Suicidal thoughts
• Unhappiness
This means that many people have been plagued by such emotions and thoughts for years, all the while blaming themselves for being weak or flawed. Many resort to prescription antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping pills, drugs for attention deficit disorder, etc., most of which are only partially effective and have substantial side effects. Many have undergone counselling, psychoanalysis or cognitive behavioural therapy and have endured, cried, felt defeated, lashed out at others or turned to alcohol and drugs to dull the suffering. Some of the most illustrative stories of the power of grains come from people who have struggled with suicidal thoughts for years, fighting off the impulse to drive a car into oncoming traffic or swallow a bottle of sleeping pills – thoughts that miraculously disappeared within five days of having no grains and then abruptly and powerfully returned with any reexposure. On again, off again; on again, off again – incontrovertible proof of individual cause and effect.
There are several ways grains cause mood and emotional effects. While prolamin protein-derived opiates are the culprits in most of these situations, disruption of neuroendocrine hormones, such as vasoactive intestinal peptide, probably plays a role as well. In addition, the gluten proteins of wheat, rye and barley and the zein protein of corn have been shown to reduce brain levels of tryptophan,30 the amino acid that leads to serotonin. Low brain levels of serotonin are associated with depression.
The next time you find yourself yelling at your spouse or kids, feeling unaccountably anxious over a minor problem, struggling to sleep normally or experiencing some emotional response out of proportion to the situation, question whether the emotionally disruptive effects of grains are at work.
A Big Bellyful of Grains: Why Grains Make us Fat
Feed your dog or cat grains in their pet food, and they get fat. Feed your cows and chickens wheat and corn, and they get fat. Feed humans wheat, corn, rice and other grains, and they get fat.
This ain’t rocket science. Nonetheless, conventionally minded nutritionists insist that whole grains cause weight loss. Not true. What the data really show is that white flour products cause people to gain weight, and whole grain products cause people to gain a little less weight than white flour does.31 Whole grains don’t make you lose weight any more than drinking a little less vodka makes an alcoholic a little less alcoholic.
The pathways by which grain consumption leads to weight gain, particularly visceral fat of the abdomen, are manifold.
GLIADIN-DERIVED OPIATES STIMULATE APPETITE. Specifically, they stimulate appetite for more grains and sugars: crisps, biscuits, cupcakes, breads, bagels, pizza. They drive hunger that is physiologically inappropriate, causing you to eat more than your body needs, more frequently and in larger quantities than is necessary for sustenance. In rats administered gliadin-derived fragments, weight increased by 20 per cent over three months.32 Block gliadin-derived opiates with opiate-blocking drugs, and calorie intake drops by 400 calories per day, whether or not you have an eating disorder.33 Although obesity in China is not as advanced as in the Western world, wheat-consuming Chinese are fatter than Chinese who don’t consume wheat.34 The way this works in rats is the way it works in humans, regardless of ethnic origin, colour or political persuasion.
Susceptibility to this effect can vary from individual to individual. It can range from no effect at all to wild, 24-hour-a-day food obsessions, as experienced by some people with bulimia. The effect is most prominent in response to the opiates that derive from wheat, rye and barley, though corn seems to achieve a similar, though less intense, effect in many people.
AMYLOPECTIN CARBOHYDRATES OF GRAINS RAISE BLOOD SUGAR TO HIGH LEVELS. Anything made of wheat, of course, raises blood sugar to high levels. While wholemeal bread has a GI of 72 (and sucrose has a GI of 59 to 65), there is nothing higher than the GI of cornflour and rice flour: 90 to 100. High blood sugars are also followed by low blood sugars, a response to the release of insulin. Low blood sugars 90 to 120 minutes after consuming grains are experienced as anxiousness, mental cloudiness, irritability and hunger. The blood sugar highs of grains therefore set you up for an inevitable blood sugar low, a two-hour cycle of satiety and hunger that sends you back out on a quest to find more food.
High blood sugars also result in high insulin responses, which provoke resistance to insulin, higher blood sugars, higher insulin – around and around in a vicious cycle. This leads to a build-up of visceral fat, the sort of fat that is inflammatory and exudes inflammatory proteins into the bloodstream, adding further to poor insulin response. Grains are among the most potent dietary triggers for growth of visceral fat. That’s why I’ve called it a ‘wheat belly’, but we can also call it a ‘grain belly’. Visceral fat cells also express higher levels of cortisol within each fat cell, a situation that mimics that of people with Cushing’s disease or who are taking the drug prednisone, both of which are associated with extravagant weight gain.35
GRAIN LECTINS BLOCK LEPTIN. Leptin, the hormone of satiety, which is meant to signal us to stop eating after a meal, is blocked by the lectin of wheat, rye, barley and rice.36 Humans, or any other animal, for that matter, should experience satiety once physiological needs have been met. But if grain lectins are in the vicinity, they block the signal to stop.
Can you think of any other food that contains opiates that drive appetite, turns off satiety signals, and causes extravagant hyperglycaemia and hypoglycaemia? If you’re wondering why, after cutting fat and eating more ‘healthy whole grains’, you feel like you can’t eat enough, have to knock over the other customers in the queue at the canteen or gain weight by doing everything ‘right’, well, you now understand: whole, white, sprouted, organic, fresh or stale, grains make you fat.
Diabetes and Prediabetes: Anatomy of a Blunder
Grains cause diabetes. All the flours and products created from the seeds of grasses play major roles in creating the blood sugar disasters that define diabetes and prediabetes.
I’m sure you have heard all the painful statistics about how Americans and the rest of the world are experiencing an epidemic of diabetes: 26 million in the United States have diabetes, and 35 per cent of adults over 20 years old have prediabetes. At this rate, one in three Americans are predicted to be diabetic by 2050.37 It is an epidemic that dwarfs all other epidemics. The International Diabetes Federation reports that 382 million people had diabetes worldwide in 2013, and that number is expected to increase to 592 million by 2035,38 numbers that make the 1918 flu pandemic and the bubonic plague seem like minor public health nuisances. But unlike the flu and plague, which involved contagious, infectious organisms, the diabetes epidemic is man-made: it was not created by rapidly evolving viruses or nasty vermin, but by human blundering.
Public health officials lay blame on the public, of course, claiming that we simply eat too much and move too little. They say that the nearly 500 per cent increase in the number of diabetics in the United States, from 5.6 million in 1980 to 26 million in 2011, happened because modern Americans, and now much of the rest of the world, are the most gluttonous and lazy populations that ever walked the earth. We’re more gluttonous and lazy than we were in 1980, 1990 or 2000, and we’ve become worse every year since.
I don’t think so. Take a look at the graph from National Health Survey data reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), showing the number of diagnosed diabetics in the United States.
Note that the number of diabetics (represented by vertical bars) began to increase, almost imperceptibly, between 1983 and 1985. This coincides quite nicely with a number of developments.
1.
