Tag Archives: brain

Wheat: The New Strychnine?

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Everyone seems to be giving up gluten these days (and bragging about it). But we’ve been eating it for thousands of years, right? Good, whole-grain wheat is supposed to be healthy, and the government wants us to eat more of it.

Wheat sensitivities run the gamut from low-level inflammation that we don’t even notice to celiac disease, which is fatal if the sufferer does not give up eating gluten. I have friends and acquaintances who have given up wheat and lost weight effortlessly without changing anything else they are doing. They also report the disappearance of joint pain, skin rashes, muscular pain, diarrhea, and more.

Dr. William Davis, MD, author of “Wheat Belly,” makes the case that the wheat we eat today bears little resemblance to the wheat our ancestors consumed. He says that modern wheat contains the complete genomes of three different but related plants, and contains complex proteins (gluten is a protein) that ancestral varieties did not. Our gut has not evolved as quickly as wheat has due to modern genetic engineering. Also, modern wheat—uniquely among foods—has the ability to pass the blood-brain barrier, and thus can tinker with bodily mechanism and brain function in a way no other food can.

Dr. Davis cites many different studies to provide evidence that his assertions are valid. He also notes that the rise of obesity in America tracks precisely the advent of genetic modification of the wheat genome. (He doesn’t mention this, but it also precisely tracks the widespread introduction of high-fructose corn syrup that has become so ubiquitous in processed food since the 1970s.) Modern wheat, developed by Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace prize for his work on wheat, was crafted with the best of intentions in mind: alleviation of world hunger. It is a high-yield, short-growing-season dwarf wheat, and it has in fact done much toward alleviating world hunger. Apparently, it’s also making us sick.

The good doctor performed an experiment on himself to test his assertion about the pernicious effect of modern wheat versus ancestral wheat. He is highly wheat-sensitive himself. Somewhere, he managed to obtain two pounds of einkorn, probably the first form of cultivated wheat. He also obtained two pounds of modern wheat. He ground these two grains himself and made bread, using only flour, water, salt and yeast. He tried the einkorn bread. It was denser than modern bread, and had a rich, nutty flavor. He had no reaction at all. He tried the modern wheat bread—and was ill for 36 hours, nauseated and unable to focus.

Being a scientist, he also did blood tests before and after eating the breads. His blood sugar before eating either bread was 84 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl). After eating the einkorn bread, his blood sugar was 110 mg/dl. After eating the modern wheat bread, it was 167 mg/dl. He points out that one slice of whole wheat bread will raise blood sugar significantly higher than a Snickers bar.

High blood sugar, as we all know, leads to insulin resistance, which leads to gaining weight and may eventually cause diabetes. According to Dr. Davis, we’ve been virtuously munching away on something that is making us very ill.

“Wheat Belly” is an interesting book, well written, credible, and even entertaining. It is probably an exaggeration to claim that wheat is solely responsible for everything from joint pain to schizophrenia, however. There are certainly other trends in modern life (can we blame computers?) that contribute to the surge in obesity. But if even part of what Dr. Davis claims is true (and he does have the facts and figures), giving up wheat may be part of a sensible weight-loss and weight-loss-maintenance plan—along with exercise, portion control and common sense. There are other grains that don’t present the same problems, including quinoa, sorghum, buckwheat, millet, and oats (especially oats harvested in the British Isles, where it is less likely to be contaminated by coming into contact with machinery that is also used to process wheat).

Don’t forget that other food sensitivities can play a role in weight by causing low-level inflammation that spurs fat storage and the growth of fat cells. Stress can have the same effect, so stress management is another critical aspect of successful weight loss.

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Download SweetBeat™, the iPhone stress management app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sweetbeat/id492588712?mt=8

 

 

Maybe, Baby, It’s Those Baby Steps That Work!

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Some of us at SweetWater Health recently attended the 2012 Mobile Health Conference on the Stanford University campus. The theme was “Baby Steps.” The conference was oriented to mHealth entrepreneurs, but what the speakers had to say about baby steps really applies to any human being seeking to make changes in his or her life—especially those really difficult changes, like trying to lose weight or live a healthier lifestyle.

Part of the message was that behaviors are hard to change. They’re even harder when we take on a whole raft of changes at once, which is what we usually do when we’re trying to lose weight. Here’s a sample of what many of us try to do all at once:

  • Give up anything with sugar in it
  • Reduce fat in our diet
  • Eat more fruits and vegetables
  • Cut down on or give up red meat
  • Give up or cut down on bread, cereals, rice, pasta, etc.
  • Eat smaller portions
  • Exercise for an hour a day
  • Always take the stairs instead of the elevator
  • Attend some sort of weight-loss meeting every week
  • Journal what we eat/count points/count calories or carbs every day
  • Walk at least 10,000 steps a day (in addition to exercising)
  • Some diets demand things like eating only cabbage soup, drinking a supplement twice a day instead of eating, eating only prepackaged meals, or following a complicated diet regimen based on blood type—an endless array of exotic and difficult behavior changes.

That’s a HUGE number of changes for most people! Somehow, we think we can squeeze all this in to our routine day, which includes taking care of our families, working, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Talk about feeling stressed. And the results are predictable; we blow another weight-loss effort and feel guilty. (More stress. And if you’ve been following this blog, you know stress can make you gain and retain weight.)

The underlying message was that it’s easier to change behaviors if you just take baby steps, and when something doesn’t work, don’t keep trying to make it work; try a different baby step instead.

Not everyone can walk every day, for instance. So walk when you can, and on the days when you can’t, just try to get in 10,000 steps. If you always forget your pedometer, go up and down the stairs a few times; tomorrow, as Scarlett O’Hara famously remarked, is another day.

Another thing we tend to do is beat ourselves up if we eat something not on the “approved” list. Because we’re feeling bad anyway, we figure what the heck, in for a dime in, for a dollar, and throw the rest of the Oreos down the hatch after the first guilty cookie. Although the experts tell us truthfully that it’s better not to have temptations around the house in the first place, circumstances aren’t always ideal, and some of us have spouses and children who don’t share our issues. Look, it was just a cookie, it’s not like you stole a car. Enjoy that one cookie to the absolute maximum, and go do something else—like take a walk.

You wouldn’t begin training for a marathon by running 26 miles and 385 yards the first day. Add a step, do something else if it doesn’t work, and cut yourself some slack if you slip up. Eventually, all those baby steps add up to real progress in behavioral change.

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 As we’ve mentioned before, stress is a major cause of illness—responsible for up to 90% of preventable disease, according to medical institutions like Stanford University Medical Center and Mayo Clinic. And as mentioned previously, stress can actually cause weight gain and retention, even when eating habits don’t change. One baby step you can take to reduce stress is SweetBeat™, the stress management iPhone app from SweetWater Health. Learn more about SweetBeat on our website, http://www.beathealthy.com. You can read the app description and download SweetBeat here.

Change Your Brain, Change Yourself

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Sometimes we hear people say, “That’s just the way I am,” as though they had been fated to be a certain way, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Nothing could be further from the truth!

“Neuroplasticity” is a term that describes the brain’s ability to change structurally and functionally in response to the environment. Once scientists thought that after a critical growth period in youth, the brain became static. We now know that the brain is capable of change throughout life. We can change in response to injury, when the brain reroutes functions to work around physical damage. And we can deliberately create change, as happens when we learn a new language or how to play the guitar.

This means that for all of us, the ability to change what we know, how we feel, and what we do IS “just the way we are”!