Bagels, burgers, bran muffins…pick your poison. Or at least that is what Dr. William Davis is asking you to do. In the present day and age, it seems like everything is made with this miracle grain, even when you may not suspect it. Going down the aisles of grocery stores, you can look shelf to shelf and find it in almost every processed food. From soup to soy sauce, wheat has become not only the main body, but also an additive to many items that make our mouths water with delight. But what if I told you your missing the whole story of the whole grain?
This past winter break I found myself in the middle of one of my mom’s typical Dr. Oz show recaps that always seem more like a MBI 121 lecture than anything. With the ending of Oprah, ABC delivered the next big 4pm mom-magnet The Dr. Oz Show, starring a hot doctor who can’t seem to make up his mind on what new diet fad we “can do for him.” A few days before we left for vacation, my mom watched an episode about a little book called “Wheat Belly,” written by Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who had a knack for dietary ideas. Case after case, including himself, Dr. Davis found that when people cut wheat from their diet, their health problems (a whole spectrum of aliments at that) would disappear- giving people a chance at normalcy and saving many from debilitating surgeries. After sitting on the beach for just one day, my mom had blown through half of the book, so naturally I became interested. Interested turned to obsessed as I read page by page Davis historical accounts of our food to his experiments with wheat in the lab and in the field. Obsessed turned into self-experimentation, and experimentation turned into this article.
Wheat is something as old as time. It’s something that has been around for as long as we, our parents, our grandparents, even our great grandparents can remember. It’s chronicled in present day media as those “healthy whole grains” making Cheerio’s the heart healthy breakfast, in literature, as reason for Jean Valjean’s arrest in Les Miserables, and even historically as representing the body of Christ in the last supper. It seems like these amber waves of grain have been waving tall stalked in the wind for all of humanity. That is, until we genetically modified them in the 1950’s to save hungry people by making more, faster. This new dwarf wheat, invented by Norman Borlaug, eliminated the waste of the tall stalks and added stiff short shafts that make it able to grow in even the most uncultavatable areas. Borlaug got a Nobel Prize and we got uncertainty.
No official testing was done on the reactions humans had to this grain, and why would their be? It looked the same, it tasted the same, and it solved one of those old-as-time problems pageant contestants ramble on about each year. Fast-forward 40 years and add a tenacious and interested doctor, and we have blood-glucose level testing with simple whole grain items by the books author Dr. Davis. Conclusion? You were better off eating a snickers bar for breakfast than a piece of whole-wheat toast. I know what you’re thinking, and I had the same reaction, so I read on. It’s truly amazing to me how little we know about what we eat for a country that is so fixated on food. Diabetes and obesity are to media discussion as turkey and stuffing are to Thanksgiving. Would you be shocked if I told you Dr. Davis had clients who reversed their pre-diabetes to none at all?
After reading this book, I knew I had to try it out. I returned to the US from vacation and went to the grocery store with my mother, determined to go wheat free for at least a month. First, let me tell you something about my eating habits. I have a weakness for soup; it’s like my own personal cup of joy. Going down the soup isle and having 90% of the product labels read “this product contains wheat” was like a stake to the heart. Over the next few weeks of grocery shopping at home and here at school, I have really seen the full effect of wheat on the food industry. It’s the main ingredient, it’s the coating, it’s the binder. Whatever it is, it’s in there. But while I have been crying in my soup about not being able to eat it, I finally sit here a month later, never happier. For someone who had a migraine a day to be migraine free, that is better than chicken noodle soup any day.