Wheat Belly (2011) by William Davis
Here's another nutrition/health book worth your time: Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health by William Davis, MD. This is not just for celiac sufferers, but genuinely for all of us living through today's food supply system. The writing is engaging, energetic and studded with personal anecdotes from the author's clinical practice.
The book begins with a fascinating mini-history of the wheat plant, from primordial einkorn, the original wild grain; through emmer, the very first cross, which became the domesticated grain of the Agricultural Revolution and thousands of years after; to today's post-"Green Revolution" dwarf wheat, which has been so vastly modified in the past fifty years that not only can it not survive in the wild (that is, without human assistance throughout its life cycle), but it bears almost no chromosomal/protein-producing resemblance to its forebears. It seems that many plants (unlike mammals) do not halve the genetic inheritance from each parent in a hybridization cross, but instead accumulate most or all the genes from each side, and so for each hybridization, approximately 5% "of proteins expressed in the offspring" are, due to the interactions of the new gene array, "unique, found in neither parent" [original emphasis]. Multiply this by the "flurry of breeding activity" late in the twentieth century, the thousands and thousands of crosses accomplished rapid-fire in the "Green Revolution" ... with not a single safety study performed. "Not Your Grandma's Muffins," as this chapter declares.
Subsequent chapters move on to the latest studies correlating wheat sensitivity with various diseases, including such unexpected guests as schizophrenia, Multiple Sclerosis and Crohn's, as well as the recurring stars acid-reflux, diabetes and obesity. Titles include "Hey, Man, Wanna Buy Some Exorphins? The Addictive Properties of Wheat," "Dropping Acid: Wheat as the Great pH Disruptor" and "Bagel Face: Wheat's Destructive Effect on the Skin." One of the most fascinating-to-me studies compared preserved tissue samples from young soldiers early in the twentieth century with fresh tissue samples from elderly men with the same birth years as the samples, and from young men the same age as the samples when taken (guess which one group did not display wheat-related wear and tear). Another was when a severely wheat-sensitive person tested, on consecutive days, eating two slices of einkorn bread to eating two slices of modern whole-wheat bread (both spiked his insulin, but guess which one did not make him violently ill).
I still heartily recommend starting with Gary Taubes if you're new to the subject of controlled-carbohydrate nutrition, but Wheat Belly is an easy, accessible, happy addition to the literature.
The book begins with a fascinating mini-history of the wheat plant, from primordial einkorn, the original wild grain; through emmer, the very first cross, which became the domesticated grain of the Agricultural Revolution and thousands of years after; to today's post-"Green Revolution" dwarf wheat, which has been so vastly modified in the past fifty years that not only can it not survive in the wild (that is, without human assistance throughout its life cycle), but it bears almost no chromosomal/protein-producing resemblance to its forebears. It seems that many plants (unlike mammals) do not halve the genetic inheritance from each parent in a hybridization cross, but instead accumulate most or all the genes from each side, and so for each hybridization, approximately 5% "of proteins expressed in the offspring" are, due to the interactions of the new gene array, "unique, found in neither parent" [original emphasis]. Multiply this by the "flurry of breeding activity" late in the twentieth century, the thousands and thousands of crosses accomplished rapid-fire in the "Green Revolution" ... with not a single safety study performed. "Not Your Grandma's Muffins," as this chapter declares.
Subsequent chapters move on to the latest studies correlating wheat sensitivity with various diseases, including such unexpected guests as schizophrenia, Multiple Sclerosis and Crohn's, as well as the recurring stars acid-reflux, diabetes and obesity. Titles include "Hey, Man, Wanna Buy Some Exorphins? The Addictive Properties of Wheat," "Dropping Acid: Wheat as the Great pH Disruptor" and "Bagel Face: Wheat's Destructive Effect on the Skin." One of the most fascinating-to-me studies compared preserved tissue samples from young soldiers early in the twentieth century with fresh tissue samples from elderly men with the same birth years as the samples, and from young men the same age as the samples when taken (guess which one group did not display wheat-related wear and tear). Another was when a severely wheat-sensitive person tested, on consecutive days, eating two slices of einkorn bread to eating two slices of modern whole-wheat bread (both spiked his insulin, but guess which one did not make him violently ill).
I still heartily recommend starting with Gary Taubes if you're new to the subject of controlled-carbohydrate nutrition, but Wheat Belly is an easy, accessible, happy addition to the literature.