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This common grain may be setting us up for a variety of health problems.
Why is wheat such a problematic food for so many people? Was it always not good for us, or has it become worse for our health in recent years?
It's sometimes hard to connect the dots because disease develops gradually from eating the wrong foods.
The case against wheat has been building for quite some time. But more recent research suggests that wheat breeding and modern farming practices may have dramatically changed wheat in ways that make it even more toxic to our health.
Humans evolved as meat- and vegetable-eating hunters and gatherers who didn't eat grains at all. Archeological research shows that when they switched to an agricultural lifestyle and a grain-based diet, humans experienced a deterioration in health, including a reduction in stature and an increase in bone abnormalities and diseases, dental caries and enamel defects, infectious diseases, and iron-deficiency anemia.
Historically speaking, high-wheat diets were found to be major causes or contributing factors of severe zinc deficiency or iron-deficiency anemia. In addition, bone abnormalities-including osteoporosis, rickets (soft, thin, bowed bones), gnarled bones from arthritis, and dental enamel defects-increased as the cultivation of gluten grains such as wheat spread throughout Europe.
Though few people realize it, the following are some of the little-known nutritional problems with wheat. The grain is:
Wheat, of course, is also high in gluten, a gluey, hard-to-digest collection of proteins that leads to the autoimmune condition celiac disease in some individuals and to gluten sensitivity that causes uncomfortable symptoms (but not the damage to the small intestine lining found in celiac disease) in many more people.
Celiac disease may seem like a "new" disease, but the first description of the disorder dates back to the first century AD, when Aretaeus, a distinguished Greek doctor, wrote about it in a medical textbook. However, it wasn't until the 1940s and 1950s that Dutch pediatrician Willem Karel Dicke established the cause-and-effect connection between wheat flour and celiac disease. So our understanding of the damage that wheat and gluten can do to health has been building slowly over many decades.
According to Wheat Belly author William Davis, MD, the harmful health effects from wheat and gluten have become worse lately because of newfangled agriculture techniques-hybridization, backcrossing, and inducing mutations through the use of chemicals-that have been performed on wheat during the last 50 years in an effort to increase yield.
These techniques altered wheat in many ways; wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with hybridization. In one hybridization experiment, 14 new gluten proteins were identified.
The incidences of celiac disease and nonceliac gluten sensitivity are on the rise-and those conditions are associated with more than 300 different health conditions. Common signs of gluten sensitivity include digestive problems, headaches, migraines, arthritis, infertility, and skin rashes, but there are many more. Growing research suggests that gluten may harm everyone, even those who don't think they are gluten-sensitive, over a lifetime.
It's possible that a recent change that has taken place in modern industrialized agriculture may be contributing to people developing earlier and more noticeable symptoms from eating wheat. Far greater amounts of herbicides such as Roundup are sprayed on our crops, especially genetically modified crops, and some farmers reportedly apply Roundup to wheat (which is not currently a genetically modified crop) just prior to harvest. Eating products made from heavily sprayed crops means consuming extra residues of the herbicide on and in the food we eat, which may cause adverse reactions in itself. In addition, the herbicide acts as an antibiotic and may set us up for developing imbalances of the good and bad bacteria in our gut, which is associated with gluten-related conditions such as celiac disease.
From my perspective, the ill health effects from wheat stem from eating large amounts of a food that our bodies were not designed to properly digest. Added to that are hybridization and other techniques used during the past 50 years or so that have likely prompted quicker and more dramatic adverse reactions to it.
The most health-promoting way to take wheat and gluten out of your diet is to avoid foods that contain wheat, spelt, kamut, rye, barley, and triticale and replace them with vegetables. A few quick tips:
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