The next chapter will explain why wheat has a unique ability to convert quickly to blood sugar. In addition, it has addictive properties that actually cause us to overeat; has been linked to literally dozens of debilitating ailments beyond those associated with being overweight; and has infiltrated almost every aspect of our diet. Sure, cutting out refined sugar is a good idea, as it provides little or no nutritional benefit and impacts your blood sugar in a negative way. But eliminating wheat is the easiest and most effective step, the biggest bang for your buck that you can take to safeguard your health and trim your waistline.
NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S MUFFINS: THE CREATION OF MODERN WHEAT
He is as good as good bread.
—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE
WHEAT, MORE THAN any other foodstuff, is woven into the fabric of the American food experience, a trend that began even before Ozzie met Harriet. It has become such a ubiquitous part of the American diet in so many ways that it seems essential to our lives. What would a plate of fried eggs be without toast, lunch without sandwiches, beer without pretzels, picnics without hot dog buns, dip without crackers, hummus without pita, lox without bagels, apple pie without crust?
IF IT’S TUESDAY, IT MUST BE WHEAT
I measured the length of the bread aisle at my local supermarket: sixty-eight feet.
That’s sixty-eight feet of white bread, whole wheat bread, multi-grain bread, seven-grain bread, rye bread, pumpernickel bread, sourdough bread, Italian bread, French bread, breadsticks, white bagels, raisin bagels, cheese bagels, garlic bagels, oat bread, flax bread, pita bread, dinner rolls, Kaiser rolls, poppy seed rolls, hamburger buns, and fourteen varieties of hot dog buns. That’s not even counting the bakery and the additional forty feet of shelves packed with a variety of “artisanal” wheat products.
And then there’s the snack aisle with forty-some brands of crackers and twenty-seven brands of pretzels. The baking aisle has bread crumbs and croutons. The dairy case has dozens of those tubes you crack open to bake rolls, Danish, and crescents.
Breakfast cereals fill a world unto themselves, usually enjoying a monopoly over an entire supermarket aisle, top to bottom shelves.
There’s much of an aisle devoted to boxes and bags of pasta and noodles: spaghetti, lasagna, penne, elbows, shells, whole wheat pasta, green spinach pasta, orange tomato pasta, egg noodles, tiny-grained couscous to three-inch-wide pasta sheets.
How about frozen foods? The freezer has hundreds of noodle, pasta, and wheat-containing side dishes to accompany the meat loaf and roast beef au jus.
In fact, apart from the detergent and soap aisle, there’s barely a shelf that doesn’t contain wheat products. Can you blame Americans if they’ve allowed wheat to dominate their diets? After all, it’s in practically everything from Twizzlers to Twinkies to twelve-grain bread.
Wheat as a crop has succeeded on an unprecedented scale, exceeded only by its cousin, corn, in acreage of farmland planted. It is, by a long stretch, among the most consumed foods on earth, constituting 20 percent of all human calories. While humans also consume plenty of corn in its widely varied forms, from corn on the cob to high-fructose corn syrup and maltodextrin, much of the corn is also fed to livestock to fatten them up and marble the meat just before slaughter.
Wheat has been an undeniable financial success. How many other ways can a manufacturer transform a dime’s worth of raw material into $3.99 worth of glitzy, consumer-friendly product, topped off with endorsements from the American Heart Association? In most cases, the cost of marketing these products exceeds the cost of the ingredients themselves.
Foods made partly or entirely of wheat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks have become the rule. Indeed, such a regimen would make the USDA, the Whole Grains Council, the Whole Wheat Council, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association happy, knowing that their message to eat more “healthy whole grains” has gained a wide and eager following.
So why has this seemingly benign plant that sustained generations of humans suddenly turned on us? For one thing, it is not the same grain our forebears ground into their daily bread. Wheat naturally evolved to only a modest degree over the centuries, but it has changed dramatically in the past sixty years under the influence of agricultural scientists. Wheat strains have been hybridized, crossbred, and chemically mutated to make the wheat plant resistant to environmental conditions, such as drought, or pathogens, such as fungi, as well as resistant to herbicides. But most of all, genetic changes have been introduced to increase yield per acre. The average yield on a modern North American farm is more than tenfold greater than farms of a century ago. Such enormous strides in yield have required drastic changes in genetic code, reducing the proud “amber waves of grain” of yesteryear to rigid, stocky, eighteen-inch-tall high-production “semi-dwarf” wheat of today. Such fundamental genetic changes, as you will see, have come at a price for the unwitting creatures who consume it.
Even in the few decades since your grandmother survived Prohibition and danced the Big Apple, wheat has undergone countless transformations. As the science of genetics has progressed over the past sixty years, permitting human intervention to unfold much more rapidly than nature’s slow, year-by-year breeding influence, the pace of change has increased exponentially. The genetic backbone of a high-tech poppy seed muffin has achieved its current condition by a process of evolutionary acceleration for agricultural advantage that makes us look like pre-humans trapped somewhere in the early Pleistocene.
FROM NATUFIAN PORRIDGE TO DONUT HOLES
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
It’s in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, Moses describes the Promised Land as “a land of wheat and barley and vineyards.” Bread is central to religious ritual. Jews celebrate Passover with unleavened matzo to commemorate the flight of the Israelites from Egypt. Christians consume wafers representing the body of Christ. Muslims regard unleavened naan as sacred, insisting it be stored upright and never thrown away in public. In the Bible, bread is a metaphor for bountiful harvest, times of plenty, freedom from starvation, even salvation.
Don’t we break bread with friends and family? Isn’t something new and wonderful “the best thing since sliced bread”? “Taking the bread out of someone’s mouth” is to deprive that person of a fundamental necessity. Bread is a nearly universal diet staple: chapati in India, tsoureki in Greece, pita in the Middle East, aebleskiver in Denmark, naan bya for breakfast in Burma, glazed donuts any old time in the United States.
The notion that a foodstuff so fundamental, so deeply ingrained in the human experience, can be bad for us is, well, unsettling and counter to long-held cultural views. But today’s bread bears little resemblance to the loaves that emerged from our forebears’ ovens. Just as a modern Napa Cabernet Sauvignon is a far cry from the crude ferment of fourth-century BC Georgian winemakers who buried wine urns in underground mounds, so has wheat changed. Bread and other foods made of wheat may have helped sustain humans for centuries (but at a chronic health price, as I shall discuss), but the wheat of our ancestors is not the same as modern commercial wheat that reaches your breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. From original strains of wild grass harvested by early humans, wheat has exploded to more than 25,000 varieties, virtually all of them the result of human intervention.
In the waning days of the Pleistocene, around 8500 BC, millennia before any Christian, Jew, or Muslim walked the earth, before the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires, the Natufians led a semi-nomadic life roaming the Fertile Crescent (now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq), supplementing hunting and gathering by harvesting indigenous plants. They harvested the ancestor of modern wheat, einkorn, from