Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (7 page)

Beyond celiac disease, though, there are allergic or anaphylactic (a severe reaction resulting in shock) reactions to nongluten proteins, including α-amylases, thioredoxin, and glycerinaldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, along with about a dozen others.
¹⁸
Exposure in susceptible individuals triggers asthma, rashes (atopic dermatitis and urticaria), and a curious and dangerous condition called wheat-dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis (WDEIA), in which rash, asthma, or anaphylaxis are provoked during exercise. WDEIA is most commonly associated with wheat (it can also occur with shellfish) and has been attributed to various ω-gliadins and glutenins.

In short, wheat is not just a complex carbohydrate with gluten and bran. Wheat is a complex collection of biochemically unique compounds that vary widely according to genetic code. Just by looking at a poppy seed muffin, for instance, you would be unable to discern the incredible variety of gliadins, other gluten proteins, and nongluten proteins contained within it, many of them unique to the modern dwarf wheat that was your muffin’s source. On taking your first bite, you would enjoy the immediate sweetness of the muffin’s amylopectin A as it sends your blood sugar skyward.

Let’s next explore the incredible wide-ranging health effects of your muffin and other wheat-containing foods.

ADDICTION. WITHDRAWAL.
Delusions. Hallucinations. I’m not describing mental illness or a scene from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I’m talking about this food you invite into your kitchen, share with friends, and dunk in your coffee.

I will discuss why wheat is unique among foods for its curious effects on the brain, effects shared with opiate drugs. It explains why some people experience incredible difficulty removing wheat from their diet. It’s not just a matter of inadequate resolve, inconvenience, or breaking well-worn habits; it’s about severing a relationship with something that gains hold of your psyche and emotions, not unlike the hold heroin has over the desperate addict.

While you knowingly consume coffee and alcohol to obtain specific mind effects, wheat is something you consume for “nutrition,”
not for a “fix.” Like drinking the Kool-Aid at the Jim Jones revival meeting, you may not even be aware that this thing, endorsed by all “official” agencies, is fiddling with your mind.

People who eliminate wheat from their diet typically report improved mood, fewer mood swings, improved ability to concentrate, and deeper sleep within just days to weeks of their last bite of bagel or baked lasagna. These sorts of “soft” subjective experiences on our brains, however, are tough to quantify. They are also subject to the placebo effect—i.e., people just
think
they’re feeling better. I am, however, impressed with how consistent these observations are, experienced by the majority of people once the initial withdrawal effects of mental fog and fatigue subside. I’ve personally experienced these effects and also witnessed them in thousands of people.

It is easy to underestimate the psychological pull of wheat. Just how dangerous can an innocent bran muffin be, after all?

Wheat is the Haight-Ashbury of foods, unparalleled for its potential to generate entirely unique effects on the brain and nervous system. There is no doubt: For some people, wheat is addictive. And, in some people, it is addictive to the point of obsession.

Some people with wheat addiction just
know
they have a wheat addiction. Or perhaps they identify it as an addiction to some wheat-containing food, such as pasta or pizza. They already understand, even before I tell them, that their wheat-food-addiction-of-choice provides a little “high.” I still get shivers when a well-dressed, suburban soccer mom desperately confesses to me, “Bread is my crack. I just can’t give it up!”

Wheat can dictate food choice, calorie consumption, timing of meals and snacks. It can influence behavior and mood. It can even come to dominate thoughts. A number of my patients, when presented with the suggestion of removing it from their diets, report
obsessing over wheat products to the point of thinking about them, talking about them, salivating over them constantly for weeks. “I can’t stop thinking about bread. I
dream
about bread!” they tell me, leading some to succumb to a wheat-consuming frenzy and give up within days after starting.

There is, of course, a flip side to addiction. When people divorce themselves from wheat-containing products, 30 percent experience something that can only be called withdrawal.

I’ve personally witnessed hundreds of people report extreme fatigue, mental fog, irritability, inability to function at work or school, even depression in the first several days to weeks after eliminating wheat. Complete relief is achieved by a bagel or cupcake (or, sadly, more like four bagels, two cupcakes, a bag of pretzels, two muffins, and a handful of brownies, followed the next morning by a nasty case of wheat remorse). It’s a vicious circle: Abstain from a substance and a distinctly unpleasant experience ensues; resume it, the unpleasant experience ceases—that sounds a lot like addiction and withdrawal to me.

People who haven’t experienced these effects pooh-pooh it all, thinking it strains credibility to believe that something as pedestrian as wheat can affect the central nervous system much as nicotine or crack cocaine do.

There is a scientifically plausible reason for both the addiction and withdrawal effects. Not only does wheat exert effects on the normal brain, but also on the vulnerable abnormal brain, with results beyond simple addiction and withdrawal. Studying the effects of wheat on the abnormal brain can teach us some lessons on why and how wheat can be associated with such phenomena.

The first important lessons on the effects wheat has on the brain came through studying its effects on people with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenics lead a difficult life. They struggle to differentiate reality from internal fantasy, often entertaining delusions of persecution, even believing their minds and actions are controlled by external forces. (Remember “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer who stalked his victims on instructions received from his dog? Thankfully, violent behavior is unusual in schizophrenics, but it illustrates the depth of pathology possible.) Once schizophrenia is diagnosed, there is little hope of leading a normal life of work, family, and children. A life of institutionalization, medications with awful side effects, and a constant struggle with dark internal demons lies ahead.

So what are the effects of wheat on the vulnerable schizophrenic mind?

The earliest formal connection of the effects of wheat on the schizophrenic brain began with the work of psychiatrist F. Curtis Dohan. whose observations ranged as far as Europe and New Guinea. Dr. Dohan journeyed down this line of investigation because he observed that, during World War II, the men and women of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada, and the United States required fewer hospitalizations for schizophrenia when food shortages made bread unavailable, only to require an increased number of hospitalizations when wheat consumption resumed after the war was over.
¹

Dr. Dohan observed a similar pattern in the hunter-gatherer Stone Age culture of New Guinea. Prior to the introduction of Western influence, schizophrenia was virtually unknown, diagnosed in only 2 of 65,000 inhabitants. As Western eating habits infiltrated the New Guinean population and cultivated wheat products, beer made from barley, and corn were introduced, Dr. Dohan watched the incidence of schizophrenia skyrocket
sixty-five-fold.
²
On this background, he set out to develop the observations that established whether or not there was a cause-and-effect relationship between wheat consumption and schizophrenia.

In the mid-sixties, while working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Dohan and his colleagues
decided to remove all wheat products from meals provided to schizophrenic patients without their knowledge or permission. (This was in the era before informed consent of participants was required, and before the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment became publicized, which triggered public outrage and led to legislation requiring fully informed participant consent.) Lo and behold, four weeks sans wheat and there were distinct and measurable improvements in the hallmarks of the disease: a reduced number of auditory hallucinations, fewer delusions, less detachment from reality. Psychiatrists then added the wheat products back into their patients’ diets and the hallucinations, delusions, and social detachment rushed right back. Remove wheat again, patients and symptoms got better; add it back, they got worse.
³

The Philadelphia observations in schizophrenics were corroborated by psychiatrists at the University of Sheffield in England, with similar conclusions.
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There have since even been reports of complete remission of the disease, such as the seventy-year-old schizophrenic woman described by Duke University doctors, suffering with delusions, hallucinations, and suicide attempts with sharp objects and cleaning solutions over a period of fifty-three years, who experienced complete relief from psychosis and suicidal desires within eight days of stopping wheat.
⁵

While it seems unlikely that wheat exposure
caused
schizophrenia in the first place, the observations of Dr. Dohan and others suggest that wheat is associated with measurable worsening of symptoms.

Another condition in which wheat may exert effects on a vulnerable mind is autism. Autistic children suffer from impaired ability to interact socially and communicate. The condition has increased in frequency over the past forty years, from rare in the mid-twentieth century to 1 in 150 children in the twenty-first.
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Initial small samples have demonstrated improvement in autistic behaviors with wheat gluten removal.
^7,
8
The most comprehensive clinical trial to date involved fifty-five autistic Danish children, with formal measures of autistic behavior showing improvement with gluten elimination (along with elimination of casein from dairy).
⁹

While it remains a topic of debate, a substantial proportion of children and adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may also respond to elimination of wheat. However, responses are often muddied due to sensitivities to other components of diet, such as sugars, artificial sweeteners, additives, and dairy.
¹⁰

It is unlikely that wheat exposure was the initial
cause
of autism or ADHD but, as with schizophrenia, wheat appears to be associated with worsening of the symptoms characteristic of the conditions.

Though the laboratory rat treatment of the unsuspecting schizophrenic patients in the Philadelphia VA Hospital may send chills down our spines from the comfort of our fully informed and consenting twenty-first century, it is nevertheless a graphic illustration of wheat’s effect on mental function. But why in the world are schizophrenia, autism, and ADHD exacerbated by wheat? What is in this grain that worsens psychosis and other abnormal behaviors?

Investigators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to find some answers.

Dr. Christine Zioudrou and her colleagues at the NIH subjected gluten, the main protein of wheat, to a simulated digestive process to mimic what happens after we eat bread or other wheat-containing products.
¹¹
Exposed to pepsin (a stomach enzyme) and hydrochloric acid (stomach acid), gluten is degraded to a mix of polypeptides. The dominant polypeptides were then isolated and administered to laboratory rats. These polypeptides were discovered to have the peculiar ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain. This barrier is there for a reason: The brain is highly sensitive to the wide variety of substances that gain entry to the blood, some of which can provoke
undesirable effects should they cross into your amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex, or other brain structure. Once having gained entry into the brain, wheat polypeptides bind to the brain’s morphine receptor, the very same receptor to which opiate drugs bind.

Zioudrou and her colleagues dubbed these polypeptides “exorphins,” short for exogenous morphine-like compounds, distinguishing them from endorphins, the endogenous (internally sourced) morphine-like compounds that occur, for instance, during a “runner’s high.” They named the dominant polypeptide that crossed the blood-brain barrier “gluteomorphin,” or morphinelike compound from gluten (though the name sounds to me more like a morphine shot in the butt). The investigators speculated that exorphins might be the active factors derived from wheat that account for the deterioration of schizophrenic symptoms seen in the Philadelphia VA Hospital and elsewhere.