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FOREWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

WHEAT BELLY IS not what it used to be.

In the three years since the original Wheat Belly was published in the US, something astounding and wonderful has happened. What began as an experience in helping people reduce blood sugars, tame inflammation and regain control over appetite has evolved into a nationwide experience of lives transformed on an unprecedented scale. The few thousand people who understood this message in 2011 has now ballooned to the millions, and they are experiencing effortless weight loss and turnarounds in health across a whole spectrum of conditions.

Within weeks of its initial release, I was flooded with stories from people who, for the first time in years, finally understood why they had struggled with health, weight, appetite and pain – despite doing everything ‘right’. A man named Lucas sent a comment saying that he had tried with little success to get rid of his belly despite what he thought was a healthy diet and active lifestyle. ‘I’ve tried raw, vegan, low-carb, low-fat – and none of them had much effect and all left me with food cravings that never went away. In the month since I started Wheat Belly, I’ve lost 12 pounds,’ said Lucas. ‘The most remarkable thing for me, though – and I wasn’t really expecting it – is that after the first week of being completely grainfree, I have not had a single headache of any kind, and I have been a migraine sufferer since my teens.’

Another comment came from Cindy, a woman whose obsession with food was controlling her life. ‘I was in constant turmoil over eating; I couldn’t understand how the educated, intelligent, strongwilled person I believed myself to be could become totally defeated by food. I was completely exhausted by my preoccupation with eating, not eating, dieting, binging, crying, hating myself, dieting again, binging and hating myself more. I was at the end of my rope,’ she said. Then she found Wheat Belly and her life changed. ‘After cutting out the wheat, I could barely believe the feeling of calm that descended upon my life. The weight dropped off, my depression lifted and I too experienced all of the amazing things everyone else had reported. I now love my food, but I rarely think about it anymore.’

Multiply those wonderful stories by several thousand and you get a sense of what unfolded in just the first several months of Wheat Belly’s publication.

When the original Wheat Belly hit the bookstores, I already knew that this message had the potential to change lives, achieve astounding quantities of weight loss, and turn around conditions such as depression, eating disorders, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol, skin rashes, joint pain, heart disease, fatty liver and hundreds of other conditions. I knew this because I’d already witnessed such transformations in thousands of people in my cardiology practice and online discussions, backed up by a surprising wealth of science already available. What I did not anticipate was the tidal wave of people embracing this message. I credit that to the phenomenon of social media and the awesome potential of shared experiences.

When people tell their stories on Facebook or Twitter, for instance, detailing their 56-pound weight loss over 6 months, relief from the disfigurement and pain of rheumatoid arthritis, and transitioning from barely being able to rise from a chair to running their first half-marathon, well … that makes for the kind of conversation that changes the world. It’s the same process that led to the overturn of despotic governments and the same process that can now make the difference between someone winning and losing a presidential election. We’ve now applied this miraculous, 21st-century formula to nutrition.

If you peel back the layers of the nutritional advice given to Americans by ‘official’ agencies through the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the USDA Food Pyramid or MyPlate, and the legions of dietitians and other providers of conventional dietary advice, we find the agendas of agribusiness, Big Food and other parties who stand to profit from such advice. We do not find objective, unbiased science, interpreted by the rules of logic.

We also find that the darling of all nutritional advice, the proposed centrepiece of every meal, the widest parts of the pyramid and plate – wheat – is something different today than it was 40 years ago. Just one look at a modern stalk of wheat and you will immediately know: this is not the wheat I remember, not the wheat I’ve seen in pictures, certainly not the wheat I saw as a kid. It’s been changed. That fundamental insight – that many of our foods have been changed by the efforts of agribusiness and genetics, whether the methods were ‘genetic modification’ (using gene splicing techniques, as used to create genetically modified corn) or repetitive hybridization and mutagenesis (the purposeful induction of mutations using chemicals, gamma rays and x-rays, used to create new strains of wheat) – is a growing reality in the 21st-century. Contrary to the claim of geneticists and agribusiness, the full implications of the changes introduced into such crops are not known, but are showing themselves in a variety of ways in the humans who consume them.

Some people, understandably wary of a notion as revolutionary and potentially disruptive as doing away with all things wheat, have asked: ‘Is this elimination based solely on anecdote, or is there clinical data to back it up?’ When I first set out to understand why the removal of wheat might result in such extravagant health and weight changes, I talked to agricultural geneticists, studied their experimental data and probed the data generated by physicians to study conditions such as coeliac disease. What I found was that an astounding amount of science had already been collected that showed us the following: 1) Modern wheat has undergone change in several crucial components, such as the gliadin protein and others; 2) These changes have been associated with various effects in humans, such as intestinal inflammation outside of coeliac disease and an astounding array of mind effects; 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 nor dared question conventional advice that advocates essentially unrestrained consumption of the new modern strains of wheat.

Alongside my efforts to explore and understand the changes introduced into modern wheat were my efforts to help people rid themselves of this component of diet. One of the experiences I observed was the 38-year-old schoolteacher (whose story I tell in more detail in this book) who, on the eve of her colon-removal surgery, experienced complete relief from her ulcerative colitis, so dramatically improved that she was able to stop her medications as well as not have her colon removed. After twelve years of failed response to drugs, constant abdominal pain, diarrhoea and intermittent intestinal hemorrhage, she was now essentially cured with removal of all wheat from her diet. That experience spurred me on to share this collection of insights, or else people might undergo such awful things as colon removal or worse, never understanding that wheat is what lies at the root of the entire problem.

Thus was born Wheat Belly. And the nutritional world has never been the same.