Modern-day Wheat is a 'Chronic Poison'

All set to order that next sandwich on wheat bread? Using wheat-based pasta instead of regular spaghetti noodles tonight because you've been told wheat-based foods are better for you?

Not so fast, says one doctor.

William Davis, a cardiologist, calls modern-day wheat a "chronic, perfect poison" in a new book all about the world's most popular grain.

What gives?

Davis says the wheat we are currently eating isn't the same thing your grandparents used back in the day.

Modern wheat is "an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the '60s and '70s," he told CBS' "This Morning" program in a recent interview.

"This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there's a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It's not gluten," he said.

"I'm not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I'm talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate," Davis continued. "This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 440 more calories per day, 365 days per year."

Can you say expanding waistline?

'We're seeing hundreds of thousands' lose weight

In the interview Davis was asked if the agriculture industry is capable of changing back to using the grain it once produced.

That's possible, he said, but it would be costly to farmers because the old-style wheat doesn't produce as much yield per acre, and in a hungry world where the population is growing, food is becoming more scarce and prices are already on the rise, that choice would be a tough sell to today's agriculture giants.

Nevertheless, Davis notes that a movement is afoot to drop the weight-causing grain, and that those who have done so have said goodbye to wheat are dropping clothes sizes.

"If three people lost eight pounds, big deal," he said. "But we're seeing hundreds of thousands of people losing 30, 80, 150 pounds. Diabetics become no longer diabetic; people with arthritis having dramatic relief. People losing leg swelling, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, and on and on every day."

Those are real results and they are widespread, Davis said - not isolated or fluky.

Okay, so someone decides to shun the wheat; what are their alternatives? "Real food," Davis suggested, like avocados and olives, olive oil, some meats and, yes, veggies.

"(It's) the stuff that is least likely to have been changed by agribusiness," he said. "Certainly not grains. When I say grains, of course, over 90 percent of all grains we eat will be wheat, it's not barley... or flax. It's going to be wheat."

So, this is "really a wheat issue," he said.

Smart diets, sans wheat, will help trim the belly

There are those health resources and dieticians, he said, that are serving up and advocating a more balanced diet, like the Mayo Clinic, that does not include wheat. But in his interview, Davis said what they are offering is just a poor alternative.

"All that literature says is to replace something bad, white enriched products with something less bad, whole grains, and there's an apparent health benefit - 'Let's eat a whole bunch of less bad things,'" he told the program. "So I take...unfiltered cigarettes and replace with Salem filtered cigarettes, you should smoke the Salems. That's the logic of nutrition, it's a deeply flawed logic. What if I take it to the next level, and we say, 'Let's eliminate all grains,' what happens then?"

"That's when you see, not improvements in health, that's when you see transformations in health," he added.

Without question, the nation is in the throes of an obesity epidemic. Cheap foods (for the most part) like wheat-filled pastas and other fillers have caused the country's collective waistline to expand to bursting. But as Davis notes, you don't need fad diets and gimmicks to lose the belly fat and cut back on the calories. You just need to eat smarter.

Monday, September 10, 2012 by: J. D. Heyes

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com

Who Moved My Peak Oil?

The buzz about peak oil has peaked, and for a good reason: the peak remains MIA. That doesn’t mean that the global supply of crude oil is a non-issue. Far from it. But for the moment, at least, statistical evidence in favor of arguing that the world’s output of crude has hit a ceiling, or is in imminent danger of doing so, looks thin.


Global production of crude (defined as crude including lease condensate) hit an all-time high this past April: 75.872 million barrels per day, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That wasn't supposed to happen, a number of peak-oil theorists warned over the past decade. In 2001, for example, geologist Ken Deffeyes wrote a widely cited book (Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage) that predicted that “global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade.” Deffeyes wasn't alone in seeing trouble on the production horizon.

But as the chart below reminds, higher peaks keep coming.


The peak-oil theorists haven't given up. Instead, they keep revising their peak forecasts, pushing the dates for production crests further out in time. Two years ago, for instance, Charles Maxwell—the "dean of oil analysts"—predicted that the peak will come sometime between 2015 and 2020.

Perhaps, but some observers of the oil scene argue that the peak-oil warnings must be labeled flat-out wrong. George Monbiot, a visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, recently wrote: "The facts have changed, now we must change too."

For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike….

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)

Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time.

It certainly hasn't happened over the last decade. As the next chart reminds, production is up in several of the key oil-producing nations, including Saudi Arabia. According to the EIA, Saudi output is higher by nearly one-third over the past 10 years through June 2012.



As always in the oil game, there are key details behind the numbers. Oil, as they say, isn't just another commodity. Geopolitics, in other words, intrudes big time on what otherwise would be a fairly straightforward supply/demand analysis. In the chart above, for instance, Iraq's big gain is less about new discoveries and more about the country's resumption of production after years of war. Meantime, Iran's retreating production reflects the combined burden of international sanctions and domestic difficulties with aging technology.

Despite the various issues, global production managed to increase 12% over that past decade. That doesn't mean that we should expect oil output to effortlessly rise, year after year. The one forecast that some of the peak-oil theorists got right is that finding and producing oil is getting tougher. But technology is improving too, and so far the net result is that the oil industry has been able to squeeze out more supply from what ultimately is a finite resource.

The idea of peak oil isn't dead, not by any means. At some point, production will top out, plateau, and then fall. Exactly when that occurs is wide open for debate. Even what was considered accepted fact—that U.S. production had peaked and was destined to suffer a long, slow decline—no longer looks true. Domestic output is up 6% over the past decade, and most of the gain has come over the last year or so. A few years ago, almost no one expected a revival. Now we're reading reports of U.S. production at 15-year highs.

The lesson in all of this? Predicting is still hard—especially about the future, and particularly for relatively long time horizons.

Capital Spectator is a finance/investment/economics blog that's edited, owned and otherwise managed by James Picerno.