Free Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health by William Davis Page B

I meet plenty of people who tell me that they follow “official” nutritional guidelines seriously, avoid junk foods and fast foods, exercise an hour every day, all while continuing to gain and gain and gain. Many follow the guidelines set by the USDA food pyramid (six to eleven servings of grain per day, of which four or more should be whole grain), the American Heart Association, the American Dietetic Association, or the American Diabetes Association. The cornerstone of all these nutritional directives? “Eat more healthy whole grains.”
    Are these organizations in cahoots with the wheat farmers and seed and chemical companies? There’s more to it than that. “Eat more healthy whole grains” is really just the corollary of the “Cut the fat” movement embraced by the medical establishment in the sixties. Based on epidemiologic observations that suggested that higher dietary fat intakes are associated with higher cholesterol levels and risk for heart disease, Americans were advised to reduce total and saturated fat intake. Grain-based foods came to replace the calorie gap left by reduced fat consumption. The whole-grain-is-better-than-white argument further fueled the transition. The low-fat, more-grain message also proved enormously profitable for the processed food industry. It triggered an explosion of processed food products, most requiring just a few pennies worth of basic materials. Wheat flour, cornstarch, high-fructose cornsyrup, sucrose, and food coloring are now the main ingredients of products that fill the interior aisles of any modern supermarket. (Whole ingredients such as vegetables, meats, and dairy tend to be at the perimeter of these same stores.) Revenues for Big Food companies swelled. Kraft alone now generates $48.1
billion
in annual revenues, an 1,800 percent increase since the late eighties, a substantial portion of which comes from wheat- and corn-based snacks.
    Just as the tobacco industry created and sustained its market with the addictive property of cigarettes, so does wheat in the diet make for a helpless, hungry consumer. From the perspective of the seller of food products, wheat is a perfect processed food ingredient: The more you eat, the more you want. The situation for the food industry has been made even better by the glowing endorsements provided by the US government urging Americans to eat more “healthy whole grains.”
GRAB MY LOVE HANDLES: THE UNIQUE PROPERTIES OF VISCERAL FAT
    Wheat triggers a cycle of insulin-driven satiety and hunger, paralleled by the ups and downs of euphoria and withdrawal, distortions of neurological function, and addictive effects, all leading to fat deposition.
    The extremes of blood sugar and insulin are responsible for growth of fat specifically in the visceral organs. Experienced over and over again, visceral fat accumulates, creating a fat liver, two fat kidneys, a fat pancreas, fat large and small intestines, as well as its familiar surface manifestation, a wheat belly. (Even your heart gets fat, but you can’t see this through the semi-rigid ribs.)
    So the Michelin tire encircling your or your loved one’s waistline represents the surface manifestation of visceral fat contained within the abdomen and encasing abdominal organs, resulting from months to years of repeated cycles of high blood sugar andhigh blood insulin, followed by insulin-driven fat deposition. Not fat deposition in the arms, buttocks, or thighs, but the saggy ridge encircling the abdomen created by bulging fatty internal organs. (Exactly why disordered glucose-insulin metabolism preferentially causes visceral fat accumulation in the abdomen and not your left shoulder or the top of your head is a question that continues to stump medical science.)
    Buttock or thigh fat is precisely that: buttock or thigh fat—no more, no less. You sit on it, you squeeze it into your jeans, you lament the cellulite dimples it creates. It represents excess calories over caloric expenditure. While