Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (17 page)

THE HUMAN BODY
is a tightly controlled pH vessel. Veer up or down from the normal pH of 7.4 by just 0.5 and you’re … dead.

The acid-base status of the body is finely tuned and maintained more tightly than the Fed regulates the discount rate. Severe bacterial infections, for instance, can be deadly because the infection yields acid by-products that overwhelm the body’s capacity to neutralize the acid burden. Kidney disease likewise leads to health complications because of the kidney’s impaired ability to rid the body of acid by-products.

In daily life, the pH of the body is locked at 7.4, thanks to the elaborate control systems in place. By-products of metabolism, such as lactic acid, are acids. Acids drive pH down, triggering a panic mode response from the body to compensate. The body responds by drawing from any alkaline store available, from bicarbonate in the bloodstream to alkaline calcium salts such as calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate in bones. Because maintaining a normal pH is so crucial, the body will sacrifice bone health to keep
pH stable. In the great triage system that is your body, your bones will be turned into mush before pH is allowed to veer off course. When a happy net alkaline balance is struck, bones will be happy, joints will be happy.

While pH extremes in either direction are dangerous, the body is happier with a slight alkaline bias. This is subtle and not reflected in blood pH, but evident by such methods as measuring acid and alkaline products in the urine.

Acids that stress the body’s pH can also come through diet. There are obvious dietary sources of acid such as carbonated sodas that contain carbonic acid. Some sodas, such as Coca-Cola, also contain phosphoric acid. The extreme acid loads of carbonated sodas stretch your body’s acid-neutralizing capacity to its limits. The constant draw on calcium from bones, for instance, is associated with fivefold increased fractures in high school girls who consume the most carbonated colas.
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But certain foods can be not-so-obvious sources of acids in this tightly controlled pH environment. Regardless of source, the body must “buffer” the acid challenge. The composition of the diet can determine whether the net effect is an acid challenge or an alkaline challenge.

Proteins from animal products are meant to be the main acid-generating challenge in the human diet. Meats such as chicken, pork roast, and Arby’s roast beef sandwiches are therefore a major source of acid in the average American diet. Acids yielded by meats, such as uric acid and sulfuric acid (the same as in your car’s battery and acid rain), need to be buffered by the body. The fermented product of bovine mammary glands (cheese!) is another highly acidic group of foods, particularly reduced-fat, high-protein cheeses. Any food derived from animal sources, in short, generates an acid challenge, whether fresh, fermented, rare, well done, with or without special sauce.
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However, animal products may not be as harmful to pH balance as it first appears. Recent research suggests that protein-rich meats have other effects that partially negate the acid load. Animal protein
exerts a bone-strengthening effect through stimulation of the hormone insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), which triggers bone growth and mineralization. (“Insulin-like” refers to its similarity in structure to insulin, not similarity in effect.) The net effect of proteins from animal sources, despite their acid-generating properties, is that of increasing bone health. Children, adolescents, and the elderly, for instance, who increase protein intake from meat show increased bone calcium content and improved measures of bone strength.
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Vegetables and fruits, on the other hand, are the dominant alkaline foods in the diet. Virtually everything in your produce department will drive pH toward the alkaline direction. From kale to kohlrabi, generous consumption of vegetables and fruits serve to neutralize the acidic burden from animal products.

Hunter-gatherer diets of meats, vegetables, and fruits, along with relatively neutral nuts and roots, yield a net alkaline effect.
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Of course, the struggle for the hunter-gatherer wasn’t pH regulation, but dodging the arrows of an invading conqueror or the ravages of gangrene. So perhaps acid-base regulation did not play a major role in the health and longevity of primitive people who rarely survived beyond their thirty-fifth birthday. Nonetheless, the nutritional habits of our ancestors set the biochemical stage for modern human adaptation to diet.

Around 10,000 years ago, the formerly alkaline human diet pH balance shifted to the acid side with the introduction of grains, especially the most domina nt of grains, wheat. The modern human diet of plentiful “healthy whole grains” but lacking in vegetables and fruit is highly acid-charged, inducing a condition called acidosis. Over years, acidosis takes its toll on your bones.

Like the Federal Reserve, bones from skull to coccyx serve as a repository, not of money but of calcium salts. Calcium, identical
to that in rocks and mollusk shells, keeps bones rigid and strong. Calcium salts in bone are in dynamic balance with blood and tissues and provide a ready source of alkalinizing material to counter an acid challenge. But, like money, the supply is not infinite.

While we spend our first eighteen or so years growing and building bone, we spend the rest of our lives tearing it back down, a process regulated by body pH. The chronic mild metabolic acidosis engendered by our diet worsens as we age, starting in our teens and continuing through the eighth decade.
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The acidic pH pulls calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate from bone to maintain the body pH of 7.4. The acidic environment also stimulates bone-resorbing cells within bones, known as osteoclasts, to work harder and faster to dissolve bone tissue to release the precious calcium.

The problem comes when you habitually ingest acids in the diet, then draw on calcium stores over and over and over again to neutralize these acids. Though bones have a lot of stored calcium, the supply is not inexhaustible. Bones will eventually become demineralized—i.e., depleted of calcium. That’s when osteopenia (mild demineralization) and osteoporosis (severe demineraliza-tion), frailty, and fractures develop.
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(Frailty and osteoporosis usually go hand in hand, since bone density and muscle mass parallel each other.) Incidentally, taking calcium supplements is no more effective at reversing bone loss than randomly tossing some bags of cement and bricks into your backyard is at building a new patio.

An excessively acidified diet will eventually show itself as bone fractures. An impressive analysis of the worldwide incidence of hip fracture demonstrated a striking relationship: The higher the ratio of protein intake from vegetables to the protein intake from animal products, the fewer hip fractures occur.
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The magnitude of difference was substantial: While a vegetable-to-animal-protein intake ratio of 1:1 or less was associated with as many as 200 hip fractures per 100,000 population, a vegetable-to-animal-protein intake ratio of between 2:1 and 5:1 was associated with less than 10 hip fractures per 100,000 population—a reduction of more
than 95 percent. (At the highest intakes of vegetable protein, the incidence of hip fracture practically
vanished)

The fractures that result from osteoporosis are not just tumbling down the stairs kinds of fractures. They can also be vertebral fractures from a simple sneeze, a hip fracture from misjudging the sidewalk curb, a forearm fracture from pushing a rolling pin.

Modern eating patterns therefore create a chronic acidosis that in turn leads us to osteoporosis, bone fragility, and fractures. At age fifty, 53.2 percent of women can expect to experience a fracture in their future, as can 20.7 percent of men.
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Contrast this with a fifty-year-old woman’s risk for breast cancer of 10 percent and risk for endometrial cancer of 2.6 percent.
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Until recently, osteoporosis was thought to be largely a condition peculiar to postmenopausal females who have lost the bonepreserving effects of estrogen. It is now understood that the decline in bone density begins
years
before menopause. In the 9,400-participant Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study, females began to show declining bone density in the hip, vertebra, and femur at age twenty-five, with a precipitous decline resulting in accelerated loss at age forty; men show a less marked decline starting at age forty.
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Both men and women showed another phase of accelerated bone loss at age seventy and onward. By age eighty, 97 percent of females have osteoporosis.
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So even youth does not ensure protection from bone loss. In fact, loss of bone strength is the rule over time, largely due to the chronic low-grade acidosis we create with diet.

Unlike all other foods derived from plants, grains generate acidic by-products, the only plant products to do so. Because wheat is, by
a long stretch, the foremost grain in most Americans’ diet, it contributes substantially to the acid burden of a meat-containing diet.

Wheat is among the most potent sources of sulfuric acid, yielding more sulfuric acid per gram than any meat.
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(Wheat is surpassed only by oats in quantity of sulfuric acid produced.) Sulfuric acid is dangerous stuff. Put it on your hand and it will cause a severe burn. Get it in your eyes and you can go blind. (Go take a look at the warnings prominently displayed on your car battery.) The sulfuric acid in acid rain erodes stone monuments, kills trees and plants, and disrupts the reproductive behavior of aquatic animals. The sulfuric acid produced by wheat consumption is undoubtedly dilute. But even in teensy-weensy quantities in dilute form, it is an overwhelmingly potent acid that rapidly overcomes the neutralizing effects of alkaline bases.

Grains such as wheat account for 38 percent of the average American’s acid load, more than enough to tip the balance into the acid range. Even in a diet limited to 35 percent of calories from animal products, adding wheat shifts the diet from net alkaline to strongly net acid.
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One way to gauge acid-induced extraction of calcium from bone is to measure urinary calcium loss. A University of Toronto study examined the effect of increasing gluten consumption from bread on the level of calcium lost in the urine. Increased gluten intake increased urinary calcium loss by an incredible 63 percent, along with increased markers of bone resorption—i.e., blood markers for bone weakening that lead to bone diseases such as osteoporosis.
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So what happens when you consume a substantial quantity of meat products but fail to counterbalance the acid load with plentiful alkaline plant products such as spinach, cabbage, and green peppers? An acid-heavy situation results. What happens if acids from meat consumption are not counterbalanced by alkaline plants and the pH scales are tipped even more to the acidic side by grain
products such as wheat? That’s when it gets ugly. Diet is then shifted sharply to that of an acid-rich situation.

The result: a chronic acid burden that eats away at bone health.

Remember Ötzi? He was the Tyrolean Iceman found buried and mummified in the glaciers of the Italian Alps, preserved since his death more than 5,000 years ago, circa 3300
BC
While the remains of unleavened einkorn bread were discovered in Ötzi’s gastrointestinal tract, most of the digestive contents were meats and plants. Ötzi lived and died 4,700 years after humans began incorporating grains such as cold-tolerant einkorn into their diet, but wheat remained a relatively minor portion of the diet in his mountain-dwelling culture. Ötzi was primarily a hunter-gatherer most of the year. In fact, he was likely hunting with his bow and arrow when he met his violent end at the hand of another hunter-gatherer.

The meat-rich diet of hunter-gatherer humans such as Ötzi provided a substantial acid load. Ötzi’s greater consumption of meat than most modern humans (35 to 55 percent of calories from animal products) therefore yielded more sulfuric and other organic acids.

Despite the relatively high consumption of animal products, the abundant nongrain plants in the diets of hunter-gatherers yielded generous amounts of alkalinizing potassium salts, such as potassium citrate and potassium acetate, that counterbalanced the acidic load. The alkalinity of primitive diets has been estimated to be six- to ninefold greater than that of modern diets due to the high plant content.
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This resulted in alkaline urine pH as high as 7.5 to 9.0, compared to the typical modern acidic range of 4.4 to 7.0.
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Wheat and other grains enter the picture, however, and shift the balance back to acid, accompanied by calcium loss from bone.
Ötzi’s relatively modest consumption of einkorn wheat likely meant that his diet remained net alkaline most of the year. In contrast, in our modern world of plenty, with unlimited supplies of cheap wheat-containing foods on every corner and table, the acidic load tips the scales heavily toward net acid.

If wheat and other grains are responsible for tipping the pH balance toward acid, what happens if you do nothing more than remove wheat from the modern diet and replace the lost calories with other plant foods such as vegetables, fruits, beans, and nuts? The balance shifts back into the alkaline range, mimicking the hunter-gatherer pH experience.
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Wheat is therefore the great disrupter. It’s the floozy girlfriend of the midlife crisis male, busting apart the entire happy family. Wheat shifts a diet that had hopes of being net alkaline to net acid, causing a constant draw of calcium out of bone.

The conventional solution to the “healthy whole grain” acid diet and its osteoporosis-promoting effects are prescription drugs such as Fosamax and Boniva, agents that claim to reduce the risk for osteoporotic fractures, especially of the hip. The market for osteoporosis drugs has already topped $10 billion a year, serious money even by the jaded standards of the pharmaceutical industry.