A resource for health professionals, parents, teachers, counselors & kids on the childhood obesity epidemic.

In the science of forensics, transfer theory holds that a criminal will always leave trace evidence at the crime scene. A person with celiac disease has to be as suspicious and hyper-vigilant as a detective dusting for fingerprints. If the grocery store has bulk bins, the scoop you use to measure out some safe food may have previously been used for a gluten-containing food, and you might get sick. People who don’t have CD but wish to avoid gluten for other reasons are constantly surprised to find the stuff popping up everywhere.

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News mentioned the input received from the Weigh2Rock kids, who confide their problems and secrets to Dr. Pretlow’s website. Where do they stand on gluten? Well, aside from treats featuring wheat flour, they also tend to get hooked on fried foods, cheese, corn chips, popcorn, sour cream, nuts, burgers, potato chips and chocolate — none of which seem, at first glance, as if they would be guilty of containing gluten. Many sources were consulted to take the measure of just how innocent these particular items actually are.

Fried foods — Any fried item that has been marinated, breaded or battered has gluten. Flavorings have it. “Fillers” and anti-clumping agents have it. In most restaurants, all the fried entrees are cooked in the same fryers. The intense heat of the oil doesn’t kill gluten but transfers it to foods that are sold as gluten-free.

Cheese — Cheese is dairy, right? Why would it contain gluten? Yet it can. If it’s processed or “beer-washed,” the gluten avoider will shun it. If it’s blue cheese or Roquefort, it might have been treated with bacteria grown from rye, and bingo — you’ve got gluten. Now imagine a fancy supermarket, the kind that buys gigantic wheels of cheese. Every cut and repackaging is an opportunity for cross-contamination. Plus, flour from the store’s bakery floats in the air and lands on things. Incredibly, the ingredient lists on yogurt tubs must also be carefully read.

Corn chips — Again, careful scrutiny of the ingredients is a must. Tortilla chips can be manufactured with a variety of flours, making them a risky food for gluten-intolerant people.

Popcorn — The movie-theater kind seems to be okay, gluten-wise. Microwave popcorn and the pre-popped kind in decorated tins are not.

Sour Cream — This is amazing, but nonfat, light and full-fat sour cream are all perfectly capable of harboring gluten.

Nuts — Yep, flavored nuts, dry-roasted nuts, coated nuts, any of them could contain gluten. Even the ones that start out gluten-free can be cross-contaminated in retail store bins.

Burgers — When kids are talking about burgers, they mean buns too, which of course are bread and therefore crammed with gluten. Okay, so just order the burger without a bun. Not so fast! Even some hamburger meat is enhanced with “filler,” or the kitchen might stretch it by adding bread crumbs. It might be cross-contaminated from anything in the kitchen, and did the worker change gloves before handling your food?

Potato chips — These crunchy treats are hugely addictive, and some brands contain gluten ingredients like seasonings, while others are subject to gluten cross-contamination in production.

Chocolate — Here’s the bad news, from Jane Anderson:

Some chocolate candy products feature gluten ingredients — either in the form of wheat (most frequently in chocolate-cookie confections) or in the form of barley malt (a popular sweetener frequently used in candy). Other chocolate candies contain no gluten ingredients, but they are subject to gluten cross-contamination because they’re made on the same manufacturing equipment or in the same facilities as those gluten-containing items.

The list of unsafe foods and additives is literally hundreds of items long: imitation crab meat, licorice candy, soy sauce, malt vinegar — it just goes on and on. This gets into another realm of addiction, but beer, of course, contains gluten.

Dr. William Davis says that whole wheat bread increases blood sugar, and eating a couple of slices of it is pretty much the equivalent of eating a candy bar or drinking a can of soda pop. But the news gets even worse. He cautions patients not to go near processed foods labeled gluten-free that substitute various forms of starch. Why?

The few foods that increase blood sugar higher than even wheat include … rice starch, cornstarch, tapioca starch, and potato starch — the most common ingredients used in gluten-free foods…. [M]any celiac patients who forego wheat and resort to gluten-free foods become fat and diabetic.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is chocolate gluten-free or does chocolate contain gluten?” About.com, 02/29/12
Source: “Summary: Wheat Belly by William Davis, MD,” TheHealingProject.us, 09/22/12
Image by Whatsername?

In 2011, William Davis, M.D., published the book Wheat Belly, whose message is that “over-consumption of wheat is the main cause of the obesity and diabetes crisis in the United States.” Some of his medical peers are uncomfortable with assigning so much blame to the fabled Staff of Life, and they all have different reasons. For instance, Dr. Pretlow has remarked, “The youth on our website and in our study identify many foods with which they have a problem, outside of the flour and sugar realm, such as fried foods, cheese, corn chips, pop corn, sour cream, nuts, and burgers.”

The next post will go into that sentence deeply. The website Dr. Pretlow referred to is, of course, Weigh2Rock.  Thousands of young people have supplied information on their problem foods by way of the website polls, and data has been gathered from the first study and the current study establishing the usefulness of the W8Loss2Go smartphone app. Dr. Pretlow says, “Withdrawal from specific user-identified problem foods is thus the approach of our app, then progressing to all food amounts. This self-identified problem food approach seems to resonate with the youth in our pilot study.”

But something else is going on here. While America wasn’t looking, gluten has snuck into everything, and wheat is its delivery system, to the point where the average American eats 133 pounds of wheat per year. “It’s in over 90% of the foods on supermarket shelves,” Dr. Davis says, possibly without exaggeration. He’s not talking about vegetables, fish, or nuts. The shelves in the middle are where the boxes and cans of processed food are, and an astonishing number of them contain gluten in some form, often disguised by alternate terminology. Dr. Davis asserts, “For most Americans, every single meal and snack contains foods made with wheat flour.”

Like fish in water, we are surrounded by enough of it that it becomes almost invisible. Maybe its ubiquity is part of the reason why, at first, biochemical addiction to wheat flour sounds like an unlikely reason for an obesity epidemic. Wheat seems so innocent, so helpful to humankind and so necessary. Revolutions have begun over a lack of bread.

Also, it’s not wheat

As in a science fiction film about pod people, wheat has been replaced by something that bears the same name but is not, in fact, the same. When a person longs for the incomparable biscuits that Grandma made, it isn’t just nostalgia. Davis says:

The wheat of today is not the same grain our forebears ground into their daily bread. It has changed dramatically in the past 50 years under the influence of agricultural scientists. Wheat has undergone a drastic transformation to yield something entirely unique, nearly unrecognizable when compared to the original.

This was accomplished, by the way, with no testing in regard to the safety of animals or humans. The scientists had other priorities, such as increasing yield per acre. Nobody paused to ask, “What will this do to people?” So what does it do to people? Thanks to Lisa, who took the trouble to deconstruct the book into easily graspable bites, we find Dr. Davis’s answer. For starters, the carbohydrate in wheat is very digestible and the body converts it to blood sugar with remarkable efficiency, which is undesirable in health terms.

High blood sugar, in turn, provokes high blood insulin. High blood insulin provokes visceral fat accumulation, which causes tissues such as muscle and liver to respond less to insulin. This so-called insulin resistance means that the pancreas must produce greater and greater quantities of insulin to metabolize the sugars. Eventually, a vicious circle of [increase ensues]: insulin resistance, insulin production, deposition of visceral fat, insulin resistance etc, etc…

Gluten sensitivity can even cause such unlikely-seeming problems as peripheral neuropathy, affecting the nerves of the hands and feet. In cultures where teenagers don’t get acne, they’re not eating wheat. Dr. Davis says that among his own patients, three months off grain can lead to the loss of 20 or even 40 pounds, and the remission of diabetes.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Summary: Wheat Belly by William Davis, MD,” TheHealingProject.us, 09/22/12
Source: “Wheat Belly: Frequently Asked Questions,” WheatBellyBlog.com, 07/26/11
Image by Robert Couse-Baker

As we have seen, one school of thought holds that gluten is addictive. A lot of foodstuffs (as well as myriad other products) contain gluten, and gluten critics say the substance is what causes so many people to be addicted to certain foods. Any doubt can be banished by observing how often people want to take naps after meals involving pasta, bread, pancakes, pastries, and so forth. (This might be a good place to mention the meticulously detailed and mind-blowingly extensive list of unsafe foods and ingredients compiled by Scott Adams.)

Dr. Daniel Amen is a neuropsychiatrist who, according to his bio, “has worked with tens of thousands of patients from 90 countries for more than 20 years,” and that is an impressive amount of experience. He calls the 31% success rate of gastric banding a disappointment but is not surprised by this failure because, as he puts it:

Most weight problems occur between the ears, which may explain why most diets don’t work…. It’s the brain that makes our eating decisions, and what we’ve found is that there isn’t just one brain pattern associated with overeating — there are at least five.

Dr. Amen is convinced of something that far too many professionals overlook, the fact that everyone is different. In any individual case of obesity, there may be still more factors at work, including economic status, availability of food, cultural norms, physical activity level, genetic predisposition, medications and so forth. But insofar as the brain itself is concerned, he sees the five broad categories.

Then, just to complicate things, people can have more than one of the five types of reaction going on in their heads at the same time, and for this they need extra individual attention. Amen’s whole theory can be found in his 2011 book The Amen Solution, but here are the essentials as boiled down by writer Mary Monroe and then condensed a bit more here. They are all fully explained in Monroe’s Ideafit.com article, along with suggestions about supplements that might help.

1: Compulsive Overeater. Tends to get stuck on the thought of food and feels compulsively driven. Tends to be a nighttime eater. Typically claims to have no control over food.
2: Impulsive Overeater. Exhibits poor impulse control, is easily distracted and reaches for food without thinking. Research suggests that having untreated ADD nearly doubles the risk of being overweight; without proper treatment, it’s nearly impossible for people with this condition to adhere to a nutrition plan.
3: Impulsive-Compulsive Overeater. Exhibits symptoms of 1. and 2. Compulsive gamblers, for instance, are compelled to gamble and have little control over their impulses.
4: Sad or Emotional Overeater. Overeats to medicate feelings of sadness and to calm the emotional storms in the brain. Often struggles with depression, low energy, low self-esteem and pain symptoms, and tends to gain weight in winter.
5: Anxious Overeater. Medicates feelings of anxiety or nervousness with food, complains of waiting for something bad to happen and frequently suffers from headaches and stomach problems.

Amen sums it up:

So giving everyone the same diet plan will make some people better and some worse. Instead we’re seeing that we need to match our strategies for overeating to the type of brain pattern or patterns that are affecting us the most.

Plenty of information on the activity of the addicted brain is here too, as well as another list of nine strategies to control cravings, including advice on how to identify a harmful allergy to gluten.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “It’s All in the Brain: Unlocking the Secrets of Overeating With Neuroscience,” IdeaFit.com, November 2011
Image by Tumblr.com

The best way to avoid foods that are bad for you is to stay away from foods with health claims on the label. They are usually hiding something bad.

What a powerful quotation! These are the words of Dr. Mark Hyman, who, like Dr. Pretlow, has written and talked about food addiction. In Dr. Hyman’s case, that subject is tied in with his suspicions about gluten as a major player in the obesity epidemic. “Gluten Free” is one of the health claims that needs to be closely examined if a person is serious about eliminating gluten from the diet.

Why would anyone do that? A relatively rare condition called celiac disease (CD), whose sufferers cannot tolerate any gluten at all, has been recognized for some time. But only in the last couple of years has there been any acknowledgment that a lot of people who don’t technically have CD are nevertheless intolerant of gluten.

The damage is inflicted on the lining of the small intestine, which is only supposed to let certain things get through to the rest of the body. But gluten empowers zonulin, which makes holes in the mortar between the cells of the intestine wall. The “leaky gut” allows chunks of undesirable material to float around in the bloodstream and wreak havoc. It’s like getting the fresh water line in the kitchen sink crossed with the sewer pipe — not recommended.

The debris that is now circulating comes to the attention of the immune system, which attacks it, and pretty soon there’s a general whole-body inflammation going on. Trouble could spring up anywhere, including further damage to the gut lining.

General confusion

In such a widespread attack of the body upon itself, the weakest points will succumb first. Patients turn up with a bewildering variety of seemingly unrelated symptoms, and doctors don’t know what’s going on. Like celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity is tricky to diagnose. But evidence is piling up that convinces many health professionals that wheat is to blame for not only obesity, but heart disease, diabetes, dementia and cancer.

A person might think skeptically, “Hold on there, my grandpa ate a loaf of bread every day for 94 years and was never sick a day in his life.” This is what Dr. Hyman addresses as one of the “hidden reasons” that actually prove how much obesity and other illnesses stem from consumption of the fabled Staff of Life, wheat.

This is not the wheat your great-grandmother used to bake her bread. It is FrankenWheat — a scientifically engineered food product developed in the last 50 years…. [I]t is different in three important ways that all drive obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and more.

It contains a Super Starch — amylopectin A that is super fattening.
It contains a form of Super Gluten that is super-inflammatory.
It contains forms of a Super Drug that is super-addictive and makes you crave and eat more.

Now, that is what you might call a real triple threat. The third item must pique the interest of anyone interested in the area of food addiction. The exorphins created by digesting wheat are molecules that latch onto the brain’s opioid receptors, making a person “crazy, hungry and addicted.” These “super drugs” even have their own name — they are gluteomorphins. More impressive still, they can be counteracted by the same emergency-room drug used to treat a morphine or heroin overdose. As Dr. Hyman eloquently puts it, “Bottom line: wheat is an addictive appetite stimulant.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Three Hidden Ways Wheat Makes You Fat,” DrHyman.com, 01/25/13
Image by Jeff Keacher

As a childhood obesity villain, gluten is one of the “usual suspects” and Childhood Obesity News has looked at the case against it before. InsuliteLabs.com takes an especially dim view of gluten:

As many as 75% of overweight and obese people in the U.S. may be addicted … to either carbohydrates or the protein called gluten, which is found in all wheat, rye, barley and oat products.

It’s found in a great many other places too, including some unexpected ones, like vitamin pills. The unavoidability of gluten is a huge problem for people with celiac disease, because they are extremely sensitive to even the tiniest amounts of it, and the consequences of exposure can be very severe. But there is a growing school of thought that gluten is harmful for just about everybody.

The contention here is that a lot of people are having milder reactions to gluten in their systems, and just generally feeling lousy most of the time, without ever being able to pinpoint the cause of their illness. InsuliteLabs.com weighs in again:

Eating gluten can cause inflammation in the sensitive mucous membranes of the intestinal lining which can trigger an immune response. Because of this immune reaction, individuals experience wide variations in symptoms such as rashes, fatigue, mental fog, behavioral disorders like hyperactivity in children, gastrointestinal symptoms such as constipation or diarrhea, chronic headaches and more.

All that is bad enough, but we haven’t even gotten to the childhood obesity connection yet. Gluten is also believed to be very addictive — as in food addiction, which by now has been well established as a real thing. The writer goes on to say:

Many individuals have increased food cravings as a reaction to consuming gluten, but are unaware of the reason for their desire to eat continuously or even out of control…. Due to the lack of specificity in identifying their disorder, many people continue to eat gluten for decades and struggle constantly with their food cravings.

Next up is Icelandic medical student Kristjan Gunnarsson. In the description of his book, Vicious Eating: The Food Addict’s Guide to Redemption, he writes: “I now haven’t touched sugar or gluten in over 6 months. I’ve lost ALL my excess weight with little effort and feel better than I ever have in my life.”

The Kris Health Blog discusses how wheat glutens form opioid peptides, which in the brain act just like heroin and morphine. Wheat, in fact, forms 4 types of opioid peptides. As it turns out, the blood-brain barrier is not much of a barrier at all, and those molecules can get through. Gunnarsson writes:

I believe that humans are able to become addicted to these substances. The process often starts in childhood, when kids are rewarded with candy when they behave well, contributing to psychological dependency as well. Judging from the above studies and personal experience, I think it is highly likely that junk food causes addiction in the brain of many people, causing them to become unable to change their diet despite wanting to.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Addiction to Carbohydrates and Gluten Often Underlies Excess Weight and Obesity,” InsuliteLabs.com
Source: “Junk food causes addiction in the brain,” Kris Health Blog, 03/25/11
Image by ilovebutter