The Story of Wheat ❤

Many of my clients ask about wheat, what's all the fuss about and how does it affect my health?  Modern agriculture and it's connection to the health of our bodies always amazes me.  Looking at wheat and it's evolution over time, is the perfect example of this. Here's the skinny from Wheat Belly by Dr. Wlliam Davis.

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It’s in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, Moses describes the Promised Land as “a land of wheat and barley and vineyards.” Bread is central to religious ritual. Jews celebrate Passover with unleavened matzo to commemorate the flight of the Israelites from Egypt. Christians consume wafers representing the body of Christ. Muslims regard unleavened “naan” bread as sacred, insisting it be stored upright and never thrown away in public. In the Bible, bread is a metaphor for bountiful harvest, a time of plenty, freedom from starvation, even salvation.

Don’t we break bread with friends and family? Isn’t something new and wonderful “the best thing since sliced bread”? “Taking the bread out of someone’s mouth” is to deprive that person of a fundamental necessity. Bread is a nearly universal diet staple: chapatti in India, tsoureki in Greece, pita in the Middle East, Aebelskiver in Denmark, naan bya for breakfast in Burma, glazed donuts any old time in the United States.

The notion that a foodstuff so fundamental, so deeply ingrained in the human experience, can be bad for us is, well, unsettling and counter to long-held cultural views of wheat and bread. But today’s bread bears little resemblance to the loaves that emerged from our forebears’ ovens. Bread and other foods made of wheat have sustained humans for centuries, but the wheat of our ancestors is not the same as modern commercial wheat that reaches your breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. From the original strains of wild grass harvested by early humans, wheat has exploded to more than 25,000 varieties, virtually all of them the result of human intervention.

In the waning days of the Pleistocene period, around 8500 BC, millennia before any Christian, Jew, or Muslim walked the earth, before the Egyptians, Greek, and Roman empires, the Natufians led a semi-nomadic life roaming the Fertile Crescent (now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq), supplementing their hunting and gathering by harvesting indigenous plants. They harvested the ancestor of modern wheat, einkorn, from fields that flourished wildly in open plains. Meals of gazelle, boar, fowl, and ibex were rounded out with dishes of wild-growing grain and fruit. Relics like those excavated at the Tell Abu Hureyra settlement in what is now central Syria suggest skilled use of tools such as sickles and mortars to harvest and grind grains, as well as storage pits for stockpiling harvested food. Remains of harvested wheat have been found at archaeological digs in Tell Aswad, Jericho, Nahal Hemar, Navali Cori, and other locales. Wheat was ground by hand, then eaten as porridge. The modern concept of bread leavened by yeast would not come along for several thousand years.

Natufians harvested wild einkorn wheat and may have purposefully stored seeds to sow in areas of their own choosing the next season. Einkorn wheat eventually became an essential component of the Natufian diet, reducing the need for hunting and gathering. The shift from harvesting wild to cultivating grain was a fundamental change that shaped their subsequent migratory behavior, as well as the development of tools, language, and culture. It marked the beginning of agriculture, a lifestyle that required long-term commitment to more or less permanent settlement, a turning point in the course of human civilization. Growing grains and other foods yielded a surplus of food that allowed for occupational specialization, government, and all the elaborate trappings of culture (while, in contrast, the absence of agriculture arrested cultural development at something resembling Neolithic life).

Over most of the ten thousand years that wheat has occupied a prominent place in the caves, huts, adobes, and on the tables of humans, what started out as harvested einkorn, then emmer, followed by cultivated Triticum aestivum, changed gradually and only in small fits and starts. The wheat of the seventeenth century was the wheat of the eighteenth century, which in turn was much the same as the wheat of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Riding your oxcart through the countryside during any of these centuries, you’d see fields of four-foot-tall “amber waves of grain” swaying in the breeze. Crude human wheat breeding efforts yielded hit-and-miss, year-over-year incremental modifications, some successful, most not, and even a discerning eye would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the wheat of early twentieth century farming from its many centuries of predecessors.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in many preceding centuries, wheat changed little. The Pillsbury’s Best XXXX flour my grandmother used to make her famous sour cream muffins in 1940 was little different from the flour of her great-great-grandmother sixty years earlier or, for that matter, from that of her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother another two centuries before that. Grinding of wheat had become more mechanized in the twentieth century, yielding finer flour on a larger scale, but the basic composition of the flour remained much the same.

That all ended in the latter part of the twentieth century, when an upheaval in hybridization methods transformed this grain. What now passes for wheat has changed, not through the forces of drought or disease or a Darwinian scramble for survival, but through human intervention. As a result, wheat has undergone a more drastic transformation, it’s been stretched, sewed, cut, and stitched back together to yield something entirely unique, nearly unrecognizable compared to the original and yet still called by the same name: wheat.

Modern commercial wheat production has been intent on enhancing features such as increased yield, decreased production costs, and large-scale delivery of a consistent commodity product. All the while, virtually no questions have been asked about whether these features are compatible with human health. I submit that, somewhere along the way during wheat’s history, perhaps five thousand years ago but more likely fifty years ago, wheat changed.

The result: A loaf of bread, biscuit, or pancake of today is different than its counterpart of a thousand years ago, different even from what our grandmothers made. They might look the same, even taste much the same, but there are biochemical differences. Small changes in wheat protein structure can spell the difference between a devastating immune response to wheat protein versus no immune response at all.

Q: How does this modified wheat make us fat, exactly?

A: It contains amylopectin A, which is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than just about any other carbohydrate, including table sugar. In fact, two slices of whole wheat bread increase blood sugar to a higher level than a candy bar does. And then, after about two hours, your blood sugar plunges and you get shaky, your brain feels foggy, you're hungry. So let's say you have an English muffin for breakfast. Two hours later you're starving, so you have a handful of crackers, and then some potato chips, and your blood sugar rises again. That cycle of highs and lows just keeps going throughout the day, so you're constantly feeling hungry and constantly eating. Dieticians have responded to this by advising that we graze throughout the day, which is just nonsense. If you eliminate wheat from your diet, you're no longer hungry between meals because you've stopped that cycle. You've cut out the appetite stimulant, and consequently you lose weight very quickly. I've seen this with thousands of patients.

 Q: But I'm not overweight and I exercise regularly. So why would eating whole wheat bread be bad for me?

A: You can trigger effects you don't perceive. Small low-density lipoprotein [LDL] particles form when you're eating lots of carbohydrates, and they are responsible for atherosclerotic plaque, which in turn triggers heart disease and stroke. So even if you're a slender, vigorous, healthy person, you're still triggering the formation of small LDL particles. And second, carbohydrates increase your blood sugars, which cause this process of glycation, that is, the glucose modification of proteins. If I glycate the proteins in my eyes, I get cataracts. If I glycate the cartilage of my knees and hips, I get arthritis. If I glycate small LDL, I'm more prone to atherosclerosis. So it's a twofold effect. And if you don't start out slender and keep eating that fair trade, organically grown whole wheat bread that sounds so healthy, you're repeatedly triggering high blood sugars and are going to wind up with more visceral fat. This isn't just what I call the wheat belly that you can see, flopping over your belt, but the fat around your internal organs. And as visceral fat accumulates, you risk responses like diabetes and heart disease.

Q: What results have been observed by patients cutting wheat out of their diets?

"Cutting wheat products from the diet, proved to be the dietary turning point that reduced my appetite, accelerated weight loss, and just helped me feel clearer, more energetic and happier than I'd felt in years.” According to Dr. William Davis, the author of Wheat Belly.

Dr. Davis then transferred this experience to his patients and witnessed similar results: weight loss, especially from the abdomen; reversal of abnormal cholesterol patterns without drugs; drops in blood pressure and blood sugar; and a host of other improvements in multiple abnormal health conditions.

Q: What about gluten-free options?

So you kiss all things wheat goodbye. And you’ve come to see there are endless gluten-free options only to later learn that gluten-free foods made with replacement flours like cornstarch, tapioca starch, potato starch, and rice starch are also very destructive, since they make visceral fat grow, send blood sugar through the roof, and cause hypertension and heart disease.

With Love,

Christina ❤

Sources: Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, Dr. Mercola and Dr. Robert J. Johnson