Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

Book Preface

DR. FRANKENSTEIN: “You know, I don’t mean to embarrass you, but I’m a rather brilliant surgeon. Perhaps I can help you with that hump.”
IGOR: “What hump?”

Young Frankenstein, 1974

IN MARY SHELLEY’S TALE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THROUGH BUMBLING experiments and a crude stitching together of body parts electrified to life, Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates a monster, unnatural and not entirely human, a creature terrible to behold who escapes to terrorize the countryside.
Nobody here is stitching loose heads and arms to torsos or passing 220 volts through organs to bring them back to life. Instead, a peculiar alchemy of human health has been occurring these last fifty years or so, creating modern health horrors all during a time—most of us have believed—of unprecedented medical advancement. So it’s all the more surprising that a universe of primitive creatures dwelling directly below our diaphragm, behind our belly button, but beneath our conscious awareness—and that of our doctors—is only now coming to light as a hugely important phenomenon in human health.
Eleven years ago, in the first of my series of Wheat Belly books, I described how agricultural scientists and farmers had changed this plant called “wheat,” transforming a traditional five-foot-tall plant into an eighteen-inch-tall, thick-stalked, large-seeded crop, a change that required thousands of genetic experiments. The final genetically altered result did indeed produce a high-yield crop, enabling farmers to harvest several-fold more bushels per acre than of traditional strains, a boom in yield that helped feed the hungry in starvation-plagued underdeveloped countries. But this new crop also inflicted a collection of unexpected effects on the humans who consumed it, effects ranging from appetite stimulation to temporal lobe seizures, seborrhea to a 400 percent increase in celiac disease. Formerly rare type 1 and type 2 diabetes became mainstream conditions, and humans who used to eat to live were transformed into a population with insatiable all-you-can-eat appetites. The health consequences of consuming modern wheat are so destructive, so unnatural, that I labeled it “Frankengrain.”

I found that removing Frankengrains from the diet yielded substantial, often life-changing, health benefits. Thousands of people experienced effortless weight loss and transformations in their health, restoring them to 1950s-like flat tummies and freeing them of numerous modern health conditions. And yet, a substantial proportion also reported something like this: “I lost forty-seven pounds without even trying, and I’m no longer hungry all the time. I am no longer prediabetic and I’m off two blood pressure pills. My rheumatoid arthritis is about 70 percent better and I was able to stop the several-thousand-dollar-per-month injectable drug. But I still have some flare-ups and had to resume the steroids and naproxen.” In other words, removing Frankengrains from the diet and adding in the handful of nutritional supplements I recommended, which reversed health phenomena such as insulin resistance, did not fully address all of people’s health issues. Some people reported losing, say, seventy pounds, with only another thirty pounds to go—but their weight loss stalled despite doing everything right. The Wheat Belly lifestyle includes basic efforts to recultivate healthy microbial species dwelling in the gastrointestinal tract, that is, the intestinal microbiome, but something was still missing.

The Wheat Belly community, large, international, and enthusiastically engaged, was also (and remains) a collaborative community, all of us sharing experiences and looking for better answers on how to achieve 100 percent success and finally conquer residual health issues. This community, in effect, is an enormous crowdsourcing of wisdom, with hundreds of thousands of people all seeking answers to similar questions. (Don’t worry: if you are unfamiliar with the strategies of the Wheat Belly lifestyle, which, despite its shortfalls, is still quite powerful, I articulate its tenets later in the book in addition to introducing new and powerful strategies you can use to build a Super Gut.)

Over the last few decades, outside the Wheat Belly experience, an explosion of research made it clear that common mental and emotional struggles such as depression, social isolation, hatred, anxiety, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could be blamed on disruptions to the intestinal microbiome. It also became clear that health conditions as unrelated as obesity, autoimmune conditions, and neurodegenerative diseases likewise could be blamed on changes inflicted on the microbes dwelling beneath our diaphragms. Because I am personally interested in both improving human health and performance and decreasing people’s reliance on the health-care system, I wondered whether such microbiome disruptions could explain the persistence of health issues in the individuals who were following my programs. It was this chain of logic that sent me searching for evidence of lost microbes, bacterial species that might have vanished from the modern human microbiome. And, indeed, I did find several candidates that, when restored to the human gut, yielded impressive improvements in people’s health, and even in their appearance.

But I also found that the disappearance of several key microbes could not explain all persistent health problems. Hints of a more comprehensive answer kept trickling in from the worldwide Wheat Belly community as some people continued to complain about their sleep struggles, persistent joint pain even after partial relief with wheat and grain elimination, and stubborn food intolerances from before the Wheat Belly program that would not resolve. Why would so many people have intolerances to everyday foods such as tomatoes, kidney beans, and peanuts? Digging into the idea that disrupted microbiomes could also account for these health phenomena made it clearer and clearer that I’d find the answers in the microbial universe. Then additional developments, such as the availability of a smartphone-enabled consumer device that can detect microbial gas production in the breath, clinched it: the answers would come from the microbiome.

I wanted to discover ways to put the power of a healthy microbiome to work beyond the usual “take a probiotic and get plenty of fiber.” I wanted to address not just people’s residual health problems but also ways they could supercharge their health to reach new heights of day-to-day functioning.
I am certain beyond any doubt that modern lifestyles have disrupted the composition of microbes in the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract, and these microbial imbalances are to blame for the residual health issues the Wheat Belly community and others were encountering. Modern lifestyle factors that disturb our inner ecosystem are also responsible for a long list of other health problems—no body system is immune to the effects of this monster we have created called the modern human microbiome. The microbiome of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and that of our predecessors just fifty years ago were very different from the one we have today. A combination of factors associated with modern life—from modern processed foods to stomach acid–blocking drugs—has created a gut that is almost no longer human; it’s something I call a “Frankenbelly,” and it’s as destructive to our health or perhaps more so than Frankengrain. Real health horrors result from a Frankenbelly: from irritable bowel syndrome and constipation to ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, from polycystic ovary syndrome and colon cancer to depression and despair, from social isolation to thoughts of suicide. These are all effects of this thing we, as a society and as individuals, have created: a Frankenbelly of disruptions in the microbiome.

Now we have to figure out how to kill off this thing and resurrect something closer to the natural human condition. Unfortunately, the medical community is poorly equipped to handle the ailments resulting from a disturbed microbiome, never mind understand their source. Rather than address the proliferation of unhealthy bacterial and fungal species responsible for generating dark emotions, anxiety, and suicidal impulses, doctors prescribe antidepressant and antianxiety medications to block their effects. Rather than chart the location of errant microbes that underlies conditions like hypertension and atrial fibrillation, they prescribe medications that push blood pressure down and suppress abnormal heart rhythms. Rather than decipher the microbial disruptions that cause weight gain and type 2 diabetes, they resort to gastric bypass and medications that forcibly regulate blood sugar. All these conventional but misguided efforts also come, of course, with a considerable price tag and long lists of side effects. I’m sure you can appreciate the fact that coming to an understanding of all the microbial havoc that’s been inflicted on modern humans will turn our entire idea of health and disease topsy-turvy. Solutions will be different too—we will certainly need tools beyond those you can obtain through your doctor’s prescription pad.

We need to rebuild the very microbial core of our health to achieve freedom from disease and to regain youthfulness and overall quality of life. And you know what? The sorts of benefits we can reap from restoring the healthy human microbiome will go farther than just relief from, say, being overweight or having acid reflux. The strategies that I shall share with you can also yield smoother skin, accelerated healing, and increased feelings of empathy for other people—benefits that you likely had no idea originated with the microbial universe within. First, we must reestablish order in this monstrous microbial mess we have created, then I will show you how to cultivate a Super Gut.