In the sixth chapter, Wheat Belly reviews celiac disease. Celiac disease is a serious disease and if you have it you should avoid wheat and all gluten containing products. Yet the book tries to make a case that wheat is the primary cause of irritable bowel syndrome (IB...

One of the sub-chapter headings of chapter five of Wheat Belly is “WHOLE GRAINS, HALF TRUTHS.” You could have titled the chapter, “UNTRUTHS ABOUT WHOLE GRAINS” and that would have been much more accurate. The book abandons all pretense of actually responding to the sci...

In the fourth chapter, the book continues its habit of constant conjunction of wheat with dangerous things and obesity. Wheat is “like drinking the Kool-Aid at a Jim Jones revival meeting.” Wheat has a hold on people “not unlike the hold heroin has over a desperate add...

The third chapter of Wheat Belly spends more time on the negative health effects of wheat, but again, the focus is almost entirely on celiac disease. The crux of the book’s argument against wheat is its high glycemic index. Glycemic index is a calculated figure used to...

The second chapter of Wheat Belly talks about the changes in wheat over the years and how common the grain is in the American diet. The book tries to build a case that Americans consume too much wheat by measuring the length of grocery store aisles and listing the name...

The first chapter of Wheat Belly points out that Americans are fat. We can all agree on this. It’s not debatable. Unfortunately, the book spends a lot of time establishing that there is an epidemic, rather than showing what caused it. Yes, there is an obesity epidemic...

Now we get to the third point in the list from the foreword to Wheat Belly. “3) Direct connections between wheat consumption and conditions such as diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, had been conclusively made … but virtually nobody had collected the data into one place...

The last post we discussed the claim that wheat and the gliadin protein have undergone substantial and serious genetic change since modern hybrid wheat was developed. We showed that wheat isn’t isolated and that chicken has had more than eight times more genetic change...

Wheat Belly and Grain Brain, a Review

I am starting a series of blog posts reviewing the books, Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, MD and Grain Brain by Dr. David Perlmutter, MD. Dr. Davis practices “preventative cardiology” and Dr. Perlmutter practices “integrative neur...