Read Online Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox by William Davis - Free Book Online Page B

up your weight-loss efforts. They often tell us that if a high-GI food is consumed with added proteins, fats, or fiber, the glycemic effect will be reduced. As often occurs in the fictional tales of nutrition, this is an example of something being less bad but not necessarily good. A typical blood sugar after consuming two slices of multigrain bread on an empty stomach might be 170 mg/dL—high enough to provoke insulin, cortisol, insulin resistance, visceral fat accumulation, and inflammation. Consume two slices of multigrain bread with some slices of turkey, mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomatoes, and blood sugar will be around 160 mg/dL—better, yes, but still pretty high.
    Less bad is not necessarily good. The wolf can wear Grandma’s nightie, but he’s still a big, bad, ugly wolf.
    If you are worried about your cholesterol, know that the majority of people will experience a reduction in the LDL (bad) cholesterol with this lifestyle, along with plummeting triglycerides and a rise in healthy HDL. Eating fats and oils normalizes these predictors of cardiovascular risk. (A full discussion of the why behind these changes, and why and how a low-fat diet ruins health and booby-traps cardiovascular risk, can be found in both the original
Wheat Belly
and in
Wheat Belly Total Health
.)
    If we are going to increase our intake of fats and oils, it also means avoiding foods labeled “low-fat” or “nonfat.” These terms mean high carbohydrate and high sugar and also serve as buzzwords for grains. Yes, conventional notions of healthy foods with reduced fat have not just wasted our time, but disposed of any control we may have hoped for in weight and health. Have nothing to do with them. If you consume dairy products, for instance, pour the fat-free, 1%, or 2% milk down the drain and go for the full fat or cream. No light coconut milk; we want the thickest, fattiest variety.
    We also avoid hydrogenated fats, or trans fats, a common ingredient in processed foods, especially grain-based foods, as they contribute to heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. Margarine is the worst, made with vegetable oils hydrogenated to yield a solid stick or tub form. Many processed foods, from cookies to sandwich spreads, contain hydrogenated oils and should be avoided for this and other reasons. Use real organic butter or ghee instead (if you include dairy).
    Despite our embrace of fats and oils, you should not interpret this to mean that foods deep-fried in oils are healthy. They are not. But it’s not so much the fat as the high-temperature reactions that occur in deep-fried foods, even healthy foods, especially if polyunsaturated oils like corn are used. Because of the health-impairing effects of the by-products from high-temperature cooking, we avoid or at least minimize any food that is deep-fried.
    There are a few additional tips that are useful for managing carbohydrate intake.
    ABSOLUTELY AVOID GLUTEN-FREE FOODS MADE WITH CORNSTARCH, RICE FLOUR, TAPIOCA STARCH, OR POTATO FLOUR. These are the four ingredients most commonly used in gluten-free processed foods. They are awful for health and will completely shut down any hope of weight loss, often resulting in outright, sometimes outrageous, weight gain and inflammation. Managing carbohydrates to improve control over metabolism and health means 100 percent avoidance of these terrible products marketed to an unsuspecting public thinking they are eating healthy by avoiding gluten.
    Nothing raises blood sugar higher than the gluten-free junk carbohydrates in, say, gluten-free multigrain bread or gluten-free pasta—higher than even table sugar. Blood sugar that results from eating two slices of whole grain gluten-free bread made with potato flour, rice flour, and millet can easily top 180 mg/dL (in those without diabetes) over the first hour after consumption, regardless of the mayonnaise, meat, cheese, or other foods in the sandwich. There are indeed some food