Skip to main content

Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health / William Davis

By

I can’t remember where I saw the review for this.  Somehow it caught my eye, but in retrospect I’m not sure why.  I've already had the sermon on the ubiquity of corn in our diet from Michael Pollan.  In the opening chapters of Wheat Belly, William Davis explains how wheat has been so radically hybridized and modified in the last half of the twentieth century, that it little resembles the grain that our grandparents consumed and used as flour.  The “wonder wheat” that grows with tremendous yields worldwide is a gen-modified stubby dwarf variety that is resistant to disease, winds and stormfall (no amber waves of grain anymore) and will not grow without generous allotments of chemical fertilizer (no surprise there). No studies have ever been conducted on this superwheat’s compatibility with human digestion, since its fundamental makeup is radically different from its forebears. Davis suggests that eliminating wheat, all wheat, from our diet has manifold benefits, even for those who are not suffering from celiac disease or pronounced gluten intolerance.  He gives some stunning examples of people with grim health profiles who were cured by eliminating wheat from their diet. 

Reading this after overindulging in Christmas cookies, I started to contemplate what it would take to purge wheat from my diet.  Ultimately I think this title is more of a diet book than a scientific study.  Parts were interesting, but some was too technical for my liking, and it was repetitive.  I think the best advice I’ve gleaned from books on food and nutrition is the first line from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”  Perhaps after reading this I should add “eat plants your grandmother would have recognized”.  Or, just eat your vegetables!  We've all heard that before.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

By
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation.  Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

By
The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her?  Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable?  Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea .  It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre .  I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances.  Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall.  Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage.  All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...
Post a Comment
Read more