The Untold Story of Wheat
If I were a ruler of a kingdom and my goal was to make my citizens as healthy as possible, one of the first moves I would make would be banning wheat. Limiting wheat consumption has the power to transform your health. When I was sick, one of the surprising things I learned during my recovery was the hidden dangers of eating wheat. Humans aren’t meant to eat them. Your beloved wheat products - such as bread, pasta, cereal, pizza, crackers, pretzels, and muffins - do not add much to your health and do more harm than good.
It Comes Down to Evolution
Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years. For 95% of this time, our ancestors ate various plants and animals. The fatty meat and complete protein from animal products supported the development of a complex brain that propelled us to the top of the food chain. Processing and consuming wheat at scale has only been around for about 10,000 years, coinciding with the start of civilization. This represents just 5% of humanity; our genes aren’t adapted to this diet. Early signs of wheat negatively impacting our health began to show almost immediately.
Specialized Agriculture
The start of civilization brought specialized agriculture, which was initially great. It prevented starvation and allowed for societal advances. However, the main crop grown was wheat, which became a dietary centerpiece and caused subsequent health issues. Fossil records and archaeological evidence suggest early agricultural societies experienced nutritional deficiencies, reduced average height, decreased bone density, decreased brain size, increased infectious diseases, and a major decline in dental health. (1) Society started to advance, but our health began to retreat, leading to the epidemic of health issues we face today.
Wheat and Modern Health Issues
Despite these warning signs, wheat is still cultivated in most societies across the globe because it is relatively cheap and can be grown in different climates. According to the FAO, global wheat production surpasses 700 million tons annually. (2) The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that wheat products and whole grains should make up a significant portion of our diet. (3) Ironically, following this advice puts people on a path to gut dysfunction, obesity, type 2 diabetes, mental health disorders, and cancer, which are strongly associated with high wheat consumption.
Gluten and Leaky Gut
Gluten is the sticky protein in wheat that creates dough’s elasticity. When you eat gluten, it binds with intestinal receptors in cells, releasing zonulin. Zonulin causes the tight junctions in our gut to become porous, (leaky gut) allowing toxins, microbes, and partially digested food particles into the bloodstream. These substances travel around the body, wreaking havoc and activating an autoimmune response. This could manifest as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and more.
Gluten-induced immune system over-activation can divert immune sources away from other essential functions, making you more susceptible to illness. Additionally, gluten consumption has been linked to mental health issues. There are around 100 trillion neurons in your gut, and a leaky gut caused by gluten can negatively affect these neurons, contributing to anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, dementia, migraines, and more.
High Insulin Levels
When you consume a product like bread, it raises glucose levels in your blood. In response, insulin is released to clear the glucose out of the bloodstream into your tissues where it can be used for energy or stored for later use. Problems occur when we consume too many carbohydrates (like wheat) that make up a majority of people’s diets today. This leads to insulin resistance, where your cells have a harder time storing glucose, which leads to dangerously high blood sugar levels. High blood sugar leads to type 2 diabetes, which affects about 10% of Americans (4).
Increased blood sugar levels leading to insulin resistance, also increase the risk of cancer, heart disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. (5).
Anti-nutrients
Wheat makes it harder for your body to absorb essential nutrients due to phytates, an antioxidant compound in whole grains. They bind to minerals in the digestive tract (iron, zinc, magnesium) making these nutrients more difficult to absorb. While consuming these in moderation might not be a big deal, prioritizing wheat in our diets (as recommended by The Dietary Guidelines for Americans) (6) can hinder our health.
Oral Health Decline
Wheat consumption in early civilization brought an onslaught of poor oral health. Diets shifted from predominantly plant and animal foods to an over-reliance on wheat. Evidence from fossil records showed that hunter-gatherers had relatively good oral health, thanks to the fibrous plants that helped clean teeth. With the introduction of wheat came oral health problems many struggle with today such as bacteria overgrowth, plaque formation, cavities, and tooth decay.
Inflammation
Wheat causes an inflammatory response. Inflammation is the body’s natural response to harmful environmental stimuli, like a swollen ankle from a twist or a bee sting. Inflammation in these acute areas helps increase blood flow, assists with the removal of toxins, and repairs damaged cells. When inflammation becomes chronic, as with frequent wheat consumption, you have the root of many modern health problems. Compounds in wheat stimulate the production of inflammatory cytokines. With the body in a constant inflammatory response, this prolonged state of alert eventually starts damaging healthy cells, tissues, and organs leading to a variety of chronic issues such as cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, dementia, and cause also cause symptoms like fatigue, body pain, depression, anxiety, stomach aches, and more.
Trim out the other stuff
If you decide to ditch wheat or limit your consumption after reading this, you are dodging the triple threat of sugar, trans fats, and processed seed oils often sneakily added to many of the wheat products sold in stores today. One change, three wins for your health.
Are there better forms of Carbohydrates?
Consider these healthier options if you want to include carbohydrates in your meals. These choices are better because they don't contain gluten, which causes problems. Use these alternatives instead of bread and plan your meals around them. Replace toast with oatmeal for breakfast, swap a sandwich for a protein rice bowl at lunch, and choose potatoes and steak instead of pasta for dinner. There are many healthier alternatives out there that don’t include wheat.
Here are a few alternatives:
Oatmeal
Potatoes
Sweet Potatoes
Rice
Quinoa
The decision to include wheat in your diet is ultimately yours. I'm sharing what has worked for me and my reasoning behind it, and I firmly believe that limiting wheat has been a key factor in my improved health. In the end, do what works best for you.
It's important to question conventional nutritional advice, especially when it comes to recommendations about wheat and whole grains. Many authority figures have long preached that these foods are essential for our health. However, considering our genetic makeup and the mismatch between these recommendations and our evolutionary history, it’s worth questioning their validity. Look at the current state of our society's health, and it's clear that some of these recommendations aren’t working.
