Eat Wheat: A Scientific and Clinically-Proven Approach to Safely Bringing Wheat and Dairy Back Into Your Diet
318
Eat Wheat: A Scientific and Clinically-Proven Approach to Safely Bringing Wheat and Dairy Back Into Your Diet
318Paperback
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Overview
Dr. John Douillard, a former NBA nutrition expert and creator of LifeSpa.com, and author of six health books, addresses the underlying cause of the gluten-free epidemic. Eat Wheat explains how a breakdown in digestion has damaged the intestinal wall and leaked undigested foods and environmental toxins into the body’s lymphatic system, causing “grain brain” symptoms and food allergies. Although eliminating wheat and dairy from your diet may help your symptoms, it is a a temporary solution. Eat Wheat addresses the root cause: the inability to digest well and break down harmful pollutants and toxins that can lead to more serious health concerns.
Backed by more than 600 scientific studies, Eat Wheat is a revolutionary guidebook to regaining your digestive strength. Eat Wheat will:
- Reveal hidden science on the benefits of wheat and dairy
- Help you navigate around food toxins in modern wheat and dairy
- Retrain your body to digest wheat and dairy again
- Flush congested lymphatics linked to food intolerance symptoms
- Teach you to follow natural digestive circadian cycles
- Help bring your blood sugar back into balance
- Teach you proven exercise and detox techniques to re-boot strong digestion and achieve optimal health and vitality
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781683500094 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 01/10/2017 |
| Pages: | 318 |
| Sales rank: | 549,477 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FOUND GUILTY WITHOUT A FAIR TRIAL
Has gluten been found guilty without a fair trial? It wouldn't be the first time an innocent food was given a life sentence. For example, after almost 60 years of so-called "hard science" condemning cholesterol, we now find out that the interpretation of the science was flawed and high cholesterol saturated fats, such as butter, have been officially taken off the FDA's nutrient concern list.
Is it possible that we have wrongfully given gluten the boot as well, along with dairy and other commonly allergenic foods such as eggs, soy, corn, fish and nuts?
Today, there are millions of people without celiac disease or severe dairy allergies who are electing to be gluten-free and/or dairy-free, not because they are actually allergic to these foods, but because of their food sensitivities, or simply because these foods have been labeled as dietary "no-no's." It is the aim of this book to share the compelling scientific and clinical evidence that gluten — along with other specified foods, such as dairy — is often not the underlying issue in the case of digestive woes and food sensitivities.
For many, the underlying issue is actually a broken down digestive system caused by:
1. Overeating certain food groups, resulting in inflamed skin that lines the intestinal tract.
2. Making poor food choices that slowly break down digestive strength and gut health.
3. Preparing and eating certain foods at the wrong times and in the wrong ways.
4. Eating out of season.
5. Eating commercially processed bread and dairy that contains herbicides, pesticides (sometimes even genetically engineered pesticides), antibiotics, preservatives, cooked oils and growth hormones that our bodies were never designed to digest.
All of these actions compromise our digestive strength. It's no wonder so many people are no longer able to properly digest these foods!
Starting From the Top: What Is Gluten, Anyway?
Gluten refers to the proteins found in wheat and wheat products — including wheat berries, spelt, bulgur, durum, couscous, farina, farro, semolina, emmer, einkorn, graham, wheat bran, wheat germ, wheat starch, and KAMUT® khorasan wheat. Other common sources of gluten include triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye), rye, barley, various forms of malt, and brewer's yeast. Oats sometimes contain gluten, but are usually gluten-free when they are specifically labeled "not contaminated by wheat." Generally speaking, gluten behaves as a glue-like element, helping foods to bind together and preserve their shape.
A Brief History of Gluten
It's important to know that gluten is not the new kid on the block. There is archeological evidence of flour from wild cereal grains made in (what is now) Europe from around 30,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic era. And, around 10,000 years ago, with the widespread rise of farming and agriculture during the Neolithic era, bread and cereals became seasonal dietary staples.
Contrary to what we have been led to believe, our early ancestors may have eaten much more grass, grain and wheat than previously thought, as the Ice Age forced them to venture out of the tropical rain forests into the grassland savannas, and look for new food sources.
Field studies have shown that a human can gather enough wheat berries from a field to supply enough nutrition for the entire day in just 2 hours, so why wouldn't early humans gather the easy-to-obtain grains from the grasslands as a mainstay of their diet? New findings suggest they did.
In the same groundbreaking report out of the University of Utah, the earliest evidence of human ancestors scavenging already-dead meat did not appear until 2.5 million years ago. Moreover, definitive evidence that humans hunted for their food does not appear until 500,000 years ago.
As for our direct human ancestors, this study suggests that about 3.4 million years ago, the hominin, Australopithecus afarensis and other human relatives ate, on average, 40 percent grasses, which included gluten-rich barley and wheat. By 1.7–2 million years ago, early humans ate 35 percent grasses and some scavenged meat from grazing animals, while another nearby hominin, Paranthropus boisei, was eating 75 percent grasses, including wheat.
As the studies show, humans have been eating gluten for a very long time. Why is it that, suddenly, after so many thousands or millions of years of eating wheat and other glutenous grains as in-season dietary staples, eating a gluten-free diet is now one of the most prominent dietary trends?
Explaining the Gluten-Free Trend
Many people report feeling better without eating gluten. It boils down, in part, to this: If you are not able to digest gluten well, it can lead to common symptoms such as allergies, bloating, gas, belly fat, brain fog and focus issues, chronic fatigue, insomnia, autoimmune conditions, attention deficit disorder, asthma, memory loss, headaches, rashes, joint pain, digestive issues, malaise, anxiety, depression, cravings, exhaustion and, of course, weight gain. No fun, right? These are all extremely valid reasons to want to avoid it.
So, you may stop eating gluten, for instance, and create a gluten-free diet based on treating the symptoms — but not the cause — of your digestive issues. This is how the rise of the popular gluten-free and other restrictive diets came to be.
I completely understand the reasoning behind why being gluten-free is such a popular choice. If you know that eating gluten doesn't make you feel good, who in their right mind would continually choose to eat it, after all? In fact, sparing your digestive tract from the ravages of undigested proteins and allergenic foods caused by weak digestion is a good strategy in the short-term.
I am proposing an alternative to a life sentence of restrictive diets that eliminate an entire food group. Instead, let's get to the root of the issue and heal the problem at its core and, in doing so, eliminate the symptoms caused by food intolerances. While we're at it, we will build a digestive strength that won't predispose us to susceptibility for toxin-induced chronic, degenerative diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders down the road.
Healing, balancing, and rebooting your digestion should allow you to once again easily digest foods like wheat and dairy. Imagine enjoying an ice cream or a delicious pastry, on occasion, without paying a painful price shortly thereafter. In this book, I will show you how to do exactly that, and explain why it is so crucially important to our health and wellbeing to have an optimally functioning digestive system.
As a strong digestive system is required to break down and eliminate ingested environmental chemicals and pollutants — which are, yes, even on your organic produce — healing the digestive system is more important now than ever before. A new EPA analysis reports that almost 4 billion pounds of chemicals — 62 million of them carcinogenic — are released into the environment each year in the U.S. alone. If you cannot tolerate wheat and dairy now, but once could, or you have found yourself slowly removing foods from your diet over the years, then this may be a sign that your ability to both digest and detoxify is compromised, which also puts you at risk for unnecessary exposure to the dangerous chemicals and toxins in our environment.
The Prevalence of Gluten Sensitivity
Estimates show that for every person with celiac disease (approximately 0.5– 1 percent of the U.S. population), there are at least 6–7 people with gluten sensitivity, which would put the approximate number of people with gluten sensitivities upwards of 3–7 percent of the population. With the current U.S. population in 2015 at around 322 million people and counting, that would mean there are upwards of anywhere between 9.66–22.54 million people in the U.S. with gluten sensitivities. That's a lot of people who are sensitive to gluten, and these numbers do not begin to reflect those with intolerances to dairy and other hard-to-digest foods.
Let's heal your digestive system! To accomplish this, I will be giving you evidence-based natural healthcare strategies in combination with wisdom from India's 5,000-year-old traditional healthcare science, Ayurvedic medicine, as well as clinically proven strategies from more than 30 years in my natural medicine practice.
Some Facts, For Starters
While this subject is hotly debated, there is good science suggesting the original wild wheat, with less exposure to the environmental toxins of our modern world, may have had gluten levels that reached almost twice the amount of gluten in today's wheat! Suggesting that, based on gluten levels alone, the original wild wheat was a much harder grain to digest compared to today's wheat.
When researchers compared the gliadin components of gluten from 2 ancient wheat varieties, Kamut and Graziella Ra with modern varieties, the ancient wheats had total gliadin and alpha-gliadin levels that were almost twice as high as the modern wheat varieties. Alpha-gliadin is considered the indigestible toxic form of wheat that is linked to many of the gluten sensitivity symptoms.
In another study, inflammation markers were measured on 22 people who ate either the ancient wheat, Kamut, or a modern wheat strain for 8 weeks. The group that ate the Kamut, where they found almost twice the amount of toxic gliadins in the previous study, saw a more than 2 times reduction in the common inflammatory markers associated with gluten sensitivity compared to the group that ate the modern wheat. How could the wheat with the highest toxic gliadin levels be almost twice as anti-inflammatory as the wheat with the least amount of gluten and gliadins?
In that same study, the Kamut lowered total cholesterol, fasting blood sugar and increased magnesium and potassium levels in the blood compared to the modern wheat, suggesting that the ancient wheats are a much better choice, even though they may have more gluten and gliadins. I agree.
Here is the scenario we find ourselves in: We are blaming gluten and it's gliadins as the cause of our digestive imbalances, yet ancient wheat may have had almost twice the gluten that modern wheat does, and people have been eating gluten for millions of years. How could it be that suddenly gluten has become such an issue? How could our modern gluten be solely responsible for the recent litany of health concerns and food sensitivities?
Glutenous grains are processed and prepared much differently in our modern day than they used to be. There are actually marked differences that would have made digesting ancient wheat, even with almost 2 times more gluten than modern wheat, easier to digest. For example, studies also show ancient wheat had more antioxidants than modern wheat, which may have offset its heightened gluten levels. The good news is that ancient wheats are readily available in the marketplace. I'll tell you where in Chapter 7.
In the late 19th century, technology was introduced that allowed us to process mass amounts of grains and separate the whole grain into various components. The nutrient-dense bran and germ were stripped away from the car-brich endosperm (the part we now eat), which spikes our blood sugar without the nutrient boost.
Ancient grain varieties were also traditionally prepared differently. They were often soaked, sprouted, and fermented before consumption, rendering them easier to digest and increasing their nutritional value. These practices, which are also in use today, can almost completely break down gluten, boost mineral content, increase levels of amino acids like lysine that make nutrients more easily absorbed and break down anti-nutrients like phytic acid.
Certain studies show that although there has been an increase in celiac-based gluten intolerance in the second half of the 20th century, there is no evidence that this rise is due to an increase of the gluten content in wheat. In fact, according to a 2013 study in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, the gluten content in wheat during the 20th and 21st century has been relatively stable since wheat processing began in the late 19th century, and the average consumption of wheat flour in America has decreased by a whopping 86 pounds per person per year from the year 1900–2008.
If the gluten content in wheat hasn't increased and the amount of wheat we are consuming has decreased, then we need to question how the recent rise in non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) cases could be caused by gluten. Most of my patients who stop eating gluten feel better only for a short time before the symptoms start to creep back, so again, how could it be just the gluten? Could we be missing something like we did with the 60-year cholesterol faux pas? The science will show that there are a handful of factors that are contributing to the current prevalence of gluten sensitivity, and if we stop to fix the cause of these problems, instead of just eliminating wheat altogether, most people will find that they can begin to enjoy eating wheat again.
Your Digestion on Gluten and Casein
Here is what we know: Both gluten and the casein in dairy require a strong and healthy digestive system to assimilate properly.
Many people, including holistic doctors and a growing number of medical doctors, have figured out that if they take away the "big three": Wheat, dairy, and rich, fatty or greasy foods, most everyone feels better. The thought is that if these foods can cause digestive trouble, they must be bad. However, if you could handle these foods when you were younger — not to mention the thousands of years of genetics we've inherited from our ancestors, who digested these foods just fine — perhaps you have simply lost the ability to properly digest these foods. The good news is that it's possible to regain the ability to digest hard-to-digest foods, even in their over-processed state — in small amounts.
Toxins and Sugar: Guilty as Charged
Early farmers who first domesticated wheat selected seeds that were larger and easier to remove when threshing. The larger the wheat seed, the more starch (sugar) and less protein the grain had. Since the gluten content in wheat is proportional to the protein content, ancient domesticated wheat gradually increased in sugar content while decreasing in gluten, gliadins and protein.
As wheat became increasingly hybridized and processed, the glycemic index (how quickly a food breaks down and enters the bloodstream, creating a rise in blood sugar) of commercialized wheat products spiked. For example, a slice of processed white bread or large dinner roll is about a 70 on the glycemic scale, while a slice of 100 percent stone-ground whole wheat or pumpernickel rates in at about 55.
The famed "wheat belly" is better termed "sugar belly" as many of the wheat sensitivities and studies linking gluten to these health concerns are more a result of excess sugar. Refined carbohydrates, such as processed white bread, quickly convert to sugar in the bloodstream.
This explosion of sugar from a high glycemic diet can cause every single symptom we have that is currently linked to gluten. In fact, much of the science supporting the grain brain theory, which links wheat to an increased risk of dementia, was based on the effect of sugar on the brain rather than the wheat itself. The theory suggested that wheat (and all grains for that matter) is the cause of high blood sugar and, thus, the smoking gun for Alzheimer's disease. This theory is challenged by a number of studies that show wheat actually lowering blood sugar and reducing the risk of Alzheimer's. Have we once again condemned an innocent grain, like we did with cholesterol, to the dangerous foods list, based on a flawed interpretation of the science?
I have the highest respect for Dr. Perlmutter, the author of Grain Brain, and his case is spot-on when we are talking about sugar and overeating highly processed, refined grains. Let me help you navigate around these issues and still enjoy your daily bread.
The hybridization of our food — as well as genetic modifications and toxins — has far-reaching implications upon our blood sugar, the digestibility of our food, and our health as a whole.
For instance, when gliadin (a protein found in wheat) is not digested completely, it may increase gut permeability, which makes the digestive system more susceptible to having trouble with hard-to-digest proteins. Gliadin also affects our body's zonulin levels. Zonulin is a molecule that regulates our intercellular tight junctions, meaning that if our zonulin levels are deregulated, this can predispose us to the possibility of proteins from food passing through intestinal junctions into the blood and lymph, where they don't belong, predisposing us to issues like leaky gut syndrome and inflammation. But wait ... we just read a study that high gliadin levels in wheat can actually reduce inflammation.
Even more confusing are the studies that high levels of wheat lectins called WGA (wheat germ agglutinin) found in wheat are linked to a host of health issues including inflammation, disruption of our digestive health and deregulated immune responses.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eat Wheat"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Dr. JOHN DOUILLARD, DC, CAP.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Success Stories,
Acknowledgements,
Medical Disclaimer,
Introduction,
Part I Exploring the Cause of Wheat and Dairy Intolerance,
Chapter 1 Found Guilty Without a Fair Trial,
Chapter 2 Wheat: The Science Touting its Benefits,
Chapter 3 Dairy: A Food and a Medicine,
Chapter 4 It is Not the Grain, It is the Lymphatic Drains,
Chapter 5 The Great Digestive Breakdown,
Part II The Fix — Igniting the Digestive Fire within You,
Chapter 6 Eat Wheat: How, When and What Kind,
Chapter 7 Navigating Around Modern Toxins in Our Food,
Chapter 8 Ground Zero: Your Intestinal Skin,
Chapter 9 Lymph Rx,
Chapter 10 Finding your Cast Iron Stomach,
Chapter 11 Sugar Belly,
Chapter 12 Live Toxin-Free,
Chapter 13 The Eat Wheat Workout,
Chapter 14 Mind over Batter,
THANK YOU!,
John Douillard's Free Video-Newsletter,
References,
Appendices,
Appendix A Seasonal Grocery Lists,
Appendix B Homemade Sourdough Bread Recipes,
Appendix C Ayurvedic Superfood Kitchari Recipe,
Appendix D Sun Salutation Yoga Instructions,
Products and Services at LifeSpa.com,
About the Author,
Index,