We are told that we must eat wheat and grains for nutrition.
But the OPPOSITE is true: Wheat and grains are responsible for widespread, sometimes severe, nutritional deficiencies.
Conventional dietary advice is a collection of fairy tales. But understand this and you are empowered to achieve magnificent health.
Transcript:
I call this Wheat Belly conversation “There’s Nothing Phunny About Phytates”. Let me tell you what I mean. There’s a compound in grains called phytic acids, or phytates, and these are very powerfully effective binders of any mineral that is positively charged. When it binds up these minerals, you pass it out in the toilet.
Screen text: IRON, ZINC, CALCIUM, MAGNESIUM
The phytates in, say, two slices of whole wheat bread, bind up to 90%, sometimes more of all the iron, zinc, calcium, magnesium and some other minerals in your gut, and you pass it out in the toilet.
This is why, for instance, when the World Health Organization flies in wheat and corn to feed starving people, they already know that the children will stop growing, and are going to have learning impairments, because the iron is bound up in their intestines, and the zinc is bound up, and they stop growing. So the World Health Organization has to take additional steps to compensate for the nutritional deficiencies that are so severe, that they impair learning and growth in children. They’ve known this for decades — that the phytates in grains are powerful anti-nutrients.
But we’ve been told that grains are necessary for B-vitamins and fiber, right?
Well, it’s true, there are B-vitamins and fiber in grains. Now most of the fiber in grains is the cellulose fiber, and you don’t have a deficiency of sawdust. You don’t really need that cellulose. You can get lots of cellulose, say, from kale and spinach and broccoli. You do not need the cellulose fiber of grains. And B-vitamins? You can match or exceed the B-vitamin content of grains very easily, by having a pork chop, or having some nuts. It’s very easy to get lots of B-vitamins without grains. So this idea that you must have grains for fiber and B-vitamins, and that they’ll be good for you, is nonsense.
In fact, grains are anti-nutrients. They block the absorption of numerous nutrients. I’ve seen many women (women, oddly, have more of a problem with this) who had iron deficiency anemia unresponsive to iron supplementation — even injectable iron, and had even gone through transfusions — only to find out that their anemia disappeared within two weeks or so after not eating grains. That’s how bad the anemia can be.
You can appreciate that if you have no zinc, that you’ll have impaired healing, and you may have autoimmune conditions, and more prone to viral infections, and skin rashes. If you can’t absorb calcium, well that’s obvious, right? And also the gliadin protein of wheat causes you to lose urinary calcium. Grains cause calcium deficiency. They cause iron deficiency. They cause magnesium deficiency. The most important sign of magnesium deficiency is osteoporosis and osteopenia, because your bones act as a repository of magnesium. Not getting magnesium, because it’s been bound in your intestines by grain phytates, is a major problem.
So how do you remedy these problems? Get rid of the grains, right? You don’t have any more phytic acid that binds these things up in your intestines and, calcium is restored, zinc is restored, iron is restored. Some people have to supplement those things. Refer to the Wheat Belly Total Health book or the Undoctored book, for how to know whether your should supplement those nutrients.
Everybody, though, does supplement magnesium. Magnesium is a bit of an exception, and the reason for that is because the deficiency is cumulative, goes in the bones, which are the repository for magnesium, and because we drink filtered water, from which all magnesium has been lost.
So recognize that this idea that you must eat grains for nutrition is complete fairy tale — in fact, the opposite is true.
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