here's a new study, for those of you who like studies.  The ending statements are pretty good:

"The reason I find this so fascinating is that it perfectly corresponds with the patterns in the Oxford-Cornell China Study, which showed that wheat was the single biggest contributor to BMI out of any diet variable. Calories didn’t matter. Fat didn’t matter. Weight followed the wheat."

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/12/15/new-china-study-links-wheat-with-weight-gai/

I realize I often write a lot when I participate in a thread, but I strive to separate fact from belief from fiction.

Gyrobob wrote on 04/19/12 at 06:37:14:


It is not a fanciful accusation, it is a testimony from the past, it is my culture.

Quote:


This claim describes your attitude perfectly  

It is just as frustrating to carry on a fair, rational discussion when the counterpart replies with the argumentatyions of a taliban...
...meaning of a person who's read ONE book and is now convinced anything which is against that book is the work of the devil!

 

May I humbly point out that hair loss may be triggered by two factors:
- stress in the family or in the workplace,
- endocrinal factors (hormones)

In hair loss ceases or hair may even regrow, if the cause for stress is removed and emotional health is recuperated;
OR
hair may regrow where there was a bald(ing) patch due to desease of the skin, an allergy (perhaps related to something which had nothing to do with wheat, but came with the wheat, such as chemicals in the plastic wrapper)
or physical damage which is healing.

I had a skin transplant due to cancer at the age of 26, they sliced a portion of skin from my thigh and transplanted it on my neck, under the left ear.
My beard grew there, the skin on my thigh was hairy, but once the transplant was successful and the skin took root on my neck, the hair never grew back.

Menopausal reversal ?   Has the lady told her family Doctor ? What were his comments ?  

As for all the "improved health" symptoms, may I simply observe:
- many improvements are not due to "not eating wheat" but to "not eating the dressings"; many sauces mimick the Italian recipe only by name, but have far more fats than expected, or some ingredients are completely different and allergies may unexpectedly result; cheaper to mass produce but definitely a long way from being "healthy".

- many improvements are not due to "not eating wheat" but to "eating less", simply because eliminating the slices of bread or the pasta will result in less volume fed to the stomach (i.e., 2 hot dogs without the bun will result in an overall small portion to be digested, as opposed to the spongy mass which bloats the stomach if you do have the bun)

- many improvements are not due to "not eating wheat" but to improving the overall quality of the food eaten; if I cannot have my "chicken pesto fettuccine" (culinary blasphemy, but I'll skip the details) I will add vegetables to the chicken simply to make up for the missing pasta... hety, I'm hungry and DEMAND food on my table!

- many improvements are not due to "not eating wheat" but to finding "old" or "traditional" alternatives; no more corn chips for my snack but a healthy apple... corn chips are garbage in the first place, any fried and salted carbohydrate is culinary garbage.

Overall, I read many tall tales in the WB FB page (what do you think, I have never accessed the blog? I even contributed to it) but much of the advice asked or the "testimonials" are either clue to nutritional ignorance of the blogger (such as "fat free oil"  ) or dismissible claims, or explainable as I have just above.

I am not slamming Dr.Davis, nor have I insulted you.
I still have to understand where Dr.Davis draws scientific evidence for his assumed discovery of the obnoxious "wheat brain fog", I am sure that any scientist at MIT in Boston would take offense.
I certainly have.
I am ready to bet one whole dollar that while in college and at School of Medicine Dr.Davis stuffed his face with french fries, hot dogs and hamburgers - i.e., carbohydrates as you find in the buns etc.
Yet he (assumedly) got through School of Medicine successfully, got his degree and became a cardiologist.
THEN, his mind fogged by wheat, he "saw the light" and went on his anti-wheat campaing.

Am I being sarcastic ? By the looks of it, yes.

I'd rather say the more I think about it and ask around, the stronger my skepticism becomes.

If Dr.Davis belonged to a culture or an ethnic group in whose diet wheat is altogether absent, and he went on this campaing, then I'd understand.
He's supporting his culture and looking for whatever scientific evidence is avaliable to support it.

I do exactly the same when I insist on the virtues of olive oil v.s generic vegetable oil.

But I don't go on a rampage telling people who fry their cod in lard they are [please insert polite insult here] and that if they switch to olive oil their life will improve and they will grow wings and fly to work every day.

I have read a lot on the so called "paleo diet" fad, which is just that, a fad.
To assume that the diet of Man in the Paleolithic was better quality than it is today means:
- we deny the improvements due to modernisation, from hygiene to cooking and refrigeration, to medicine,
- we deny the scientific evidence that Paleo Man was generally malnourished, fed on a seasonal diet on whatever was available on hand IF he/she was ALLOWED to feet of that food (i.e., hunters/warriors first, then the women, then the elderly).

How would you feel, Gyrobob, if the allowed  calory intake was defined by age and job ?
Serving military ? 5000 calories / day
School teacher ? 3000 calories / day
Retired ? 1000 calories / day, you can't contribute much to society so why ask for more ?
THAT was Paleo Man. Diggings and findings support that.

Ride well, and enjoy your "Daly Bread"   (now... where have I heard that before ...?)

First of all, may I apologize for mistyping my "Daily bread", I speed type with a full three fingers (four on a good day) but my typing becomes dyslexic when my fingers get wrapped around each other and...

Second, Gyrobob, I actually liked your last reply.

BUT

Have you ever submitted your own experience to a Medical Journal ... of American Ophthalmologists (hey! I can spell that!!!  ) and ask them how on earth that happened ?

Are you now to 20/20 vision ?

As I said, I am a skeptic BUT paying attention.

As a whole, your proposed diet can't work on a planetary scale, there is just too much requirement for grazing land (=real estate) to allow for cattle/sheep/pigs/whatever to be raised to feed the 7 Billion we are on this planet.

As I said some 50 pages ago, on the land you need to graze cattle to feed one family, you can grow wheat to feed a village.
AND
you need less water
AND
you produce less CO2
AND
you get the same crop every year (+/-) wothout having to slaughter the cows to allow what little grass there is to feed the calfs
AND
you don't have to chase the wheat as it wonders in the fields and gets lost...

Hey, SavageRob, I liked your rant... er... conversation.

And I am certain you are right about your concerns.

Is tap water safe to drink ? It is OK / safe / good / excellent in different parts of the world, depending on how polluted the water sources are and the local available technology AND the local laws AND the honesty and integrity of the local politicians.

Back in Paleo days, water was spring water, or dranw from a pond or a river.
In the first case, spring water you could drink as it came out of thr ground; but anybody knows you have to filter (if not boil) pond or river water.
Incidentally, small technological breakthroughs allowed for better living conditions; not only did the mastery of fire allow to cook food, but the mastery of clay allowed to create pottery, which allowed you to stew foods (rather than roast them) and to boil water... SOUP !

This is no joke. Pottery is perhaps a greater invention than fire.
Fire, you learn to master, but pottery is a discovery which greatly improved the standards of living.

Fast forward to 4000 BC.

Man learns to irrigate and mass agriculture is the next step.

Just like we have 100 types of apples from the one wild apple tree, we also have man who selects and creates many kinds of grains until he decides which are best for intensive agriculture;
Maize (corn) manioca and tapioca in the Americas, wheat, barley, hops, various types of rice in Eurasia and mostly barley in Africa.

You have to go to "post-WW2" to come to "GMO wheat".

So, to claim "wheat is bad"... to claim "the human body is not made to digest wheat"... well, I'm skeptic.

The evidence is that I can ask an eskimo to go by a Zulu diet, replace all his fish and seal meat with buffalo and beef... he WILL be ill, there are records of epic failures of the Brits and French to "educate" the Eskimo, they have to eat fish and seal blubber.

You can ask an Australian Aborigene to eat rabbit, or tuna, but he won't be well as he would be by eating kangaroo or crocodile meat.
British records prove it.

But the remarkable thing is that no matter frmo which part of the world "promitive" populations came from, feed them any kind of grain, their body will accept it.

European settlers immediately became accustomed to maize (corn), and the American Indians never complained of "white man's flour"; Eskimos traded their catch with American Indian Nations which lived further south, and among the items you could regularly find some kind of grain; and the Australian Aborigene picked and milled wild grains.

In fact, in the Bible agriculture and raising animals (sheep&goats, in this case) are listed side by side in Genesis; Abel was a farmer, and his older brother Cain (the ill-tempered one) raised stock.

They are not father and son, nor grandpa and grandson, which would lead to believe one came before the other; they are brothers.

I DO believe GMO agriculture is the curse, the scourge of orporations, I also believe the original thing, natural wheat as it was a mere few decades ago, cannot be bad.

Let us not mistake modern Frankenstein GMOs with the Real McCoy.

Savage_Rob wrote on 04/20/12 at 13:02:10:


I'm not prepared to address how our race would handle moving to other planets or how we might move away from eating previously living things.  It could be done, but I have no expertise in how to work such an endeavor.

I only started this thread with a modest goal.  Do this Wheat Belly thing and report what happens to me here.  What I have to report is that this regimen is a life-changing deal.  I was 64 when I started this and felt about 70.  Now I feel about 40.  I even think I look a bit better -- thinner waist, skin way better, hair thicker, etc.  My ride to Daytona a few weeks ago was much less punishing than the several trips before that.

You said, "to be as healthy as a vegetarian." My understanding from researching these issues is that that is a negative statement.

I agree there are all kinds of nefarious things being done with the world's food supply under the banner of getting more food (and profit) out of existing resources.  This is addressed well in the Doc's book.

What is the significance of this December?  If it is the Mayan thing, they had their December 2012 a couple of years ago.

Still eating grains, eh?  Sorry to hear that.  Just on a whim, why don't you try grain-free-ness for a couple of months?  It certainly can't hurt any, and you will be surprised at what happens.  

There's nothing wrong with dairy at all, as long as you keep it low-carb.  Some yogurts have 20 carb grams in one dinky little serving!  Plain milk has a lot of carbs too, and the lower the fat, the higher the carbs.  I drink unsweetened unflavored almond milk with a 16:1 ratio of milk to heavy whipping cream. That gives me some healthy fat along with a good bit of flavor and has less than one gram of carbs per serving.

Good comments!

Gyrobob wrote on 04/24/12 at 06:56:32:


Nope, that's a misquote and I think you misunderstood my meaning too.  I said "To be healthy as a vegetarian, it's necessary to carefully balance your sources and still take supplements."  In other words, it is necessary for vegetarians to both carefully balance their nutrition sources and take supplements in order to maintain proper nutrition.  At least, that's what I've been able to glean from all of the myriad conflicting sources available.  There are amino acids, such as Taurine, which the human body cannot synthesize in sufficient quantities and the remainder must come from animal sources or supplements.

+1 for Gyrobob