Whole Wheat: Will it kill us all?

The Enemy?

December 29, 2013:

I got burned by the low fat diet craze. Growing up in the 80's, low fat foods were everything. Fat was the devil. Calorie counting was so 1970's. Behind the times.  Avoiding fat was everything.  Brands like "Snack Wells" flourished.

Low fat had a pretty long run. It dominated the "health news" reporting for much of the nineties. Product labels were scrutinized for fat content. We learned how to calculate fat as a percentage of calories. We choked down low-fat ice cream and low-fat peanut butter.

Then along came Atkins and South Beach, and now carbs were the devil and fat was a friend. Minds were blown. Low-fat slid lower on the labels and instead we counted "net carbs." Then Atkins ran its course, and we waited for whatever was next.

What's next appears to be wheat.

The hope is--that as part of our media analysis--we may be able to watch a new diet trend from birth to death. Americans long for the magical cure, the silver bullet that will strike down all of our dietary woes at once. This author suspects that the anti-wheat trend may go the way of low-fat and Atkins and South Beach.

To be clear, cutting wheat may be the key to good health. This author is not a doctor and this post is an exploration of health reporting, not medical advice. Millions of people (roughly 1% of Americans) do have serious gluten related issues such as Celiac. 

But for the rest of us, there's one big lingering question. If each one of these diet methods--calorie counting, low-fat, low-carb, wheat/gluten free--is the key to good health and controlling obesity, then why is there always a new method that comes along???


The answer comes in two parts.  The first is the logical fallacy known as the Appeal to Novelty. Novelty means new, and we are prone to equate new with better, when it's not always true.

The news media lives for novelty, though. New trends, new facts, new discoveries drive viewership and website clicks and social media sharing. When a new diet trend comes along, the media is all over it.

The second is the marketing by book publishers.  Dr. Atkins had a book (and it was called the "New Diet Revolution," novelty anybody?), and then the South Beach Diet had a book. More recently, there have been several books on the Paleo Diet.

People did lose weight using these methods.  The low-carb, high fat dieting methods pushed by Atkins and South Beach have fallen out of favor though. The focus now is on wheat.

The current anti-wheat movement seems to have sprung from a combination of a recent diet called The Paleo Diet and an increased awareness and focus on gluten intolerance and Celiac disease.

As of this writing, the book Grain Brain: The Surprising [new]Truth about . . . Your Brain's Silent Killers is number two on the New York Times Bestseller List and the book Wheat Belly has been selling well since 2011 and has been featured on Dr. Oz and CBS news.

The author of Grain Brain is a medical doctor who claims that wheat and other grain are causing things like Alzeheimer's and other neurological disorders.  The author of Wheat Belly is also a medical doctor who claims that wheat is as addictive as crack.

Are these claims true? Is modern, hybridized wheat killing us all? Let the investigations begin.