There is, of course, a flip side to addiction. When people divorce themselves from wheat-containing products, 30 per cent experience something that can only be called withdrawal.
I’ve personally witnessed hundreds of people report extreme fatigue, mental fog, irritability, inability to function at work or school, even depression in the first several days to weeks after eliminating wheat. Complete relief is achieved by a bagel or cupcake (or, sadly, more like four bagels, two cupcakes, a bag of pretzels, two muffins and a handful of brownies, followed the next morning by a nasty case of wheat remorse). It’s a vicious circle. Abstain from a substance and a distinctly unpleasant experience ensues; resume it, the unpleasant experience ceases – that sounds a lot like addiction and withdrawal to me.
People who haven’t experienced these effects pooh-pooh it all, thinking it strains credibility to believe that something as pedestrian as wheat can affect the central nervous system much as nicotine or crack cocaine do.
There is a scientifically plausible reason for both the addiction and withdrawal effects. Not only does wheat exert effects on the normal brain, but also on the vulnerable abnormal brain, with results beyond simple addiction and withdrawal. Studying the effects of wheat on the abnormal brain can teach us some lessons on why and how wheat can be associated with such phenomena.
WHEAT AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIC MIND
The first important lessons on the effects wheat has on the brain came through studying its effects on people with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics lead a difficult life. They struggle to differentiate reality from internal fantasy, often entertaining delusions of persecution, even believing their minds and actions are controlled by external forces. (Remember ‘Son of Sam’ David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer who stalked his victims on instructions received from his dog? Thankfully, violent behaviour is unusual in schizophrenics, but it illustrates the depth of pathology possible.) Once schizophrenia is diagnosed, there is little hope of leading a normal life of work, family and children. A life of institutionalisation, medications with awful side effects and a constant struggle with dark internal demons lies ahead.
So what are the effects of wheat on the vulnerable schizophrenic mind?
The earliest formal connection of the effects of wheat on the schizophrenic brain began with the work of psychiatrist F. Curtis Dohan, whose observations ranged as far as Europe and New Guinea. Dr Dohan journeyed down this line of investigation because he observed that, during World War II, the men and women of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada and the United States required fewer hospitalisations for schizophrenia when food shortages made bread unavailable, only to require an increased number of hospitalisations when wheat consumption resumed after the war was over.1
Dr Dohan observed a similar pattern in the hunter-gatherer Stone Age culture of New Guinea. Prior to the introduction of Western influence, schizophrenia was virtually unknown, diagnosed in only 2 of 65,000 inhabitants. As Western eating habits infiltrated the New Guinean population and cultivated wheat products, beer made from barley, and corn were introduced, Dr Dohan watched the incidence of schizophrenia skyrocket sixty-five-fold.2 On this background, he set out to develop the observations that established whether or not there was a cause-and-effect relationship between wheat consumption and schizophrenia.
In the mid-sixties, while working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr Dohan and his colleagues decided to remove all wheat products from meals provided to schizophrenic patients without their knowledge or permission. (This was in the era before informed consent of participants was required, and before the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment became publicised, which triggered public outrage and led to legislation requiring fully informed participant consent.) Lo and behold, four weeks sans wheat and there were distinct and measurable improvements in the hallmarks of the disease: a reduced number of auditory hallucinations, fewer delusions, less detachment from reality. Psychiatrists then added the wheat products back into their patients’ diets and the hallucinations, delusions and social detachment rushed right back. Remove wheat again, patients and symptoms got better; add it back, they got worse.3
The Philadelphia observations in schizophrenics were corroborated by psychiatrists at the University of Sheffield, with similar conclusions.4 There have since even been reports of complete remission of the disease, such as the seventy-year-old schizophrenic woman described by Duke University doctors, suffering with delusions, hallucinations and suicide attempts with sharp objects and cleaning solutions over a period of fifty-three years, who experienced complete relief from psychosis and suicidal desires within eight days of stopping wheat.5
While it seems unlikely that wheat exposure caused schizophrenia in the first place, the observations of Dr Dohan and others suggest that wheat is associated with measurable worsening of symptoms.
Another condition in which wheat may exert effects on a vulnerable mind is autism. Autistic children suffer from impaired ability to interact socially and communicate. The condition has increased in frequency over the past forty years, from rare in the mid-twentieth century to 1 in 150 children in the twenty-first.6 Initial small samples have demonstrated improvement in autistic behaviours with wheat-gluten removal.7, 8 The most comprehensive clinical trial to date involved fifty-five autistic Danish children, with formal measures of autistic behaviour showing improvement with gluten elimination (along with elimination of casein from dairy).9
While it remains a topic of debate, a substantial proportion of children and adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may also respond to elimination of wheat. However, responses are often muddied due to sensitivities to other components of diet, such as sugars, artificial sweeteners, additives and dairy.10
It is unlikely that wheat exposure was the initial cause of autism or ADHD but, as with schizophrenia, wheat appears to be associated with worsening of the symptoms characteristic of the conditions.
Though the laboratory rat treatment of the unsuspecting schizophrenic patients in the Philadelphia VA Hospital may send chills down our spines from the comfort of our fully informed and consenting twenty-first century, it is nevertheless a graphic illustration of wheat’s effect on mental function. But why in the world are schizophrenia, autism and ADHD exacerbated by wheat? What is in this grain that worsens psychosis and other abnormal behaviours?
Investigators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to find some answers.
EXORPHINS: THE WHEAT–MIND CONNECTION
Dr Christine Zioudrou and her colleagues at the NIH subjected gluten, the main protein of wheat, to a simulated digestive process to mimic what happens after we eat bread or other wheat-containing products.11 Exposed to pepsin (a stomach enzyme) and hydrochloric acid (stomach acid), gluten is degraded to a mix of polypeptides. The dominant polypeptides were then isolated and administered to laboratory rats. These polypeptides were discovered to have the peculiar ability to penetrate the blood–brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain. This barrier is there for a reason. The brain is highly sensitive to the wide variety of substances that gain entry to the blood, some of which can provoke undesirable effects should they cross into your amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex or other brain structure. Once having gained entry into the brain, wheat polypeptides bind to the brain’s morphine receptor, the very same receptor to which opiate drugs bind.
Zioudrou and her colleagues dubbed these polypeptides ‘exorphins’, short for exogenous morphine-like compounds, distinguishing them from endorphins, the endogenous (internally sourced) morphine-like compounds that occur, for instance, during a ‘runner’s high’. They named the dominant polypeptide that crossed the blood–brain barrier ‘gluteomorphin’, or morphine-like compound from gluten (though the name sounds to me more like a morphine shot in the butt). The investigators speculated that exorphins might be the active factors derived from wheat that account for the deterioration of schizophrenic symptoms seen in the Philadelphia VA Hospital and elsewhere.
Even more telling, the