The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Eating Grains Can Drive Obesity, Heart Disease, Autoimmune Issues, And More

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Mitopure and LMNT. For nearly all of our history, humans consumed no grains, and our bodies are designed to work very well without them. Today, however, grain-based foods are by far the number one source of calories in the American diet. While whole grains can be a great source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, the toxic amounts we eat contribute to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Plus, most of the grains we eat—even whole wheat—are turned into flour products which have a higher glycemic index than table sugar. In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I talk about why grains are such a contentious food, how to tackle the pros and cons of whether it belongs in your diet, and which grains are actually okay to eat.  This episode is brought to you by Mitopure and LMNT. Support the growth of new, healthy mitochondria and get 10% off Mitopure. Head to timelinenutrition.com/drmark and use code DRMARK at checkout. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. Head over to DrinkLMNT.com/hyman today. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): You don’t have to eat grains to be healthy (8:40 / 5:41) “Whole grain” is a marketing term (10:31 / 7:32) Why starch and sugar are essentially the same thing (11:22 / 8:23) You’re not eating the same grains your grandparents ate (11:58 / 8:59) Is oatmeal good for you? (14:22 / 11:23) Should everyone avoid gluten? (15:36 / 12:37) Not all grains are bad (20:02 / 17:03) Do we really have to give up bread? (21:09 / 18:10) What types of grains are okay and what should be avoided? (23:20 / 20:21) Who should avoid grains altogether? (24:59 / 22:00)

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Get yours at drinklmnt.com forward slash Hyman and get it today. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy. Now a place for conversation as a matter. If you're confused about whether you should eat grains or not, you're going to love this podcast because it's one of our new series called Health Bites, little bites of health information and take small steps daily that can make big differences over time in your health. So let's get into the grain conversation. For so many years, we've been told by experts to eat a lot of grains. In fact, the infamous 1992 food pyramid told us in no uncertain terms to eat six to 11

servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta every day. Okay, that's crazy. And we now know that's crazy. And when you see that pyramid and the data was introduced and the increase in obesity since then, it's just this total correlation, right? Now, causation, correlation, you could argue, but essentially the truth is over the last, how many years now? 30 years? That's a lot of time. 30 years, we've basically been following that instructions and eating a lot of grains. And that's why 75% of America is overweight and 42% is obese and 93.2%

are metabolic and healthy, which means they have some degree of insulin resistance, prediabetes are on their way. Now, the Bible says we should be eating bread, right? Staff of life and all that. Sounds great. Makes sense. But that's a different kind of bread, right? The staff of life, the wheat that was used in biblical times was very different. I went to Zara Ikaria or Ikaria, we like to say it in Greece, which is one of the blue zones. And I got to eat an ancient bread there called Zaya wheat. Zaya wheat was eaten by Alexander the Great. Super high in protein, very low in gluten, very nutrient dense.

And it was what fueled a lot of his campaign. So we say bread, but we're not eating anything like the bread that our ancestors ate. And one of the messages that we're getting is to eat a lot of grains, eat whole grains. And in fact, it has been taken up by the food industry in a great way, in marketing ways that are pretty pernicious. And basically, we've got phrases like whole wheat goodness, that it must be a healthy choice. But it's nuts when you look at actually what they do.

They basically put a whole grain, sprinkles of some fiber in some processed food, and they call that a healthy food. It's absolutely crazy. We'll go into some of the studies on that and the research on that. So, you know, as much as anything else, you know, grains made America. I mean, it's even in our national anthem, right? The whatever, the amber fields of grain or something like that of wheat. And that was a very different kind of wheat.

Now, we have huge amounts of acres that are dedicated to wheat and corn and barley, sorghum. And we promote so much grain, we export a lot of it to the rest of the world. Grain-based foods are the number one source of calories in the American diet. And the grains that go into these foods, which are highly processed foods, we call ultra-processed foods, wheat, corn, and so forth,

are crops that are highly subsidized by the federal government, billions of dollars. The taxpayers' dollars are devoted to keeping us on a grain-based diet with things like bread, rice, pasta, cereals, cookies, cake, pizza, oatmeal, crackers, you name it. Now, many of these crops, like corn and so forth, are fed to livestock. So it's not only are they feeding us, but they're also feeding the cows and the chickens and all the other animals that we raise. And our Americans are getting grains indirectly, too, from all the grain-fed beef, chicken, and dairy we consume.

The average American consumes about 133 pounds of flour every year. Now, it used to be 146.8 pounds in 1995, but 133 pounds from the USDA data is a lot of flour. And by the way, that's about a third of a pound per person per day. Some of us have a lot more. And that's going to include all the other grains and all the other potatoes and all the starches and sugars, which is about 152 pounds a year. So I wrote a book called Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? Because people are so confused about what to eat. And even me, I get confused because there's researchers all over the place. And I talk about in the book, Food,

What the Heck Should I Eat? That whole grains can be a good source of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and it's okay to eat them. But I talk about what and how and why, right? Now, they taste pretty good, but the toxic amounts we eat, the pharmacologic doses we eat are huge drivers of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia. And most of the grains we eat are not like whole grains, right? They're not like, we're not eating wheat berries. We're eating white flour predominantly and even whole wheat flour. But the way we mill it and grind it, it's just so fine. Essentially, it's like white flour, maybe a little bit better, has a few extra vitamins, a few extra minerals, a little extra fiber. But essentially, its effect on your blood sugar is bad. In fact, the glycemic index of whole wheat flour is higher than table sugar, meaning it

raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. If you look at most things that have whole wheat in them, you've got to read all the ingredients. It's not just the whole wheat. They can put whole wheat, but it can be filled with sugar and all kinds of stuff. So we're going to talk about why grains are such a controversial food, how to look at the pros and cons of whether or not they should be in your diet, and which grains are actually probably okay to eat. So first thing you should know is this, and this is really important. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There are essential fatty acids, right, the omega-3s, and there are essential amino acids, There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.

There are essential fatty acids, right, the omega-3s, and there are essential amino acids, which we need in large doses from protein. But there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Even the National Academy of Sciences dietary reference index says there's no biological requirement for carbohydrates. Now, that's not to say they're not okay to eat, they're not good for us. I mean, vegetables are carbohydrates, broccoli is carbohydrate, that's not to say they're not okay to eat. They're not good for us. I mean, vegetables are carbohydrates. Broccoli is carbohydrate. There's carbohydrates in nuts. It's not that they're bad, but it depends on the type of carbohydrate. So first of all, there's a myth that we have to eat grains to be healthy. We do not. We do not need to eat them.

Now, you can eat them, and we'll talk about how and why, but basically, don't buy the propaganda that we need them. In fact, for most of human history, we haven't had grains. Until the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, 12,000 years ago, we never had any grains or any beans. We basically were hunters and gatherers. Our bodies worked very well without them. And yes, there are plenty of vitamins, minerals, fiber, or nutrients in whole grains, but you can get all that from other sources, including vegetables,

fruits, seeds, nuts, and other foods that don't have the same baggage as grains. Now, there are some cases where, you know, patients and people can eat grains and be healthy, but I'm going to talk about how to be very careful about it. Particularly people who do not do well with them are people who have insulin resistance, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, people who are overweight, obese. Now how many people is that? Well, one in two Americans is prediabetes or diabetes. Seventy-five percent overweight, 93 percent are metabolic and healthy.

So maybe six percent of the population can tolerate them and not get into trouble. I mean that's not too good. So I think we need to be very smart about what we're doing. And after you talk about what kind of grains, how we're eating them and how different grains affect us differently. Now in terms of whole grains, that's just a bunch of BS, right? If you look at the marketing propaganda from the food industry, it's talking about whole grain flours. We think where it's healthy, it's just a bunch of nonsense. For example, I want you to read labels carefully so you can tell whether what you're buying is actually truly healthy or not, or just marketing hype. For example, you can get a whole grain cookie crisp cereal. Sounds great. Whole grain cookie crisp cereal. Well, the cookie crisp doesn't sound

healthy, but it's got 22 grams of sugar, right? How much is that? That's five teaspoons, five and a half teaspoons of sugar in your serving of cereal that you give your kid in the morning. Not a health food, right? Not a healthy, just because they put a few flakes of whole grain flour doesn't make it healthy, right? Also understand your body, below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of corn flakes and a bowl of sugar.

Sugar and flour are the same in the body. I mean, actually, flour might be a little worse because it has only glucose, whereas sugar has fructose and glucose, which are different metabolisms, but they're both bad. Basically, eating two slices of whole wheat bread can raise your blood sugar more than having two tablespoons of table sugar. Think about that. So whenever you eat something containing whole wheat flour, you might as well be mainlining sugar unless certain caveats are taken into consideration, which we'll talk about in a minute. So also you're not eating the same grains that we used to eat, right?

We're not eating ancient grains, heirloom grains. We're eating these new hybrids that are developed. For example, like dwarf wheat. Dwarf wheat was a very important innovation in agriculture, led to the Nobel Prize being awarded to the scientists who were able to hybridize, not GMO, but hybridize wheat so that it was short and stubby not tall and thin and then it produced much more starch and much more drought resistant much more resilient and could help you

know feed the world which all sounds great except for one thing there's a starch that's produced there called ambolepectin a which is a super starch it's the worst and it's basically the wheat we're eating today not only that they spray with glyphosate often at the end to desiccate it because these are harvest. And basically just bad news. And the new hybrids have higher amounts of gluten in them and more likely to cause autoimmune disease. So basically, we want to be very careful.

Now, heirloom strains like zea wheat, like I was talking about, might be okay, or einkorn wheat or other types of whole grains like farro, which was talking about might be okay or unformed wheat or other types of whole grains like farro which have gluten might be okay but they're more ancient grains that people are not consuming and by the way they're not eating i said whole wheat berries right i used to make you know wheat berry something like we have wheat berries and salad we cook them up and do that but that's not that common right so we So we have so much flour. It's mostly dwarf wheat. It's mostly sprayed with glyphosate. It's super high glycemic index, high gluten antibodies. Definitely not helpful. Definitely not helpful and definitely not something you should be consuming. Even

healthy grains may be problems. Like if you over consume grains that are healthy grains, even if it's like amaranth or brown rice, right? When they turn into flour, they're basically pulverizing it and the surface area is much higher and it's quickly absorbed and it spikes your blood sugar. So even if it sounds like, oh, I'm having brown rice bread or something, it's actually maybe even worse. So make sure you're really smart about what you're reading. Look at the label very carefully and look at the where the the the food is on the label if it's a by the way i i think most people should need food with labels i mean it basically you know as a can it has sardines and olive oil salt fine but if it's you know has 45 ingredients you should just not eat put it back um what about oatmeal oatmeal is such a health food, right?

Meat? Not really. Yeah. It's, you know, it actually raises your blood sugar. And most of the oatmeal we eat is actually pretty refined oatmeal. It's not steel cut oats. It's not whole oats. Those might be a little bit better. But when you eat oatmeal, it basically spikes your sugar.

In one study, they looked at kids who had oatmeal, eggs, or steel-cut oats, basically same calories, right, same calories. And the kids were a little overweight, and they basically said, okay, if you're hungry, just tell us, and we'll give you food. And when they looked, and they put a catheter in their vein, and basically tried their bluttery hour, and what they ate. And the kids who ate oatmeal had 81% more food in the day because they were hungrier.

And their blood sugar spiked more. Their insulin spiked more. They had more adrenaline, more cortisol, more stress hormones. So basically eating oatmeal is stressful for the body and led to all these things that cause weight gain. So I'm not a big fan of starting the day with oatmeal. Now, it depends if you have whole oats and you put nuts in there and fat and other things, it slows the absorption, it might be okay.

But just your quicker oats, definitely not. Now, what about gluten? Now, you all heard about gluten-free, gluten's bad for you and it's not. And generally, it's pretty new in the human diet, especially the dwarf wheat, which I mentioned, which has much more gliadin proteins that are much more inflammatory. Now, some people are fine. If you're healthy, if you don't have a leaky gut, not everybody's sensitive. About a third of the population has the gene for celiac. About 1% of the population has celiac. And by the way, there's been about a 400% true increase in celiac disease in 50 years, right,

because of the damage we've done to our gut. And part of that damage is from the new wheat and the gluten and the antibiotics and things. But basically, we have a society that is now rampant with gluten sensitivity, which probably affects up to 20% of the population, whereas true celiac is about 1%. But your body really doesn't know what to do with gluten, right? And celiac disease is an autoimmune disease, and it can cause over 50, maybe 100 different diseases, like type 1 diabetes, like rheumatoid arthritis, like osteoporosis,

like colitis, like iron deficiency, amemia. I mean, the list goes on because of how it affects your gut. Now, a lot of us, like I said, have this non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and basically our body starts to react to any inflammation, and so we don't want that. And sometimes it's worth doing a trial of a gluten elimination diet, basically to see how your body does. Do it for three weeks, see what happens, add gluten back, see what happens.

You might be fine. For example, I don't have a reaction to gluten. I do to dairy, but I don't have a reaction to gluten. I've checked. I don't have any bodies. My gut was okay. So basically, I can eat gluten, but I don't eat that much of it because it's mostly flour, right? I don't eat the wheat berries. But there are other grains. Now, one of the problems is that Dr. Alessio Fasano at Harvard, the world expert in celiac and gluten, basically talks about everybody who eats gluten has some little damage to their gut because gluten increases something called zonulin. Zonulin is a protein that's produced in our bodies, which actually causes

damage to our gut lining. It creates a leaky gut, little tight junctions, which are like Legos that are stuck together, come apart. It's only one cell thick between you and a sewer. And then you end up flooding your body with all these foreign proteins and antibodies. I mean, foreign proteins and antigens and also bacterial toxins and proteins that are really quite bad. And so basically, 60 to 70% of our immune system is right under our gut. So a lot of our inflammatory diseases are caused by gut. I mean, I was reading about insomnia recently that there's been a big correlation between dysbiosis and bounces in the gut flora, leaky gut and sleep disorders. So even sleep, for example, may be a factor. Now, when we have these leaky gut food particles, antigens,

microbes leak through our protective lining, they activate our gut immune system and that creates systemic inflammation and goes to obesity, heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, but also obviously allergies, skin disorders, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. So I think everybody with gluten has some degree of leaky gut, but some people can manage it and can tolerate it. Other people can't. And so I think we have to really take stock of the fact that gluten and celiac is a real problem. And if you don't look for it, you don't find it. I started a company called, I co-founded a company called FunctionHealth.com where we do full celiac testing.

Often your doctor won't order it and they won't do the right one. So you can go to FunctionHealth.com and learn more. So now gluten-free, by the way, isn't necessarily healthy either. Gluten-free cake and cookies is still cake and cookies right. So remember you know you had fat-free yogurt well fat-free yogurt your Yoplait fat-free yogurt has more sugar per ounce than a can of soda right doesn't make it healthy right. Remember what we call them snack well cookies right. Fat-free but full of sugar doesn't mean they're healthy. So just because it says gluten-free doesn't mean it's healthy. I

saw a package of potato chips the other day that had gluten-free on the cover, right? Coca-Cola is gluten-free. Doesn't mean it's healthy. So the word gluten-free doesn't mean anything. It just means that the gluten's not there and that's fine if you're celiac, but it doesn't mean it's a health food. And usually it's replaced with something more harmful in terms of maybe other refined grains that are more glycemic in nature uh out of additives tons of sugar high glycemic flours refined oils so just remember uh gluten-free cookies sell a cookie

so um and by the way not all grains are bad and food what the heck should i talk about um the ones that i'm concerned about like oatmeal corn wheat um and yes gluten is a real issue for people um other forms of grains are not so problematic right so for example quinoa is a south american grain that's very very helpful that actually has a lot of protein in it has amino acids in it it's problematic because we're taking the food from the indigenous people in South America, which is their staple. Now, they can't even afford it. So that's a whole other problem. Even other grains, for example, like Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is from the Himalayas,

super dense in nutrients, 132 phytochemicals, lots of protein, lots of fiber, lots of magnesium, lots of minerals. That can be fine. So I was going to make pancakes from Himalayan buckwheat flour. But we don't want to eat all the traditional grains we're eating that are in Twinkies and cookies, pizza, not good. So also, you know, you can start to make other things. Like, you know, I make the buckwheat pancakes,

which are actually quite good. You can make buckwheat bread. And by the way, buckwheat's not even a grain, so it's a flour. What about bread? Do we have to give up bread? Well, no, not necessarily. There's lots of bread made with whole kernel grains, not just a flour or no flour. You can make it with nuts and seeds. Rye bread, rye can be healthy. That's gluten for many people, but it can be problematic, but actually is super helpful in many ways. And in Germany, I went to visit a friend once and they had a meat slicer in their house. And I'm like, what's that for? Like, you know, what they have in a deli to slice the, you know, whatever, the meats. And they're like, oh, that's to cut our bread. I'm

like, what do you mean? Yeah, we can't cut it with a knife. It's too dense. So literally this fresh bread comes out and basically my rule for bread is if you can stand on it and it doesn't squish you can probably eat it so basically if it's made from whole kernels and it's made from nuts and seeds other types of flours it can be actually fine i have recipes in my book food what the heck should i cook for non-flour breads and they can be quite delicious And how often should you eat whole grains? And by the way, when you're eating grains, only whole grains, right? Get away from flours, whole grains.

So brown rice, quinoa, black rice, you know, stay away from flours, but eat whole grains, right? Brown rice, black rice, red rice, quinoa, other grains can be fine. Farro, barley, if you want, if you're not gluten sensitive. And even, you know, Himalayan Thai buckwheat, it's not something you eat as a whole grain, but that flour is okay because it doesn't have a high glycemic load.

And when you mix it with eggs and other things, it can be great. So you shouldn't be eating a lot, particularly if you're a diabetic, pre-diabetic, and some resistant, overweight, you probably want to cut them out for a while until you're healthy and then you can add them back. Probably, you know, half a cup a day is fine. I think that's okay if it's whole grain, probably once a day. So what are the things that I talk about? And it can

be, again, not the main dish, right? You know, in some countries, they do eat a lot of grains, right? In China, oh, they eat rice, and they're thin. Or, you know, in India, they eat rata rice. Well, you know, I just, you know, came back from Nepal and, you know, they were eating a lot of rice, white rice. But these guys were literally carrying 70, 80 pounds on their back up and down the Himalayan mountains all day long. So they needed the energy. But if you're not doing that, I would stick away from a lot of grains.

Buckwheat, the Himalayan Thai buckwheat is my favorite. You can go to bigboldhelp.com and learn more about that. Whole kernel rye if you're not gluten sensitive quinoa also it's not a grain it's actually a pseudo grain black rice red rice sorghum teff millet amaranth all can be great what about white rice white rice is something you know a lot of cultures eat now white rice doesn't always have to be bad there's a research that's been done on white rice that if you cool it and then you reheat it, not too hot, but just if you basically cook it in potatoes and then put it in the fridge, let it get cold and then kind of reheat it gently, it actually causes something to be produced called

resistant starch, which helps resist the digestion of it. It's lower glycemic. It actually can help with your microbiome. It's great for as a prebiotic and maybe even improve metabolism. So you can use that. So what grains should I avoid if I might be gluten sensitive? Well, all the gluten containing grains, wheat, barley, rye, spelt, camomile, farro, bulgur, oats, semolina, couscous, any refined grains, all these you want to avoid. And I think, you know, grains can be part of a healthful diet, but only if you're metabolically healthy and only if you're eating the right grains and only if they're whole grains. So in general, we need to recognize grains for what they are. They're a recreational treat, not a staple. An occasional indulgence is fine, not an everyday thing for me.

I'm not a fan of most grains. It's fine to include them in small amounts of your diet, but only if they're whole grains, only if they're organic, only if they're gluten-free. By the way, if you're not gluten sensitive, you may be able to tolerate a little bit healthier gluten grains, but for most people, they're problematic. And if you're wondering who should not be eating them, well, if you have type of diabetes or high blood sugar, prediabetes, if you have weight issues, cravings, if you have food sensitivities, digestive issues, autoimmune diseases, you feel bloated after you eat, our blood tests show you have high levels of inflammation markers, probably not great to eat a lot of grains at all. And sometimes just a period of time, getting off them can be very helpful. I wrote a book called The 10-Day Detox Diet.

It talks about elimination diet, how to take stuff out and reintroduce stuff. We're going to do another podcast on that. But that's basically the principle. So grains are not all they crack up to be. Whole grains can be fine, but the right ones. And make sure you listen to your body and see what happens when you eat them and how you feel when you get off them and reintroduce them. So that's the best test. Anyway, that's it for today's health bite.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you love to share with your friends and family, tell us how you do with grains and what you've learned about including ones in your diet that work for you or how you problems with them. We'd love to know. And we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy. Hey everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm

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