Wheat Belly & Testosterone Decline

A few weeks ago I finished reading Grain Brain – a superb book which explains how our brains our affected by grains, and more specifically, wheat and gluten. Grains are higher on the glycemic index than table sugar, so trigger a very sharp blood sugar spike, and the insulin surge that occurs soon afterwards. You probably now know that insulin is your fat storing hormone so from this, you know that anything made from grains – breakfast cereals, bread, pasta etc, will cause you to gain fat very quickly, and also, make it very difficult to burn fat. Grain brain also explains in great detail how grains and other high glycemic carbohydrates, cause all sorts of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s which has now been called Type 3 diabetes, as exactly the same characteristics that lead to type 2 diabetes, namely insulin resistance, as a result of continuous over exposure to the hormone insulin (as a result of too many high GI carbs and sugar in your diet), lead to Alzheimer’s. Our conventional diet with such a high proportion of our daily food intake comprising high GI carbs, is putting us all on the road to developing insulin resistance. This also goes hand in hand with inflammation, which triggers most, if not all, chronic diseases.

When people come off grains, the main culprit being wheat, they report more energy, an ability to think more clearly, fewer to no mood swings, accelerated fat loss, increased motivation, an increased ability to concentrate and focus, they feel less stressed and all around on better form. It transpires that most of us are intolerant to wheat, it’s not just Celiac sufferers – who have an acute reaction to gluten.

Wheat Belly, is as you might imagine, similar to Grain Brain. There are lots of overlaps but I wanted to read it anyway.  What’s really interesting so far, is learning how the quality of the wheat has changed dramatically over the last few thousand years, very different to the original crop. It has been genetically modified considerably to yield more crop (and money) for farmers. The modified version of wheat as we know it today, has caused it to become toxic and gluten is now referred to as a gut poison by experts. Wheat is highly inflammatory and is one of the first things anyone suffering from eczema (like I used to) or psoriasis or asthma is told to come off. This is because those 3 conditions are all a result of inflammation. They are all inflammatory conditions – as are Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Leaky Gut and Chron’s Disease. Remove the inflammatory culprits form your diet, and these conditions normally clear up. I personally know 3 people who have cured IBS, Chron’s and Leaky Gut from removing grains from their diets and tons of similar cases are documented in both Grain Brain and The Primal Blueprint.

Back to Wheat Belly, the author is Dr Williams Davis. He witnessed thousands of his patients regain their health by removing wheat from their diet. He’s a firm believer that wheat is the main culprit behind America’s obesity epidemic, and also type 2 diabetes epidemic – diabesity as it is now dubbed. If you’re you’re a man, low on testosterone and you have a belly, the first thing to do, would be to remove wheat from your diet to burn that belly fat away. The more belly fat you have, the more oestrogen you’ll have, as belly fat contains the enzyme aromatase and this converts testosterone into two forms of oestrogen. Since oestrogen is a fat storing hormone, the more belly fat you have the harder it will be to burn. Removing wheat and sugar is by far the fastest way to burn through belly fat. (In fact, going into ketosis is by far the fastest way when your body switches to burning stored fat for fuel and your brain switches to using ketones for energy instead of glucose from carbohydrates. This is how Joe Cross was able to survive on vegetable juices for 60 days and reverse every health condition he was suffering. This is as seen in the documentary, Sick, Fat and Nearly dead).

So how is the wheat grain so toxic compared to its ancestor thousands of years ago? Well, it gets scientific so I’m going to keep it simple for the layman. There are now thousands of strains of wheat that have been designed to yield more crop, in a fraction of the time, and to withstand pests. The gluten proteins are altered so much in the hybridisation process that in the offspring it has been reported that as many as 14 new proteins are formed, that did not exist in either parent. This probably means nothing, but the point is, they’re not natural and we are playing God creating these, and our bodies cannot digest them. Studies done on animals have shown that test animals fed glyphosate-tolerant soybeans (aka Roundup Ready, these soybeans are genetically bread to allow the farmer to feely spray the week killer Roundup without harming the crop – the Monsanto poison), show severe problems with liver, pancreatic, intestinal and testicular tissue compared with animals on conventional soybeans. If you’ve not seen GMO OMG, watch it, it goes into detail with these studies. It also shows how oestrogen levels in rats exposed to Roundup had doubled in 14 months. (And we wonder why men’s testosterone levels and sperm counts have plummeted in the last 2 decades.) And multiple tumours on mammary glands of female rats – think Breast Cancer.  Genetically modified wheat crops show similar reactions.

Side note: Know of someone with bad breath? Bad breath starts in the gut. Gluten is a gut poison. Tell them to come of wheat for a month and see how they’re more pleasurable to have around! Although, the first hurdle may be telling them they have bad breath..

I want to finish with this quote. Bear in mind that you now know that wheat is higher on the glycemic index than sugar;

“Trigger high blood sugars repeatedly and/or over sustained periods, and more fat accumulation results. The consequences of glucose-insulin-fat deposition are especially visible in your abdomen – resulting in, yes, wheat belly. The bigger your wheat belly, the poorer your response to insulin, since the deep visceral fat [this fat surrounds your organs and is highly dangerous] of the wheat belly is associated with poor responsiveness or “resistance” to insulin, demanding higher and higher insulin levels, a situation that cultivates diabetes. Moreover the bigger the wheat belly in males, the more oestrogen is produced by fat tissue, and the larger the breasts. The bigger your wheat belly, the more inflammatory responses that are triggered: Heart disease and cancer.

Nuff said. *Drop the mic!*