Wheat book!

SO I REMEMBER saying that I was going to start telling you all about some bits of info I get from reading 'Wheat Belly'.

Been an awesome book to get into - probably a bit geeky with the sciency type stuff and probably why alot of people I know wouldn't read it. Gets a bit too in depth with that stuff - not that it's a bad thing cause I like to know exactly why and how things work in the body and all the biochem and sciency terms are familiar to me..
However for most people that stuff is straight up boring or just frustrating cause they get lost in it - unless they already have some background in it.
So what I have thought about doing is trying to put some of the principles into some more easily understandable terms....

So here a a few things I have learnt so far...

A.
Wheat (the kind of wheat we have today which has been changed from days of old remember) spikes your blood glucose more than table sugar does! All of you current diabetics could try it for yourself by taking your blood glucose before and then 10-15 minutes after eating a couple of slices of bread.
How is that you say? Well wheat is really fast at breaking down into glucose. Wheat is made of lots of glucose bits stuck together like any other carbohydrate but has an amazing ability to break down to the glucose molecule - and so can do it faster than other carbohydrate foods.


B.
The constant high spikes in the blood glucose levels in your blood (from always eating those foods that break down really quickly into glucose), causes all kinds of problems with your arteries and that means heart disease.

You may well think "how can foods that have virtually no triglycerides (fat) in them, make me fat?"

Well, for those of you that really want to know, this is how.

1. Foods that cause high spikes in blood glucose trigger insulin the most.

2. High insulin levels in the blood triggers your liver to convert sugars into triglycerides and then packs heaps of those triglycerides into VLDLs (very low density lipoprotein). By the way that is how things are intended to work because it is how we would store away excess calories to use later (when food was not so abundant as it is now).


3. These big VLDLs start bumping into stuff along the bloodstream journey and can become small LDLs or large LDLs. So the more VLDL in your blood means lots of small LDL particles too since VLDL is like the parent of these large and small LDLs.


4. Lots of small LDL particles cause heart disease because they are what contribute to clogged arteries. These are the main cause of heart disease, NOT cholesterol! In fact cholesterol is what your body is using to try and repair the artery damage being done by these small LDLs.

C.
The 'heart healthy' carbohydrates are actually bad guys undercover. They have been given the healthy heart tick and we might think they are good for us because of the fibre in it or the omega-3/flax oil fats or the vitamin enriched products they make now BUT none of these can erase the adverse effects of the wheat - the main ingredient in these products. It will still trigger the high blood sugar and the rest of the story above through to the increased small LDLs which cause heart disease - not to mention the exorphin release and inflammatory responses our bodies have to wheat and its products. But that is another story - maybe next week...

OK I'm off to eat some real food at Sunday Roast!
PS. and so are the kids lol -I'm sure it will be their favourite place soon too!!