Sourced from: Infinite Health Blog, by Dr. Davis,
originally posted on the Wheat Belly Blog: 2012-02-15
Dr.
Mark Hyman: Fellow Wheat Belly-acher
It looks like Dr. Mark Hyman, well known
for his popular and insightful books, Ultramind and
Ultrametabolism, has jumped onto the Wheat Belly
bandwagon with his comments in a recent article
on his website.
Some tidbits from his article:
The history of wheat parallels
the history of chronic disease and obesity across the world.
Supermarkets today contain walls of wheat and corn disguised
in literally hundreds of thousands of different food-like
products, or FrankenFoods.
The Bible says, “Give us
this day our daily bread”. Eating bread is nearly a
religious commandment. But the Einkorn, heirloom, Biblical
wheat of our ancestors is something modern humans never eat.
Instead, we eat dwarf wheat, the
product of genetic manipulation and hybridization that
created short, stubby, hardy, high yielding wheat plants
with much higher amounts of starch and gluten and many more
chromosomes coding for all sorts of new odd proteins. The man
who engineered this modern wheat won the Nobel Prize – it
promised to feed millions of starving around the world. Well,
it has, and it has made them fat and sick.
The first major difference of
this dwarf wheat is that it contains very high levels of
a super starch called amylopectin A. This is how we
get big fluffy Wonder Bread and Cinnabons.
And:
The problems with wheat are real, scientifically
validated and ever present. Getting off wheat may not only
make you feel better and lose weight, it could save your life.
My personal hope is that together
we can create a national conversation about a real, practical
solution for the prevention, treatment, and reversal of our
obesity, diabetes and chronic disease epidemic. Getting off
wheat may just be an important step.
I applaud Dr. Hyman for seeing the
light on this huge issue and encouraging “a national
conversation.” We differ on one issue: Who
should be wheat-free. Dr. Hyman argues that people with
positive blood markers (e.g., gluten antibodies or
HLA markers) or perceived improvements off wheat should
remain wheat/gluten-free.
I argue a bit differently: The
adverse health effects are too far reaching, often
not perceived by the individual, in ways not fully
understood, that nobody should be eating wheat.
Too many things happen beneath your surface of perception,
including high blood sugars, formation of small LDL particles,
lectin-induced release of foreign substances into the
bloodstream leading to inflammatory diseases in future.
In other words, this is not
gluten-elimination for the gluten-sensitive; this is
elimination of wheat for everybody.
