Originally posted by Dr. Davis on 2016-12-06
on the Wheat Belly Blog,
sourced from and currently found at: Infinite Health Blog.
PCM forum Index
of WB Blog articles.
How to
eliminate this uncomfortable, embarrassing problem.
Our ancestors who lived
without grains, sugars, and soft drinks enjoyed predictable
bowel behavior. They ate turtle, fish, clams,
mushrooms, coconut, or mongongo nuts for breakfast, and out
it all came that afternoon or evening—large, steamy, filled
with undigested remains and prolific quantities of bacteria
, no straining, laxatives, or stack of magazines required.
If instead you are living
a modern life and have pancakes with maple syrup for
breakfast and you’ll be lucky to pass that out by tomorrow
or the next day. Perhaps, you will be constipated, not
passing out your pancakes and syrup for days, passing it
incompletely in hard, painful bits and pieces.
In constipation’s most extreme forms, the
remains of pancakes can stay in your colon for
weeks.
Bran is not the answer
to eliminate this embarrassing problem.
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We have been given advice to
consume more fiber. So, we eat bran cereal/muffins, whole
grain breads or drink powdered fiber supplements.
Most of these grain-based foods contain insoluble cellulose
(wood) fibers. This does work for some, as
indigestible cellulose fibers, undigested by our own
digestive apparatus as well as undigested by bowel flora,
yields “bulk” that people mistake for a healthy
bowel movement. Never mind that all the other disruptions
of digestion, from your mouth on down, are not addressed
by loading up your diet with wood fibers. What if sluggish
bowel movements prove unresponsive to such fibers? That’s
when health care comes to the rescue with laxatives.
Drugs are not the answer
to eliminate this uncomfortable problem.
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Laxatives are prescribed in a
variety of forms, some irritative (phenolphthalein and senna),
some lubricating (dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate), some osmotic
(polyethylene glycol), some no different than spraying you
down with a hose (enemas).
Opiate drugs such as
Oxycontin and morphine are commonly constipating.
There’s even a new drug being widely advertised to “treat”
the constipation side-effect of opiates: Relistor, or
methylnaltrexone, an opiate-blocker that requires injection
and costs around $700 per month. Those of you who have read
Wheat Belly Total Health
recall that the gliadin protein of wheat and related proteins
in other grains (e.g., secalin in rye) are partially digested
to peptides that have opiate (“opioid”) properties, including
binding to the opiate receptors in the human intestine.
Wheat and grains therefore contain a disrupter
of intestinal motility.
Simply remove wheat and grains and
constipation, even obstipation (severe, unrelenting constipation
with bowel movements occurring every several weeks), can be
relieved within days. This works because you have just removed
the opiates that slow the intestinal passage of food. You will
have removed a source of cellulose fiber, as well as the
modest content of prebiotic fibers from grains, namely
amylose and arabinoxylan, but these are easily replaced.
This is the Wheat
Belly approach to eliminating constipation.
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- Eliminate all wheat and grains–thereby
eliminating gliadin-derived opiates.
- Cultivate the garden called bowel
flora–by “seeding” with a high-potency
probiotic, followed by “water and fertilizer” to
nourish desired species with prebiotic fibers
- Hydrate well.
- Supplement magnesium.
Virtually everyone begins with a magnesium deficiency.
A magnesium deficiency adds to disrupted intestinal motility,
reversed by supplementing magnesium. However, the
degree of stool loosening varies among the different preparations
due to their variations in osmotic (water-imbibing) effects.
Magnesium water and magnesium malate are among our preferred forms,
as they are least likely to generate loose stools while softly
helping with regularity. Magnesium citrate can be used if you do
indeed need a bit more stool softening and regularity (which can
be due to delayed recovery of intestinal motility after
removing wheat and grains).
- Supplement with fiber. This is
not necessary for most people living the Wheat Belly
lifestyle. Just by adhering to the simple Wheat Belly
strategies of consuming nuts; seeds such as pumpkin, sesame,
chia, flaxseed, and sunflower; eating plenty of vegetable
with limited servings of fruit and legumes like chickpeas,
you obtain plentiful quantities of cellulose and other
fibers. Additional flaxseed, chia, or psyllium are
among the best choices.
You can see that the
Wheat Belly approach does not rely on artificial means of
reversing constipation to restore normal gut motility.
It does not load up on unnatural quantities of cellulose
fiber, as you would by eating bran cereals and muffins,
nor does it rely on intestinal irritants, softening agents,
or opiate-blocking drugs.
Doesn’t that make better sense?
Living grain-free is the
answer to eliminate this embarrassing
& uncomfortable problem.
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Yours in grainless health,
Dr. William Davis
