I’m really intrigued with new information I’ve seen about the negative health effects of eating wheat. Stick with me, please. This isn’t just the usual gluten-free stuff that is so trendy today. It effects all of us and and it makes complete sense to me.
According to Dr. Mark Hyman, author of The Blood Sugar Solution and several other books, wheat contains:
a super starch that is more fattening than pure sugar;
a super gluten that is highly inflammatory and
a super drug that is addictive and makes you crave more.
Modern day hybrid wheat and gluten is hybridized and genetically manipulated with odd proteins for high yielding plants that have many times more gluten than the ancient form eaten by our ancestors. It’s found not only in the obvious places like bread, baked goods and pasta, but in many, if not most, processed floods including ice cream, spaghetti sauce, spice mixes, french fries and soy sauce.
The evil culprit that is effecting so many of us is amylopectin-A, a starch that raises blood sugar faster than pure sugar, increasing inflammation and the risk of obesity and diabetes. White or whole grain, it makes no difference. All wheat products contains amylopectin-A that, among other things, leads to a widely recognized condition called “wheat belly,” or the dangerous belly fat that causes an cascade of inflammatory responses, all of them with dire health effects.
The super gluten that Dr. Hyman calls FrankenWheat, a chromosomally altered molecule that not only triggers the modern-day epidemic of celiac disease and gluten-intolerance, but also more subtly and equally insidiously causes obesity and diabetes. Dr. Hyman goes into great depth on super gluten in his Huffington Post article.
Finally, there is the addictive nature of the modern-day wheat that triggers binge eating. As Dr. Hyman points out, “No one binges on broccoli, but they binge on cookies or cake.” That’s because the wheat proteins are converted by the digestive system into substances called gluetomorphins (yes the same root word as morphine), highly addictive polypeptides that quickly cross the blood-brain barrier and quite literally give you a high and make you crave more.
So, OK folks, here’s the challenge: I’m going to go gluten-free for the next six weeks and see what happens. I’ll be keeping a journal and sharing my experiences here. I hope you’ll join me and share your own experiences. We’ll all have to become avid label readers, but I think the key will be to avoid all or almost all processed foods. Off we go!
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