthy without benefit of some “gluten-free” label.

But if you venture outside of familiar natural whole foods, eat in social situations, go to restaurants, or travel, then there is potential for inadvertent wheat and gluten exposure.