CONTENTS Prologue One of the many bonds between my wife, Bonnie, and myself has long been the sturdy armor of skepticism we have both erected to protect us from the relentless onslaught of dietary, fashion, lifestyle, and spiritual fads, all directed toward creating a slimmer, bouncier, brighter-eyed, whiter-toothed, higher-functioning you and me--just the sort of evolved being we've both learned to dodge at cocktail parties. Over two decades we'd lived through the Atkins, Pritikin, Scarsdale, South Beach, Blood Type, Beverly Hills, Detox, Israeli Army, Cabbage Soup, and Grapefruit diets and emerged more or less intact. We'd survived break dancing, the Maharishi, Pet Rocks, Rubik's Cubes, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Beanie Babies, ant farms, granny glasses, lava lamps, leisure suits, strobe lights, and Tony Robbins. There have been scars but no damage to major organs including the cerebral cortex--or so I thought. Then came the Ayurvedic retreat. Bonnie and three female friends disappeared into the hills near Calistoga in Napa County one December morning for a weekend of intense spa treatments. Returning home, my wife made an announcement. "I have a gluten neck," she said. Her first words. I waited for the punch line. None followed. Apparently two male Ayurvedic practitioners, who work on you as a team--I know how this sounds--performed their tandem bodywork on Bonnie. She said she half-expected to be massaged by a guru with a white goatee and a turban. The ancient Indian practice of Ayurvedic medicine, she understood, dates back more than twenty-five hundred years and stresses the balance of three internal doshas --water, fire, and air. Beneath the exotic nomenclature is an emphasis on a healthy body-mind connection, a smooth-running metabolism, and an unimpeded digestive system. "One of the bodyworkers dug his knuckles into the kinks in my neck and shoulders and after a minute he just stopped," Bonnie reported. "He told me, 'There's very little I can do for you until you stop eating gluten. Your upper torso is so inflamed that if you sincerely want to see change, you'll have to take gluten out of your diet.' And I am, starting now." This was not the punch line I expected. The first items to disappear from our kitchen pantry were pumpernickel, crusty sourdough with its spongy interior, and every other form of wheat-based, chewy, delicious bread and bagel. In their place a whole cast of pretenders moved in like squatters, bearing no resemblance to the authentic original--loaves begging to be called bread yet made from tapioca, rice, sorghum, potato, cornstarch, and flour; crackers and cookies and other assorted dry, brittle wannabe edibles that I snipped off with my front teeth like slivers of seasoned cardboard and attempted to crunch into bite-size units capable of being swallowed. Whether eating non-gluten pizza, pastry, or ersatz pasta, the experience of savoring and chewing anything springy and doughy soon became a nostalgic memory at best, the way that bright sun glows only in dim recollections of characters in bleak postapocalyptic novels. Nothing remained of the heady scent, elasticity, and buoyant texture I associate with leavened wheat. What I'm eating isn't food, I decided: it is punishment for running the occasional red light and sins I've yet to commit. You may wonder why I didn't stock up on a gluten-rich grain trove of my own in self-defense. Spousal loyalty had something to do with it--Bonnie was committed to her new regimen--but beyond that, I began on my own to investigate the current print, social, and broadcast media assaults on wheat, and they were both voluminous and daunting. Gluten, all agreed, was Satan's spawn. Characterizing wheat as a "healthy whole grain" constitutes "colossally bad advice," Dr. William Davis proclaimed in Wheat Belly . It is "among the biggest health blunders ever made in the history of nutritional science." If consuming refined white flour was comparable to smoking unfiltered Camels, he added, eating whole grains was no healthier than inhaling filtered cigarettes. The basic argument, by now familiar to one and all, goes something like this: gluten, a complex protein found in wheat, rye, and barley, triggers a variety of inflammatory and digestive reactions while the carb content in grain spikes blood glucose and, as a result, promotes insulin resistance, deposits visceral fat, and contributes to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and a host of inflammatory disorders, one of the most severe being celiac disease. That autoimmune reaction in about 1 percent of the population severely damages the small intestine and leaks unwanted bacteria into the blood system. While no cure exists, it can be accurately diagnosed and negative effects can be avoided by refraining from eating wheat, rye, and barley in any form. For the vast majority of us, however, the alleged culprit is non-celiac gluten sensitivity, a more elusive and widespread condition. While it does no damage to our intestinal walls, gluten sensitivity is said to play havoc with our systems in the myriad ways listed above. Hunger cravings, joint pain, and constipation round out gluten's rap sheet. Closer to home, my wife and dozens of others I talked to, men and women, reported an increase in mental clarity and sustained energy and less bloating as a result of abstaining from wheat. Weight loss figured in, but without the dramatic decreases reported by cardiologist Davis. While pondering the potential demise of our national grain, planted across fifty million acres of our heartland, I came across a startling statistic. Based on a survey by the marketing research NPD Group, Time magazine reported in early 2013 that just under 30 percent of one thousand respondents agreed with the statement: "I'm trying to cut back or avoid gluten in my diet." By extension, that penciled out to about one hundred million Americans who were reducing wheat intake or banishing it from the larder. What to make of the public's eager willingness to take Davis and company's demonization of the grain as gospel truth? If the non-gluten food phenomenon began as a niche movement a few years earlier, it was now reaching epidemic, critical-mass proportions. To me, wheat had become a grain convicted of bodily harm and sentenced to permanent exile without due process and benefit of counsel. Where exactly was the truth in all this? Who, for instance, was looking at wheat and gluten sensitivity in the larger context of trendy maladies and human nature, not to mention commodity and corporate profits? Having lived through numerous cycles of popular panaceas, I'd come to suspect that you and I are only too ready to take comfort and solace in unearthing a newly discovered source for what ails us, the less likely the better. And what could be less of a potential threat than wheat, the Breakfast of Champions? Who among us would not be thrilled to find relief from the anxiety of not knowing why we feel the way we do, especially if the answer turns out to be as close at hand as a baguette or cereal box? What part, if any, do hard evidence and common sense play in this scenario? My journalistic instincts, I noticed, had after a few weeks become fully engaged. Each new smear provoked an increasing desire on my part to hit the streets, follow leads, and snoop and badger as necessary in order to separate fact from fiction. I wanted to know why an edible as fundamental and ancient as wheat suddenly seemed toxic, and who, if anyone, was standing up for it. That journey took me from a heritage wheat grower in Massachusetts to mass-market wheat fields in Nebraska to a bread lab in Washington State, from a stint as an apprentice baker in Brooklyn to millers in Petaluma to a celiac medical symposium in Chicago to an annual conference for breadheads, and beyond. Grain of Truth is the result of this effort to explore the true nature of wheat today, absent the hysteria surrounding the grain. Given the unique circumstances of wheat's fall from grace as a wholesome, healthful food product, this book also looks at how that reversal of fortune is playing out among the country's largest wheat-based industries. At no time in our history has a major food staple endured such widespread public distrust. Wheat has become granum non grata from Whole Foods in Beverly Hills to mom-and-pop grocery shops in the blue-collar neighborhoods of Staten Island, where I've come upon tattered awnings prominently advertising the non-gluten, wheat-free selections within. If you're the wheat industry, I wondered, what do you do? Do you simply hunker down and wait for a backlash against the gluten backlash, or do you mount an aggressive public relations campaign to counter the avalanche of bad publicity? Companies like Post Foods and Pepperidge Farm seemed at first glance to be operating in an alternate universe. Entering "gluten" into the search field on their websites produced a one-line response: "Sorry, there are no results that match what you searched for." Others, like General Mills and Kellogg's, produced such offerings as "Chex-gluten-free" or "New Gluten-Free Rice Krispies," a staggering three hundred-plus non-gluten products from GM alone. Does that qualify as a capitulation to current opinion without a peep of protest? None seemed willing to defend wheat, bravely and boldly or even meekly, although traditionally it has comprised a significant share of their business. I sensed that somewhere cereal scientists were delving into the composition of gluten's amino-acid mysteries looking for ways to neutralize the molecule's most problematic properties. Little did I know I would indeed discover that research--in Italy. I saw my investigative charge quite simply as probing where necessary and seeking out experts--wheat growers, millers, bakers, bioscientists, nutritionists, and physicians--with credentials and insights that could be trusted to add perspective and help ferret out telling details that Davis and others possibly overlooked or chose to ignore. I quickly realized that there was much more to the story that remained yet untold. As one example, that long fermentation--the action of yeast and lactobacilli on flour that produces leavened sourdough--can play a crucial role in breaking down gluten proteins to make them more easily digestible and less disruptive. I also learned, much to my delight, that by focusing on white flour derived from nitrogen-boosted commodity grain, wheat's detractors skipped over the best part of the story, the remarkable array of flavors and tastes--as well as nutritional benefits--that wheat delivers when bred, farmed, and processed by local artisans to accentuate its strengths. An entire library of heritage wheats goes unexplored by the mainstream industry. And I trusted myself to tell the tale of wheat as an American icon. For all but the past few years this grain has been on a mythological hero's journey. It has fueled Olympic gold medalists and All-Stars who did exactly what their mothers told them to do: Eat your Wheaties! Amber waves of grain figure into the country's saga as indelibly as the soaring bald eagle, the Alamo, or Betsy Ross's stars and stripes. Nothing is as American as apple pie, and apple pie itself is nothing without the flaky wheat crust that caresses the warm, cinnamon-scented fruit filling from below and spans it from above in a latticework of diamond-shaped bands of golden baked wheat dough. Every copper penny through 1958 displayed a profile of Lincoln on its front and two wheat stalks on its reverse side. While both the president and the grain were instrumental in shaping the destiny of our country, those shafts alone symbolized prosperity, robust health, and thrift all at once--fundamental American goals and accepted virtues. It seemed only fitting that I keep a Lincoln penny in my pocket as I set out to explore wheat's economic and cultural heritage and its future prospects in turbulent times. These days a penny can't buy much, but this one inspired the kind of passionate curiosity that to me ranks as a currency beyond measure. 1 What's Up with Wheat? History celebrates the battlefield whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings' bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly. --Jean-Henri Fabre French Entomologist I'm still eating my Wheaties. That may single me out as the last man standing in America who isn't smart enough to avoid belly fat, premature dementia, skin rashes, stiff joints, insulin resistance, and a leaky gut by not giving up wheat. Eating that All-American cereal grain once marked me as a health-conscious guy intent on toning his muscles, slimming down, and adding the fiber that we all need to benefit digestion and elimination. Today it defines me as clueless and out of touch with some current medical and nutritionist thinking about the perils of ingesting what has come to be seen as a dangerous grain. Either I'm someone who chooses to ignore wheat's allegedly hazardous starch and gluten content, or I'm just a lunkhead who keeps up with the latest health guidance bulletins only to reject their advice. I see it a little differently. In fact, I'm puzzled that something as fundamental as wheat, a food source we've consumed for at least ten thousand years, suddenly seems toxic. It provides about 20 percent of the world's calories, as much as 45 percent of daily protein in many developing countries, and nourishes more people on earth than any other food. For better than a year I explored the world of American wheat and came away convinced that it isn't the grain, it's the way we grow and process it from seed to shelf that determines whether wheat supports or jeopardizes our basic health needs. That includes the methods used by farmers to fertilize and protect their plants from pests and weeds in the field and by our nation's large wheat-product manufacturers to transform the dried seeds into flour and then dough before baking. Nobody wants to hear that human intervention more than any other factor might be the source of the problem, if indeed there is one, with wheat, not when gluten-free products are predicted to rack up more than $15 billion in sales by 2016. But that's exactly the case. We've done a masterful job of designing machinery that feeds us the worst of wheat while stripping off the best of it, the plant's nutritious components, for animal feed. Scared Witless More on that to come, but first, a closer look at the bad rap on wheat. It's understandable that anyone browsing the Internet, picking up a magazine, roaming a bookstore, chatting with neighbors or friends over a latte, or tweeting online would come away with severe cereal paranoia. The assault has been relentless and, while various grains are culprits, wheat has been targeted because its seeds, or kernels, contain much more gluten than rye or barley, the two other grains with the same protein. Gluten, which provides food storage for the germinating seed, is actually a complex comprised of two amino-acid proteins, gliadin and glutenin, that bond to form long, tangled molecules. Its stickiness-- gluten comes from the Latin word for "glue"--adds elasticity and extensibility to wheat flour when mixed with water. The cohesion enables kneaded dough to stretch and hold its shape, a delicate compromise between strength and flexibility that gluten alone provides. Bakers, for that reason, depend on gluten to create structure and resilience in their bread doughs. With the addition of water, this amino-acid bead string produces a web matrix of dough, the crumb. Carbon dioxide, the escaping gas released as a yeast by-product, fills the air pockets--named alveoli, like the lung's balloon-like structures. That causes the crumb to swell inside the rising crust as it bakes. "Gluten," Michael Pollan has observed, "is the reason that wheat was able to conquer the planet." But we're not bakers, most of us, we're baked goods consumers, scared witless by the barrage of bad press surrounding these gluey molecules and the glucose-laden carbohydrate starch surrounding them. As might be predicted, many of the country's most famous and lauded chefs, including Mario Batali and the Michelin multi-starred super chef Thomas Keller, whose gastronomical empire ranges from The French Laundry in Napa to Per Se in New York to Bouchon at the Venetian in Las Vegas, have eagerly embraced the movement. Keller and one of his prizewinning pastry chefs created Cup4Cup, a gluten-free tapioca, brown rice, and potato flour blend sold at Williams-Sonoma at $20 for three pounds, a king's ransom. According to a restaurant survey quoted in a New Yorker article, in 2013 we ordered more than two hundred million gluten-free or wheat-free dishes. We didn't do that to enhance our enjoyment of flavor and texture. We did it more or less for the same reason that gluten-free dog biscuits--"keep veggie-loving pup tails waggin'"--now call up over two million search results on Google, that gluten-wary couples now use separate toaster and butter knives, and that gluten-free ocean cruises have gained a loyal following. We've been poleaxed by doomsday messages that warn us away from all things glutenized, not subtly or with qualifications. William Davis in Wheat Belly asserts that wheat has been "destroying more brains in this country than all the strokes, car accidents and head trauma combined." "The perfect poison," he calls it. "Eating wheat, like ice climbing, mountain boarding, and bungee jumping, is an extreme sport. It is the only common food that carries its own long-term mortality rate." In his best seller, Grain Brain , Dr. David Perlmutter claims that 40 percent of us cannot properly process gluten, and the remaining 60 percent may be in harm's way. But fear alone does not persuade so effectively without a reward for compliance, and in this instance it's the promise of weight loss. Lose the wheat, lose the weight. Books and blogs are crammed with testimonials, as in this excerpt that Dorothy, eighteen pounds lighter, posted on The Daily Dietribe : "OMG, I really can't believe it. I understood immediately, this Gluten Free Challenge is going to save my life. It's going to take me from 'surviving life' to living life again. It may even change my career path." As might be expected, the non-gluten expo and festival business is booming across the country. Wherever you live there is likely to be an event within a few weeks and a day's jaunt from your home, whether in West Palm Beach or Dallas, Ottawa or Calgary, Atlanta or Indianapolis, as well as scores of cities in between at all times of the year. Major markets are not the only venues. More than six thousand folks showed up at a one-day expo in Sandy, Utah, funded by General Mills, to chow down an enormous gluten-free pancake breakfast. Just about every food chain and food-and-entertainment enterprise in America today creates a special menu that caters to the wheatless. Disney's Liberty Tree Tavern at Magic Kingdom features a gluten-free version of the Pilgrim's Feast for Thanksgiving served in its Betsy Ross room. At last count there were close to a thousand gluten-free cookbooks listed on Amazon. Probable Cause Until a decade ago, hardly anyone outside the medical community knew anything about gluten intolerance and celiac disease, the severe autoimmune reaction to gluten that damages the intestinal lining; within that community the condition also remained largely unknown, even among many gastroenterologists. Today, when gluten intolerance has become a common talk-show topic, celebrities line up on both sides and launch verbal grenades at one another. The maxim that you are what you eat has been replaced by a gluten-free postscript. You are what you don't eat. While total intolerance to gluten has been on the rise for past fifty years, celiac disease is still too rare, affecting 1 in 133 or less than 1 percent of the general population, to ignite this phenomenon on its own. People who count themselves as victims of gluten may experience abdominal and joint pain, fatigue, fogginess, bloating, diarrhea, and headaches--symptoms of celiac disease but absent the intestinal lining damage that leads to life-threatening malnutrition. Those much more common complaints have been linked to non-celiac gluten sensitivity, NCGS. Unlike celiac disease, for which there are biomarkers, or reliable indicators, gluten sensitivity has yet to show up in any surefire diagnosable form in medical tests. For the time being that leaves self-diagnosis as the only other option. While experts do not discount the connection between probable cause and effect, there is still no firm data. A comprehensive clinical study at the University of Maryland found that 6 percent of patients--347 of 5,896--waiting to be seen at the university hospital self-reported gluten-sensitivity symptoms. Through 2014, this was the most reliable information on its frequency. Guesswork still trumps blood work. Given all the media and popular attention, I was surprised to discover the science on sensitivity to be more confusing than enlightening. To complicate matters, a year or so ago another country was heard from, as my grandfather might have remarked. Its official name is FODMAPS, which I choose to call Fodmaps because, well, talking or writing in ALL CAPS seems rude. I'll spare you any long-winded explanation for the moment and pick up the subject again after a closer look at gluten intolerance--celiac disease--and gluten sensitivity, but it's worth pointing out that a growing number of medical researchers now believe some symptoms associated with sensitivity may in fact emanate from the carbohydrates found in dozens of fruits and vegetables as well as wheat and other grains. Those sugars, or Fodmaps, an acronym for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols, are poorly digested and may cause many if not all of the intestinal problems ascribed to gluten sensitivity. I see your eyes glazing over, so enough at present. Who needs a long cheat sheet? We're Americans. We want a quick-fix, one-stop, silver-bullet diet. If it involves a dollop of self-sacrifice, so be it, as long as it leaves the steak on the plate and doesn't require memorizing a dictionary-length list of verboten foods. That's gluten. One word, three grains, no homework. We can do that. And indeed we do: about one in three of us buys into the idea that a life without wheat in it is a life worth living, especially when we can drop pounds and count celebs like Russell Crowe, Oprah, Lady Gaga, Gwyneth Paltrow, Miley Cyrus, and Novak Djokovic on our side. But don't show up with a platter of gluten-free brownies at the homes of two leading actresses, Jennifer Lawrence and Charlize Theron, both ardent campaigners for real food, carbs, and gluten included. Theron told talk-show host Chelsea Handler, "I just think that if you are gonna send a gift, let it be enjoyable. Why send me a fucking cupcake with no sugar in it? What's the use? There's no use. It tastes like cardboard!" And Lawrence raised more than a few hackles when she weighed in during a Vanity Fair interview on the gluten-free epidemic. She called it "the new, cool eating disorder." Eating a daily regimen of my own gluten-rich sourdough bread resulted in perfect health, dropped weight, high sustained energy, and a feeling of satiation without bloating. My personal takeaway--and eventually my wife's as well--is that I more or less blundered into a life-changing writing project. It propelled me to investigate and befriend a food source that nourishes, slims, energizes, and tastes great: sourdough breads. I'm getting ahead of myself slightly, I know, but just enough to let you know there is indeed a silver lining in the Jennifer Lawrence pro-gluten playbook, and its name is long-fermented dough. The Human Factor At a slightly higher level of discourse, or not, the anti-gluten medical contingent continues to wade in. All lines between professional probity and media hucksterism have long been erased. William Davis regularly shows up as a cruise ship headliner and in Dr. Oz's Kitchen. Neurologist David Perlmutter takes over a ninety-minute PBS special, Brainchange , which "blows the lid off a topic that's been buried in medical literature for far too long: carbs are destroying your brain." Wheat, he argues, stimulates the formation of inflammatory cytokines--molecular message proteins that block production of critical neurotransmitters like serotonin. We're lucky if we can still put sentences together. A regular columnist at the Huffington Post , Mark Hyman, MD, claims that wheat contains a "super drug, super gluten and super starch" that drive "obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and more." He promotes corrective shakes and snacks and detox diets that, no coincidence, he sells at his Healthy Living Store on the Internet. Hyman caught the public's attention when he labeled anything with wheat in it--about one third of all the products in a supermarket--"Frankenfoods." Is it possible that so many experts, supported by abundant scientific references in their books and speaking with such conviction and certainty, can be wrong? Absolutely. For the first few months of my research I bought into their full-throttle assaults, then slowly but surely I became aware that they weren't telling me the whole truth. The critical flaw, I learned, is not so much what these medical and other authorities have to say but what they leave out of their arguments. Us. Our involvement. In whole form, a wheat kernel is no health menace except to celiacs. We've created a huge milling and baking industry that produces refined flour with so little nutritional value that vitamins and minerals have to be injected back into it, yet industrial milling gets no mention in the index of Wheat Belly and other broadsides. While wheat was first domesticated from wild grass in an area that extends from Syria to Turkey, the Fertile Crescent, at least ten thousand years ago and probably long before that, not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did technology become available to quickly and efficiently strip off the outer coat of the seed, the fibrous bran, and the seed's embryo, its germ, in order to mill white flour in massive quantities from its starchy center, or endosperm. Throughout history white endosperm flour has always been favored for its powdery texture, versatility, and easy digestion. Since the absence of lipids, or fats, greatly prolongs its shelf life, white flour--unlike whole-grain--has been equally valued for its durability. For that reason in the days before refrigeration it became a vital food source on wagon trains and long ocean voyages. That engineering breakthrough led to the production of commercial white bread at low cost, available to one and all and until then an unaffordable luxury; food manufacturers sold it with little or no awareness of the grave health consequences it presented to consumers. Not until World War II, sixty years later, were measures taken to address the vitamin and mineral deficiencies caused by these grain-milling methods. They caught the government's attention only when 40 percent of the raw recruits drafted by our military proved to be so malnourished that they could not pass a physical and were declared unfit for duty. Nutritionists pointed to empty-calorie white bread as a primary cause as they had for decades, without making inroads. Before long, an enrichment protocol was put into practice. Commercial dough today is routinely loaded with conditioners and additives designed to shortcut natural processes and to function effortlessly with the machines that produce it. In the blink of an eye, fast fermentation transforms flour into packaged loaves and rolls. Industrial bakers now add a potent form of gluten--the powdered concentrate called vital gluten--to thousands of foods from cookies to cakes to lunch snacks and cosmetic products as a binder and thickener. It strengthens dough and helps to precipitate a quick rise of bread as it ferments, which accounts for its wide usage. If we're eating more gluten than ever, as we are, it is because manufacturers have upped the dosage. Breeding experts I talked to report that despite claims to the contrary, modern wheat does not contain an increased percentage of gluten in its endosperm. Wheat's most vocal adversaries argue that it does and that the gluten proteins have mutated over the last sixty years--frightening assertions, to be sure. On closer inspection, I found these assertions to be based on sketchy evidence that respected scientists in the field dismiss. Wheat's enemies also ignore an approach to growing, processing, and baking that improves its appeal and its health benefits. They do not take into account fresh whole-grain alternatives available in specialty chains like Whole Foods. Those sourdough and other baked goods, created by a burgeoning local artisan community around the country, contain a full complement of nutritive components and fiber. Many consumers with gluten sensitivity complaints report that they eat these products and experience no negative reaction, not a surprise since scientific studies show that microbes produced by long sourdough fermentation, the artisan approach, prove effective in breaking down and neutralizing gluten molecules. These breads and pastries also belie the notion that 100 percent whole wheat is too dense and bitter to be palatable. In later chapters I'll circle back to the artisan movement from field to store shelf. For now, the simple point to be made is that the subject is glossed over by the death-to-gluten hit squads. I learned again and again during my research that the way our bodies respond to wheat has everything to do with how we cultivate and process it, for better or worse. Soldiers of Science Whether or not justified, wheat bashing has become a national sport. You have to shout above the roar of the crowd in these cacophonous times to be heard, which pretty much rules out wheat's defenders. They tend to go about their business quietly as medical professionals, researchers, and academics offering thoughtful analysis in technical, often turgid papers, away from the spotlight. Unlike Davis, they don't generally pepper their oratory with memorably vivid figures of speech, as in equating wheat eating to bungee jumping or cigarette smoking. It's Fox News versus PBS, and we all know who gets the higher ratings. But these are the soldiers of science who do the unglamorous work of probing into our microbial universe to explore connections and determine verifiable cause-and-effect relationships. One in particular, Julie Miller Jones, professor emerita of food and nutrition at St. Catherine University in Minneapolis-St. Paul, looked over the brief against wheat as presented in the popular press and came away so dismayed by misstatements in Wheat Belly that she put together a twenty-two-page, point-by-point refutation of the book's central arguments. She supported her analysis with 116 references. Unless you subscribe to Cereal Foods World , you are unlikely to have come upon it. These journals, with limited circulation, rarely get noticed outside a small community of fellow health professionals. Jones, an LN (licensed nutritionist) who specializes in cereal grains and advises the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), surgically dissected Wheat Belly 's core arguments. "The facts Davis presents about central obesity are true and warrant concern," she wrote. "What is not true is that wheat causes this condition and the elimination of wheat will cure this condition." As one among many examples, she lays waste to Davis's assertion that wheat is "the world's most destructive dietary ingredient" because during digestion it breaks down into peptides, short chains of amino-acid proteins, that "bind to the brain's morphine receptor, the very same receptor to which opiate drugs bind." He calls them exorphins, as in external endorphins. As such, he claims, they cause compulsive hunger urges--an uncontrollable appetite for more of the same carbs that are sending us to an early grave--and they trigger withdrawal symptoms when withheld. Wheat, he adds, is unique among foods in creating that addiction. Not so, says Jones, among many others. Davis is citing thirty-five-year-old research performed on cell tissue cultures that ascribed exactly the same opium-like effects to milk, soy, spinach, and rice. The researchers treated mouse organs directly with purified opiods, a process not related to consuming and digesting food. No human subjects were involved. Further gut-brain feedback studies, not mentioned by Davis, came to exactly the opposite conclusion, that these foods produce a sensation of fullness, not hunger. A research group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, publishing in the Journal of Cereal Science , jumped all over Davis's contention that your wheat-addicted brain programs you to eat 400 more calories over two meals in order to restimulate those feelings of euphoria. Said the Dutch scientists: "There is no data available to substantiate this suggestion." They titled their exhaustive overview, "Does Wheat Make Us Fat or Sick?" Their resounding answer: no and no. Appearing on CBS This Morning to make his opium-like-addiction case to Charlie Rose, Davis incited the wrath of Dr. Stefano Guandalini, founder and medical director of the Celiac Disease Center at the University of Chicago and one of the country's leading experts in the field. Guandalini took to Facebook to denounce Davis for basing his evidence on unreliable, dated experiments conducted only on rodents. He criticized CBS for not allowing a qualified expert--like, well, Guandalini himself--to debate the cardiologist on camera, for which he got blasted at once on the Wheat Belly blog. "Among the most ignorant about wheat? Celiac experts!" Davis headlined his blistering counterattack. But just when it seemed that these two were about to square off on a special doc-versus-doc edition of WWE Friday Night SmackDown , Guandalini bowed out. A few months later in conversation at the International Celiac Disease Symposium he hosted in Chicago, he told me that he made that decision because he couldn't afford the time; he had more important things to do. Davis, by contrast, was pumped for a public brawl. Your Brain on Gluten? One of the first things I wanted to clear up with Jones when we spoke was any potential conflict of interest. I noted that she is also listed as a scientific adviser to the Grain Foods Foundation, funded by the American baking industry. Was she being paid to take on Davis? "No. I tell [the foundation] when data says there is a problem that they need to be concerned about," she responded. "I am there to give good nutritional advice. Throughout my career I have tried to bust nutrition myths and fads and promote general good diets. For Wheat Belly , I tried to be as dispassionate as possible." In her paper she points out that Davis makes some right calls. Wheat, as he says, is an allergen. Baker's asthma--caused by the constant presence of flour particles in the air--has been known since Roman times. Allergies are frequently related to the seed storage proteins in gluten. Carbohydrates do indeed increase small, dense LDL (low-density-lipoprotein) cholesterol particles, a potential cardiovascular disease risk, and removal of gluten may reduce the rate of type 1 diabetes. But, she said, "what really kills me with this diet is that it asks people to give up an important source of fiber in wheat bran. As it is, only 4 percent of Americans meet the recommended daily requirement for dietary fiber, and if you're a male between fourteen to fifty, not even 1 percent. I can take any chronic disease endpoint that plagues us--coronary disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hypertension--and if I compare those people with high fiber intake with those who are at the average of less than half an ounce, your risk of all those diseases and total mortality is reduced by at least 20 percent. The data are overwhelming. One of the things fiber does is control the release of glucose into the bloodstream so you don't see those spikes in blood sugar." Miller's point is taken up in another context by pediatrician and medical geneticist Ayala Laufer-Cahana. "What Davis left out," she says, "is that glycemic load matters much more than any glycemic index number--that is, how much of the food you're eating, and if you're eating it by itself. You're more likely to consume bread as part of a larger meal, with numerous other servings of food, so you're substantially lowering its glycemic load, and slowing the rate of absorption into your bloodstream. On the other hand, if you're drinking a soda you're drinking pretty much pure sugar; 80-plus percent of it is glucose. There's a significant difference." Dr. Ayala, as she's known to her Huffington Post readers, reserves most of her anger for Davis's "sweeping polemic against something so central as bread to our culture" without any real proof. His book, she says, is "baseless." "Cultivating edible grain like wheat is probably one of the most important things in the development of the modern human. If not for that we'd still be hunting and gathering. In many ways it's one of the most miraculous things that people ever invented." It's a reasonable guess that Jones, an animated, down-to-earth woman with an engaging laugh, would agree. The scientific details of her rebuttal I'll spare you. Her strongest argument is that Davis, not the first scientist to play loose with facts, cherry-picks and distorts research papers to build his case. She leans on her years spent working with obese patients to make a convincing argument that calorie reduction in general, not the removal of wheat or any other single ingredient from a diet, helps cure many of the conditions from rashes to diabetes that medical authors link solely to gluten. David Perlmutter in Grain Brain , meanwhile, takes a position even more extreme than Davis. He likens eating gluten to drinking gasoline and charges wheat with escalating a host of medical problems. He cites a New England Journal of Medicine article in which a researcher concludes, "Higher glucose levels may be a risk factor in dementia" and transforms that instantly into "Brain dysfunction starts in your daily bread, and I'm going to prove it. I'll state it again because I know it sounds absurd: Modern grains are silently destroying your brain." He indicts all grains--whole, multigrain, stone-ground, sprouted. What Davis and Perlmutter share, aside from a large readership, is an aversion to 15-mile-an-hour reduced speed zones when they're thundering down the Diatribe Autobahn at 140 mph to drive home their points. They don't slow for debatable evidence or brake for inconvenient truths. This petal-to-the-metal approach ticks off scores of health professionals who spend much of their time and talent creeping inch by inch through complex, often inconclusive data to search out science that can stand up to close scrutiny, all in an effort to help their patients. Straddling media and medicine with agility is Dr. David Katz, a leading integrative medical practitioner and founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center. In an article in The Atlantic by Dr. James Hamblin, "This Is Your Brain on Gluten," Katz lays into Perlmutter: "I also find it sad that because his book is filled with a whole bunch of nonsense, that's why it's a bestseller; that's why we're talking. Because that's how you get on the bestseller list. You promise the moon and stars, you say everything you heard before was wrong, and you blame everything on one thing. You get a scapegoat; it's classic." Katz told me after the article was published that he's worked with Perlmutter and respects him as a physician, but that there is no substance to his arguments. Foggy-Brained Glutenites The GF (gluten-free) insignia itself has leapt over semantic boundaries by now to become code language for the trim-at-heart. In a New Yorker cartoon a woman tells her friend over lunch, "I've only been gluten-free for a week but I'm already annoying." When people announce minutes after we've been introduced at a dinner party that they're gluten-free, I get the feeling they expect me to applaud and congratulate them for being sleek specimens willing to forgo every pleasure from Cronuts, that mash-up of croissant and doughnut, to linguine vongole in pursuit of a healthier, thinner, laser-brained persona. But they've picked the wrong guy. It's against my nature as a die-hard Triscuit junkie to trash wheat and praise virtuous behavior like excessive self-discipline. Instead I'm more apt to goad them. "What exactly is gluten?" I ask. "Oh, you know, it's the thing in wheat that makes you fat," I'm most likely to get back as a response. "But isn't that the carb content? Gluten isn't a carb, it's a protein." "Oh, well, then it's . . . believe me, I'm never going anywhere near it again, ever, and so shouldn't you." Most of the time I back off, but every so often, and more often more recently, I run into someone so smug and clueless that I pull out my iPhone and play a now-classic Jimmy Kimmel clip. "A lot of people don't eat gluten because someone in their yoga class told them not to," Kimmel tells his late-night audience by way of introducing the "Pedestrian Question" segment. "I keep wondering, how many of these people even know what gluten is?" To find out, his woman on the street interviews young males and females at a nearby gym who all maintain a gluten-free diet. "What is gluten?" she asks. Excerpted from Grain of Truth: The Real Case for and Against Wheat and Gluten by Stephen Yafa All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.