Are You White? Wheat Is Why.

Proof of Wheat's Human Toxicity.

By Fintan Dunne, 18th Nov, 2013 

There's been some backlash against the growing public focus on the role of wheat in gut-related inflammation and autoimmune disorders. 

Especially since Dr. Will Davis penned "Wheat Belly," and raised the profile of this largely unrecognized killer.

Critics admit that wheat gluten drives celiac disease, but argue that the condition is relatively rare, linked to a specific genotype and not a concern for the broader population.

Here's compelling evidence otherwise. 

Wheat has more toxic content than just the gluten 'gliadin' implicated in celiac disease. It also contains tiny lectins called wheat germ agglutinin (WGA). If you are white in skin tone, it is the WGA in wheat which helped give your forbears and you that distinctive pale pallor!

Allow me back that up.

Broadly speaking, racial skin tone lightens as one moves away from the equatorial lattitudes towards the poles. People living at the same latitude around the globe - have a similar tone - lightening towards the pole. It's axiomatic, almost. Because there is one very curious anomaly. 

We observe that Scandanavian and Nothern Germanic people have a very white palor. However, at similar or even higher latitude, the Inuit people of the Artic Circle and the Sami of Lapland --have much darker tone!


Understanding why ends up being unexpectedly informative. 

Frank W Sweet is an expert in racial history who has examined the Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone.

He describes how early Northern Europeans in the Baltic Sea region switched their diet from vitamin-D-rich meat, to vitamin-D-deficient grain. 

As a result, to compensate for the missing Vitamin D, over generations we would expect natural selection to give them lighter skin which would make more vitamin D from the extra sunlight.

Even as Northern Europeans adopted grain, by contrast 
the Inuit and Sami remained on a meat diet and they 
retained their natural skin pallor.

DEVIL IN THE DETAIL

But besides that switch from meat to wheat and other grains, there was another deadly driver of their intensifying paleness. 

Paleolitic diet proponent, Dr. Loren Cordain, of Colorado State University, has investigated the biochemistry of all this. 

His team's found that the WGA in wheat actually renders vitamin D inoperative!

Here's an extract from Dr. Cordain's correspondence with racial historian Sweet:

Wheat contains an antinutrient called wheat germ agglutinin (WGA).... a lectin that binds cellular glycoproteins. Once in the gut, WGA binds to a luminal facing hormone receptor called the epidermal growth factor receptor ( EGF-R ). Upon binding the EGF-R, WGA is internalized and this trancytotic pathway is how WGA penetrates the gut barrier which normally prevents almost all intact proteins entry into the body.  Once in gut cells (enterocytes) WGA gains access to the circulation via the lymph and is not removed from circulation by the liver or by gamma globulins.  Hence, within an hour of consumption WGA is found in plasma in physiological meaningful concentrations (as high as 5ug/ml). Because EGF-R are found on virtually all cells in the body, WGA now can enter the cellular compartment of all cells in the body. Once within cells, WGA wreaks more havoc by binding a structure called the nuclear pore and thereby impedes or prevents the cytosolic transport of the vitamin D receptor and its ligand (1,25 hydroxyvitamin D3) to the nucleus which results in impaired vitamin D utilization and systemically will result in rickets if high dietary levels of whole wheat are chronically consumed.  In adult females rickets ...dramatically increases mortality during childbirth. Hence, the adoption of whole wheat staples in Neolithic Northern European populations represented a powerful selection pressure which caused natural selection to chose genes which could overcome the rachitogenic effects of whole wheat.

WGA has a half-life of four hours, according to Dr Cordain at the recent gluten Summit, so if you sunbathe after eating wheat, and nibble wheat snacks through day, the Vitamin D your skin makes is blocked from benefiting you. 

When you consider that sunlight levels in Northern Europe are relatively low and that the wheat was blocking absorption of what little Vitamin D there was, the resultant (rather futile) further whitening of their skins was a certainty.

Let's be clear. Natural selection is a question of life and death. Dark skinned adult females got more rickets and saw dramatically raised mortality during childbirth.

It would be premature to lay all the blame at the door of WGA alone. But there is a strong case that moden "whites" would be significantly browner - without wheat.

Don't doubt wheat's toxicity. It's effect on humans was strong enough to help drive a wholesale skin color change change across vast populations. That's how natural selection works. The darker Europeans who ate wheat -not meat, died off over time. 

Repeat: they ate wheat and died off over time.

Note the conventional wisdom that we should avoid the very sun exposure which powers the skin's vitamin D production. And note that the western diet is now alarmingly high in direct and indirect wheat content. 

In the light of wheat's impairment of vitamin D synthesis, our current mix of sun avoidance and wheat consumption makes for a rather deadly combination. 

Now Listen to my 2005 interview with health pioneer, Dr. John Symes.