cereal or an English muffin breakfast, followed by 11 am pre-lunch cravings, as well as the mental fog, fatigue and shakiness of the hypoglycaemic glucose nadir.
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 the abdomen – resulting in, yes, wheat belly. The bigger your wheat belly, the poorer your response to insulin, since the deep visceral fat 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.
Because of wheat’s morphine-like effect (discussed in the next chapter) and the glucose-insulin cycle that wheat amylopectin A generates, wheat is, in effect, an appetite stimulant. Accordingly, people who eliminate wheat from their diet consume fewer calories, something I will discuss later in the book.
If glucose-insulin-fat provocation from wheat consumption is a major phenomenon underlying weight gain, then elimination of wheat from the diet should reverse the phenomenon. And that is exactly what happens.
For years, wheat-related weight loss has been observed in patients with coeliac disease, who must eliminate all foods containing gluten from their diets to halt an immune response gone awry, which in coeliac patients essentially destroys the small intestine. As it happens, wheat-free, gluten-free diets are also amylopectin A-free.
However, the weight-loss effects of wheat elimination are not immediately clear from clinical studies. Many coeliac sufferers are diagnosed after years of suffering and begin the diet change in a severely malnourished state due to prolonged diarrhoea and impaired nutrient absorption. Underweight, malnourished coeliac sufferers may actually gain weight with wheat removal thanks to improved digestive function.
But if we look only at overweight people who are not severely malnourished at the time of diagnosis who remove wheat from their diet, it becomes clear that this enables them to lose a substantial amount of weight. A Mayo Clinic/University of Iowa study of 215 obese coeliac patients showed 27.5 pounds of weight loss in the first six months of a wheat-free diet.11 In another study, wheat elimination slashed the number of people classified as obese (body mass index, or BMI, 30 or greater) in half within a year.12 Oddly, investigators performing these studies usually attribute the weight loss of wheat- and gluten-free diets to lack of food variety. (Food variety, incidentally, can still be quite wide and wonderful after wheat is eliminated, as I will discuss.)
Advice to consume more healthy whole grains therefore causes increased consumption of the amylopectin A form of wheat carbohydrate, a form of carbohydrate that, for all practical purposes, is little different, and in some ways worse, than dipping your spoon into the sugar bowl.
GLUTEN: WE HARDLY KNOW YA!
If you were to add water to wheat flour, knead the mixture into dough, then rinse the glob under running water to wash away starches and fibre, you’d be left with a protein mixture called gluten.
Wheat is the principal source of gluten in the diet, both because wheat products have come to dominate and because most Americans do not make a habit of consuming plentiful quantities of barley, rye, bulgur, kamut or triticale, the other sources of gluten. For all practical purposes, therefore, when I discuss gluten, I am primarily referring to wheat.
While wheat is, by weight, mostly carbohydrate as amylopectin A, gluten protein is what makes wheat ‘wheat’. Gluten is the unique component of wheat that makes dough ‘doughy’: stretchable, rollable, spreadable, twistable, baking gymnastics that cannot be achieved with rice flour, corn flour or any other grain. Gluten allows the pizza-maker to roll and toss dough and mould it into the characteristic flattened shape; it allows the dough to stretch and rise when yeast fermentation causes it to fill with air pockets. The distinctive doughy quality of the simple mix of wheat flour and water, properties food scientists call viscoelasticity and cohesiveness, are due to gluten. While wheat is mostly carbohydrate and only 10 to 15 per cent protein, 80 per cent of that protein is gluten. Wheat without gluten would lose the unique qualities that transform dough into bagels, pizza or focaccia.
Here’s a quick lesson in this thing called gluten (a lesson that you might categorise under ‘Know thine enemy’). Glutens are the storage proteins of the wheat plant, a means of storing carbon and nitrogen for germination of the seed to form new wheat plants. Leavening, the ‘rising’ process created by the marriage of wheat with yeast, does not occur without gluten, and is therefore unique to wheat flour.
The term ‘gluten’ encompasses two primary families of proteins, the gliadins and the glutenins. The gliadins, the protein group that most vigorously triggers the immune response in coeliac disease, has three subtypes: α/β-gliadins, Γ-gliadins and Ω-gliadins. Like amylopectin, glutenins are large repeating structures, or polymers, of more basic structures. The strength of dough is due to the large polymeric glutenins, a genetically programmed characteristic purposefully selected by plant breeders.13
Gluten from one wheat strain can be quite different in structure from that of another strain. The gluten proteins produced by einkorn wheat, for example, are distinct from the gluten proteins of emmer, which are, in turn, different from the gluten proteins of Triticum aestivum.14, 15 Because fourteen-chromosome einkorn, containing the so-called A genome (set of genes), has the smallest chromosomal set, it codes for the fewest number and variety of glutens. Twenty-eight-chromosome emmer, containing the A genome with the added B genome, codes for a larger variety of gluten. Forty-two-chromosome Triticum aestivum, with the A, B and D genomes, has the greatest gluten variety, even before any human manipulation of its breeding. Hybridisation efforts of the past fifty years have generated numerous additional changes in gluten-coding genes in Triticum aestivum, most of them purposeful modifications of the D genome that confer baking and aesthetic characteristics on flour.16 Indeed, genes located in the D genome are those most frequently pinpointed as the source of the glutens that trigger coeliac disease.17
It is therefore the D genome of modern Triticum aestivum that, having been the focus of all manner of genetic shenanigans by plant geneticists, has accumulated substantial change in genetically determined characteristics of gluten proteins. It is also potentially the source for many of the odd health phenomena experienced by consuming humans.
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT GLUTEN
Gluten isn’t the only potential villain lurking in wheat flour.
Beyond gluten, the other 20 per cent or so of nongluten proteins in wheat include albumins, prolamins and globulins, each of which can also vary from strain to strain. In total, there are more than a thousand other proteins that are meant to serve such functions as protecting the grain from pathogens, providing water resistance and providing reproductive functions. There are agglutinins, peroxidases, α-amylases, serpins and acyl CoA oxidases, not to mention five forms of glycerinaldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenases. I shouldn’t neglect to mention β-purothionin, puroindolines a and b, and starch synthases. Wheat ain’t just gluten, any more than Southern cooking is just grits.
As if this protein/enzyme smorgasbord weren’t enough, food manufacturers have also turned to fungal enzymes, such as cellulases, glucoamylases, xylanases and β-xylosidases, to enhance leavening and texture in wheat products. Many bakers also add soya flour to their dough to enhance mixing and whiteness, introducing yet another collection of proteins and enzymes.
In coeliac disease, the one conventionally accepted (though much underdiagnosed) example of wheat-related intestinal illness, gluten protein, specifically
