Free The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life by Joel Fuhrman Page B

as boiled wheat kernels, sprouted wheat, or wheat berries. Davis is not making it clear if wheat is the issue, or the way we process and manufacture flour.
    The claim that wheat is the villain is misleading because most of the data Davis presents to vilify wheat demonstrates that it’s actually white flour that’s the problem—not all wheat. For example, he presented data from the China-Cornell-Oxford Project to show a correlation between increasing consumption of wheat flour and modern disease, but he failed to mention that people in the study were eating products made from white flour, not whole grains.
    Contrary to Davis’s claims, wheat hasn’t morphed into a toxic monster food. It is simply too often overly processed and overly ground,which jacks up its glycemic levels. It then quickly empties out its calories into the body, spiking our insulin levels. Bagels, pancakes, muffins, bread, rolls, cake, pretzels, pizza, breakfast cereals, and pasta are all made from white flour, which is absorbed into the bloodstream as quickly as sugar. White flour and other processed grains promote diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Add these to all the soda, sweets, oils, cheeses, meats, and other processed junk food that Americans consume, and it’s no wonder our population is sick and overweight.
    However, Davis contends that even a little whole wheat product in the diet is too immune-system stimulating and can keep you from weight loss and optimal health. Is that the case? Is wheat more glycemic than all the other grains? Is even a moderate amount of real whole grain wheat really so bad for the majority of people who have no problem with gluten? That is clearly a fairy tale. As long as whole grains are in the same form, their glycemic effect is very similar. Davis implicates wheat as the villain because it contains more of the starch amylopectin A, which is more glycemic than amylopectin B and C. But the study he references for this data actually shows that all the other measured whole grains—oats, brown rice, and barley—share similar amounts of rapidly digestible amylopectin A.
    Davis also states that wheat is more glycemic than pure sugar. This is more nonsense. In fact, the glycemic load of sucrose (200 calories) is 37.2, while the glycemic load of whole wheat bread (200 calories, three slices) is 26.1. What’s more, whole wheat kernels, the preferred way to consume wheat, have a relatively low glycemic load of 13.5.
    Davis makes a number of other unsubstantiated claims to boost his contention that wheat is dangerous. While pointing out the very real health hazards of wheat to people with gluten intolerance and celiac disease, he fails to qualify his statement against the extremely low number of people in these two categories. The prevalence of wheat allergies in the United States, for instance, is found in only 0.4percent of the population, while celiac disease is found in less than 1 percent of the population. 22 Nonceliac gluten sensitivity doesn’t yet have a distinct definition, but the current estimate is 6 percent of Americans. 23 Without quantifying the number of people who have these difficulties, Davis ends up only inciting in the wider public an irrational and unsubstantiated fear of wheat. Certainly, people with celiac disease or gluten intolerance can experience severe health problems if they eat wheat, but that is ancillary to the core message of his book—mainly, that wheat makes us fat and is dangerous to our health, even though Davis doesn’t present the science to back up such claims.
    To make matters worse, he compounds his errors by advocating a diet of unlimited helpings of meat, oil, eggs, and fish, just as his partners in the Paleo and other high-animal-protein diets do. He even goes so far as to claim that animal products and saturated fat are only tangentially associated with heart disease, telling his readers that they can eat all the high-saturated-fat meats and cheeses they want as