Weekly Weigh In: Is wheat bad for you?

This week, an interesting article was brought to my attention about something I consume on the daily: wheat. 

[I want to note that I'm not going to talk about gluten-free diets or celiac disease. This is something new.]

Dr. Williams Davis is a cardiologist and author of the blog and the book Wheat Belly. We usually see whole wheat and we think "great this is good for us!" but according to Dr. Williams, it's not. He says that there is a new protein called glaidin. 

Now what the heck is a gliadin? I don't know about you guys, but when someone launches into the scientific side of food, I kind of tune out. But, for the sake of this blog post and my health (as I'm trying to lose and maintain a desired weight...and my diet consists of a lot of grains), I thought I'd give it a shot.

I spent a few minute looking up gliadin on Wiki and reading some other articles from Dr. Williams on his blog. I have gathered that gliadins have similar properties as opiates and can cause appitite increase. I think this is slightly alarming because so much of our diets include wheat. If Dr. Williams is onto something, I wonder what our society could do about it.

In the interview/article, Dr. Williams points out that not all wheat is 'bad' for you. He says "the wheat we eat these days isn't the wheat your grandma had." The wheat we see now in our breads, cereals and pastas is a wheat that was made during the 60's and 70's, and if I'm correct, it's a GMO wheat. Alarming, no?

Wheat.

Don't you think we could adjust our wheat crops to be more like the good, ol'fashion stuff? We could, says Dr. Williams, but it's not really that feisable. 'Real' wheat, as I'm going to call it, yeilds less per acre then the other stuff. So we can all see the problems in this.

So here are my questions: does this link up with all the other conerns rising now-a-days with GMO's, Monsanto seed, fertilizer, chemicals, etc? It would make sense, wouldn't it?

To me, it seems like we've made this wheat, something that grows fast and yeilds a good size crop. It looked great at first, but eventually the health effects start showing their face. Maybe that's why there has been an increasing number of gluten diets and compagns against wheat. Maybe it wasn't just a fad after all.

I've been toying with the idea of trying a gluten free diet, just because I know gluten problems run in my family and I've noticed over the past couple years that I feel strange after eating but have yet to whittle down to what it is. I guess the hard part would be to ween myself off bread...and pasta...and tortillas...and cereal...and cake...and flour...oh my goodness, that sounds hard!

But maybe it's worth it. This is def worth some more investigation!

What are your thoughts on gliadins and the 'new' wheat?

Have you tried gluten free before? What results did you see?

Have you heard of this problem before?