Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (18 page)
Read Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health Online
Authors: William Davis
Once again wheat enters the picture, adding its peculiar health-disrupting effects, embraced by the USDA and providing new and bountiful revenue opportunities for Big Pharma.
Ever notice how people with a wheat belly almost invariably also have arthritis of one or more joints? If you haven’t, take notice of how many times someone who carts around the characteristic front loader also limps or winces with hip, knee, or back pain.
Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis in the world, more common than rheumatoid arthritis, gout, or any other variety. Painful “bone-on-bone” loss of cartilage resulted in knee and hip replacements in 773,000 Americans in 2010 alone.
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This is no small problem. More than forty-six million people, or one in seven Americans, have been diagnosed with osteoarthri-tis by their physicians.
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Many more hobble around without formal diagnosis.
Conventional thought for years was that common arthritis of the hips and knees was the simple result of excessive wear and tear, like too many miles on your tires. A 110-pound woman: knees and hips likely to last a lifetime. A 220-pound woman: knees and hips take a beating and wear out. Excess weight in any part of the body—bottom, belly, chest, legs, arms—provides a mechanical stress to joints.
It has proven to be more complicated than that. The same inflammation that issues from the visceral fat of the wheat belly and results in diabetes, heart disease, and cancer also yields inflammation of joints. Inflammation-mediating hormones, such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interleukins, and leptin, have been shown to inflame and erode joint tissue.
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Leptin, in particular, has demonstrated direct joint destructive effects: The greater the degree of overweight (i.e., higher BMI), the higher the quantity of leptin within joint fluid, and the greater the severity of cartilage and joint damage.
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The level of leptin in joints precisely mirrors the level in blood.
The risk of arthritis is therefore even greater for someone with visceral fat of the wheat belly variety, as evidenced by the threefold greater likelihood of knee and hip replacements in people with larger waist circumferences.
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It also explains why joints that
don’t
bear the added weight of obesity, such as those in the hands and fingers, also develop arthritis.
Losing weight, and thereby visceral fat, improves arthritis more than can be expected from just the decreased weight load.
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In one study of obese participants with osteoarthritis, there was
10 percent improvement in symptoms and joint function with each 1 percent reduction in body fat.
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The prevalence of arthritis, the common images of people rubbing their painful hands and knees, leads you to believe that arthritis is an unavoidable accompaniment of aging, as inevitable as death, taxes, and hemorrhoids. Not true. Joints do indeed have the potential to serve us for the eight or so decades of our life … until we ruin them with repeated insults, such as excessive acidity and inflammatory molecules such as leptin originating from visceral fat cells.
Another phenomenon that adds to the wheat-induced pounding that joints sustain over the years: glycation. You’ll recall that, more than nearly all other foods, wheat products increase blood sugar, i.e., blood glucose. The more wheat products you consume, the higher and more frequently blood glucose increases, the more glycation occurs. Glycation represents an irreversible modification of proteins in the bloodstream and in body tissues, including joints such as the knees, hips, and hands.
The cartilage in joints is uniquely susceptible to glycation, since cartilage cells are extremely long-lived and are incapable of reproducing. Once damaged, they do not recover. The very same cartilage cells residing in your knee at age twenty-five will (we hope) be there when you are eighty; therefore, these cells are susceptible to all the biochemical ups and downs of your life, including your blood sugar adventures. If cartilage proteins, such as collagen and aggrecan, become glycated, they become abnormally stiff. The damage of glycation is cumulative, making cartilage brittle and unyielding, eventually crumbling.
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Joint inflammation, pain, and destruction results, the hallmarks of arthritis.
So high blood sugars that encourage growth of a wheat belly, coupled with inflammatory activity in visceral fat cells and glyca-tion of cartilage, lead to destruction of bone and cartilage tissue in joints. Over years, it results in the familiar pain and swelling of the hips, knees, and hands.
Jason is a twenty-six-year-old software programmer: smart, lightning-quick to catch onto an idea. He came to my office with his young wife because he wanted help just to get “healthy.”
When he told me that he had undergone repair of a complex congenital heart defect as an infant, I promptly interrupted him. “Whoa, Jason. I think you may have the wrong guy. That’s not my area of expertise.”
“Yes, I know. I just need your help to get healthier. They tell me I might need a heart transplant. I’m always breathless and I’ve had to be admitted to the hospital to treat heart failure. I’d like to see if there’s anything you can do to either avoid having a heart transplant or, if I have to have it, help me be healthier afterwards.”
I thought that was reasonable and gestured for Jason to get on the exam table. “Okay. I get it. Let me take a listen.”
Jason got up from the chair slowly, visibly wincing, and inched his way onto the table, clearly in pain.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Jason took his seat on the exam table and sighed. “Everything hurts. All my joints hurt. I can barely walk. At times, I can barely get out of bed.”
“Have you been seen by any rheumatologists?” I asked.
“Yes. Three. None of them could figure out what was wrong, so they just prescribed anti-inflammatories and pain medicines.”
“Have you considered dietary modification?” I asked him. “I’ve seen a lot of people get relief by eliminating all wheat from their diet.”
“Wheat? You mean like bread and pasta?” Jason asked, confused.
”Yes, wheat: white bread, whole wheat bread, multigrain bread, bagels, muffins, pretzels, crackers, breakfast cereals, pasta, noodles, pancakes, and waffles. Even though it sounds like that’s a lot of what you eat, trust me, there’s plenty of things left to eat.” I gave him a handout detailing how to navigate the wheat-free diet.
“Give it a try: Eliminate all wheat for just four weeks. If you feel better, you’ll have your answer. If you feel nothing, then perhaps this is not the answer for you.”
Jason returned to my office three months later. What struck me was that he sauntered easily into the room without a hint of joint pain.
The improvements he’d experienced had been profound and nearly immediate. “After five days, I couldn’t believe it: I had no pain whatsoever. I didn’t believe it could be true—it had to be a coincidence. So I had a sandwich. Within five minutes, about eighty percent of the pain came back. Now I’ve learned my lesson.”
What impressed me further was that, when I first examined him, Jason had indeed been in mild heart failure. On this visit, he no longer showed any evidence of heart failure. Along with relief from the joint pain, he also told me that his breathing had improved to the point where he could jog short distances and even play a low-key game of basketball, things he had not done in years. We’ve now begun to back down on the medications he was taking for heart failure.
Obviously, I am a big believer in a wheat-free life. But when you witness life-changing experiences such as Jason’s, it still gives me goose bumps to know that such a simple solution existed for health problems that had essentially crippled a young man.
That baguette may look innocent, but it’s a lot harder on the joints than you think.
As with weight loss and the brain, people with celiac disease can teach us some lessons about wheat’s effects on bones and joints.
Osteopenia and osteoporosis are common in people with celiac disease and can be present whether or not there are intestinal symptoms, affecting up to 70 percent of people with celiac antibodies.
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Because osteoporosis is so common among celiac sufferers, some investigators have argued that anyone with osteoporosis should be screened for celiac disease. A Washington University Bone Clinic study found undiagnosed celiac disease in 3.4 percent of participants with osteoporosis, compared to 0.2 percent without osteoporosis.
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Elimination of gluten from osteoporotic
celiac participants promptly improved measures of bone density—without use of osteoporosis drugs.
The reasons for the low bone density include impaired absorption of nutrients, especially vitamin D and calcium, and increased inflammation that triggers release of bone-demineralizing cytokines, such as interleukins.
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So eliminating wheat from the diet both reduced the inflammation and allowed for better absorption of nutrients.
The severity of bone weakening effects are highlighted by horror stories such as the woman who suffered ten fractures of the spine and extremities over twenty-one years starting at age fifty-seven, all occurring spontaneously. Eventually crippled, she was finally diagnosed with celiac disease.
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Compared to people without celiac disease, celiac sufferers have a threefold increased risk for fractures.
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The thorny issue of gliadin antibody-positive indivduals without intestinal symptoms applies to osteoporosis as well. In one study, 12 percent of people with osteoporosis tested positive for the gliadin antibody but didn’t show any symptoms or signs of celiac, i.e., wheat intolerance or “silent” celiac disease.
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Wheat can show itself through inflammatory bone conditions outside of osteoporosis and fractures. People with rheumatoid arthritis, a disabling and painful arthritis that can leave the sufferer with disfigured hand joints, knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders, can blend with wheat sensitivity. A study of participants with rheumatoid arthritis, none of whom had celiac disease, placed on a vegetarian, gluten-free diet demonstrated improved signs of arthritis in 40 percent of participants, as well as reduced gliadin antibody levels.
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Perhaps it’s a stretch to suggest that wheat gluten was the initial inciting cause of the arthritis, but it may exert inflammatory effects in an exaggerated way in joints made susceptible by other diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
In my experience, arthritis unaccompanied by celiac antibodies often responds to wheat elimination. Some of the most dramatic
health turnarounds I’ve ever witnessed have been in obtaining relief from incapacitating joint pains. Because conventional celiac antibodies fail to identify most of these people, this has been difficult to quantify and verify, beyond the subjective improvement people experience. But this may hint at phenomena that hold the greatest promise in arthritis relief of all.
Does the outsize risk for osteoporosis and inflammatory joint disease in people with celiac represent an
exaggeration
of the situation in wheat-consuming people without celiac disease or antibodies to gluten? My suspicion is that yes, wheat exerts direct and indirect bone- and joint-destructive effects in any wheat-consuming human, just expressed more vigorously in celiac- or gluten antibody-positive people.
What if, rather than a total hip or knee replacement at age sixty-two, you opted for total wheat replacement instead?
The broader health effects of disrupted acid-base balance are only starting to be appreciated. Anyone who has taken a basic chemistry class understands that pH is a powerful factor in determining how chemical reactions proceed. A small shift in pH can have profound influence on the balance of a reaction. The same holds true in the human body.
“Healthy whole grains” such as wheat are the cause for much of the acid-heavy nature of the modern diet. Beyond bone health, emerging experiences suggest that crafting a diet that favors alkaline foods has the potential to reduce age-related muscle wasting, kidney stones, salt-sensitive hypertension, infertility, and kidney disease.
Remove wheat and experience reduced joint inflammation and fewer blood sugar “highs” that glycate cartilage, and shift the pH balance to alkaline. It sure beats taking Vioxx.
CATARACTS, WRINKLES, AND DOWAGER’S HUMPS: WHEAT AND THE AGING PROCESS
The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
Lucille Ball
WINE AND CHEESE MAY BENEFIT
from aging. But for humans, aging can lead to everything from white lies to a desire for radical plastic surgery.
What does it mean to get old?
Though many people struggle to describe the specific features of aging, we would likely all agree that, like pornography, we know it when we see it.