Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Why are you no longer hungry?
People who were previously ravenously hungry, struggling to be satisfied and tending to overeat, can find themselves miraculously back in control of appetite just by adopting a number of basic dietary strategies that begin with elimination of gliadin-derived opioid peptides that come from the partial digestion of wheat and grains.
Add a handful of other strategies and you will be freed from abnormal and perverse appetite stimulation that comes from consumption of several foods, nonsensical dietary advice, and a disrupted gastrointestinal microbiome.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamDavisMD
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Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
If you're following any of my programs, such as the programs I introduced, for instance, in my wheat belly books, in my Undoctored book most recently, detailing the addition of microbiome strategies in SuperGut, what you may have noticed is that you're no longer hungry or that hunger has taken on a completely different feel for you. So you may recall in the days before you did some of these things that it wasn't uncommon to have this kind of gnawing, desperate hunger every few hours. It wouldn't be unusual, for instance, to have your breakfast, say, of stone ground organic oatmeal and skim milk with a banana, at 8 am, and by 9.30 or 10, you're starving again, looking for a snack and then counting the minutes till lunch. You have your lunch and then at 2 o'clock you're starving again, looking for a snack and then counting the minutes till lunch. You have your lunch and then at two o'clock, three o'clock, you're starving again. And it was this constant search for food, this constant aching, gnawing hunger, that you're dealing with. Another common phenomenon you may have noticed is that you may have had a big bowl of pasta and that even when you're filled to bursting, you're still somehow hungry. These are very unnatural situations that should not develop in normal, wild living humans. It's a product of our lives. It's a product of all the things we're exposed to that increase appetite. So what is it in my programs that has allowed this to be subdued or go away completely, such that you have your breakfast at 8 am. You might not have breakfast at all.
Speaker 1:Let's say you did. Let's say you had two eggs and maybe some ham or some sausage, whatever. You might not be hungry till maybe 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock. You might forget, actually forget to eat lunch. Or you nibble at something and have a second meal, a major meal, say at three or four or 5 pm, and then you're done. You don't have that desire for after-meal snacks or in-between-meal snacks. You don't need a dessert. Snacking is a thing of the past. In other words, hunger is different. It also feels different. You may have noticed it's not that gnawing, desperate feel. Many people report, for instance, just having this kind of gentle restlessness that you might not even recognize as hunger at first, and then you realize, oh, it might be time to eat something. So the entire experience is very different. But why? What is it we're doing that has allowed hunger to become a thing of the past? At least the desperate sort of hunger.
Speaker 1:One is we've eliminated all sorts of gliadin-derived opioid peptides, and all that means is there's a class of proteins in wheat and grains. There's a class of proteins called prolamins, because they're rich in proline, and those are amino acid sequences involving proline that we don't have digestive enzymes to break down. So if you had most proteins, like, say, an egg or a piece of beef or salmon, your digestive system would break those down, the proteins down, into single amino acids and then they're converted to the components of your body. When you consume the gliadin protein of wheat and related proteins and other grains, you can't break them down to single amino acids. You can break the gliadin protein down into four or five amino acid long peptide fragments. Now, these peptide fragments are very unusual in that they cross into the brain and stimulate opioid receptors. Now, they don't make you high. By stimulating these opioid receptors, it stimulates appetite, typically causing you to take in at least several hundred more calories per day and be exposed, not uncommonly, to around-the-clock hunger. This is a big problem in people who are prone to conditions like bulimia or binge eating disorder. These are people who have 24-hour-a-day food obsessions. These are the people you might find camped out in front of the refrigerator at 3 am binging and then going to the bathroom sticking a finger down their throat and throwing up Very demoralizing, low self-esteem and very unhealthy. When those people get rid of glide and drive opioid peptides, it's not uncommon for them to say for the first time in 20 or 30 years I'm freed of food obsessions. So getting rid of glide and derived opioid peptides by limiting wheat and grains is a big deal, also in my programs.
Speaker 1:Because we recognize that two-thirds of Americans have insulin resistance. That is, their body, their muscle, liver, brain, other organs don't respond normally to insulin. So the pancreas compensates by massive overproduction of insulin, not like a 10% or 30% worse, but tenfold, 30-fold, 100-fold higher levels of insulin. And that causes expansion of abdominal fat, inflammation. That leads to coronary disease, dementia, breast cancer, other health conditions.
Speaker 1:So in an effort, as part of our effort to minimize or reduce or eliminate insulin resistance, we limit net carbs, that is, total carbs minus fiber, to no more than 15 grams per meal. Please don't mistake this for ketosis or our ketogenic diet. We are intermittently ketotic, but we're not purposefully ketotic. I don't think that's necessary for great health. Ketotic, but we're not purposefully ketotic. I don't think that's necessary for great health. So we limit our net carb exposure to 15 grams or less per meal.
Speaker 1:Well, what that does is it avoids the rollercoaster ride of high blood glucose, because high blood glucose triggers even more insulin. That causes an overshoot and you get low blood glucose, hypoglycemia, and you get low blood glucose, hypoglycemia. So 99 plus percent of the time, hypoglycemia low blood sugar is preceded by hyperglycemia high blood glucose. So the key don't allow the high blood sugars to occur, and we do so by limiting net carbs. We start, of course, by limiting wheat and grains, because the amylopectin, a carbohydrate unique to wheat and grains, is an extravagant cause for high blood glucoses. We eliminate that. We limit other carbs to no more than 15 grams net and you don't get that roller coaster, you don't get hyperglycemia. We don't get hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, because it's hypoglycemia that sets in motion not just mind fog, irritability, but also desperate hunger, and it typically occurs in a 90 to 120 minute cycle. We've eliminated that.
Speaker 1:Another thing we do in my programs is we don't limit fats and oils. We don't limit saturated fat. We don't limit oils. We don't trim the fat off our steak or pork. We don't throw away the skin on poultry or fish. We eat it. Now we do limit seed oils because there has been overexposure through such products as corn oil, cottonseed oil, mixed vegetable oils that are often added to foods or used in restaurants. So we do limit those. Don't here eliminate those oils, omega-6s or linoleic acid sources, because linoleic acid is actually an essential fatty acid. You can't do away with it entirely. You just don't want the wild overexposure that comes from consuming a modern diet.
Speaker 1:We also eliminate or avoid processed and ultra-processed foods. These are foods that have food additives that amplify appetite. These are foods like chips, potato chips, corn chips, other highly processed foods that have been purposefully engineered to increase your appetite and have been found to cause distortions of appetite hormones, reducing the hormones that suppress appetite, amplifying hormones that increase appetite, and so these foods are designed to stimulate appetite. So we don't eat those things. Instead, we only eat as much as possible whole unprocessed foods. For instance, an avocado unprocessed, eggs unprocessed, a piece of beef unprocessed. We have to accept some processing. You're not going to make your own extra virgin olive oil. You're not going to grow your own coffee beans, right. So there is some processing, but we try to keep it to a minimum. So we avoid the ultra-processed foods that have been engineered specifically engineered to increase your appetite.
Speaker 1:And then, lastly, we take steps to rebuild a broken gastrointestinal microbiome, and one of the first things we do is restore a microbe that virtually everybody has lost in the US because we've been overexposed to antibiotics and perhaps other factors to have killed Lactobacillus reuteri. This is a microbe that does many wonderful things for humans and we've lost it. But when restored, one of its effects is that it sends a signal via the vagus nerve to the brain, to the hypothalamus, to release the hormone oxytocin. Now, oxytocin has many interesting effects on humans, including benefits on reproductive health, muscle health, including benefits on reproductive health, muscle health, the immune system. But it also suppresses appetite, but specifically for something called hedonic eating, that is, snacking behavior or eating simply for the pleasure of it, like those ultra-processed foods. In other words, there's eating for survival and to suit your physiologic needs. Then there's eating that you really don't need to do. Well, that's what oxytocin addresses it tends to turn off that inappropriate snacking or hedonic behavior. Now Put all this together not limiting fats and oils, avoiding gliding derived opioid peptides, limiting net carbs, thereby avoiding hyper and hypoglycemic episodes, including the elimination of the amylopectin A of wheat and grains, and then avoiding ultra processed foods and restoring lactobacillus roteri to generate oxytocin.
Speaker 1:Put it all together and you have been given massive, virtually complete control over appetite and impulse. You can walk right past that table full of donuts or whatever all the junk food, and not even think about it, not be tempted, and you may have noticed. Should you go back to those things, you probably get sick. A lot of us get sick when we do that. You say, ah, a few, you probably get sick. A lot of us get sick. When we do that. You say, ah, a few pretzels won't hurt or a few bites of this birthday cake won't hurt. Many of us it does hurt and you get sick.
Speaker 1:Could be diarrhea, could be emotional effects like panic anxiety. It could be a recurrence of some condition that you got rid of. It's not uncommon, for instance, if you got rid of, say, an autoimmune process, for it to come back full force. One of the greatest examples I remember was years ago. I had a patient in his 50s who I saw for coronary disease. So I showed him how to put a stop to coronary disease all the things you know about if you follow my programs a diet to eliminate the expression of small LDL particles, vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium, iodine, and then efforts to reconstruct a microbiome. Well, he did it. But he was planning a trip to Germany and he says to me well, I'll be damned, I'm going to have some pumpernickel, right.
Speaker 1:Well, doing the program here, it took about two years. In addition to correcting all the factors that led to his coronary disease, his rheumatoid arthritis, for which he took three drugs, an anti-inflammatory, prednisone and a biologic, very expensive. He was able to stop all three and have no more joint pain or swelling. So he went from barely able to grasp anything and contemplating disability to full restoration of flexibility, no joint pain, no joint swelling. He goes to Germany, has some pumpernickel. It all comes back with a vengeance.
Speaker 1:It took him another six months of resuming the program to get back to where he was free of pain. So it took six months of pain or resumption of all those drugs to get back to undo the effects of re-exposure. So that's another reason why it becomes easier and easier to stay in this program, because when you go off the program, many people not everybody, many people get sick. So there you have it, you have the means to completely control your impulse your appetite and not be embarrassed by your inability to control your behavior. Now, if you learn something, I invite you to engage in all my resources the books, as I mentioned in the beginning, such as the Wheat Belly series, supergut, most recently, of course, my thousands of posts on my WilliamDavisMDcom blog. And if you want some support or guidance, I invite you to join the conversations I have all the time with great frequency on my innercircledrdavisinfinitehealthcom.
