What’s With Wheat? with Cyndi O’Meara

The Functional Medicine Radio Show With Dr. Carri

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Cyndi O’Meara talks about her documentary What’s With Wheat.

Cyndi O’Meara is a nutritionist, documentary film maker (What’s With Wheat?), bestselling author, international speaker and founder of Changing Habits. Cyndi graduated with a BSc in Nutrition – her special interest was ancestral foods. After graduating, she became so disillusioned by the global ‘standard’ nutritional guidelines that she paved her own path. Cyndi started Changing Habits in 1990, from her regular newspaper column on nutrition.

Her ground-breaking book Changing Habits Changing Lives became an instant best seller and from there she has grown a successful organic food company, certified online education program, a ground-breaking documentary and is currently building a 60-acre organic food bowl which will be used as an education centre for sustainable farming practices.

Main Questions Asked about What’s With Wheat:

• What’s wrong with wheat?
• Can you tell us about some of the changes that have happened with wheat over the years?
• Can you tell us a little bit about Ancel Keys?
• Why has wheat gone bad?
• Where should people start in changing their diets?

Key Points Made by Cyndi about What’s With Wheat:

• Cyndi always made her own bread as her kids were growing up but in her 50’s she started feeling worse and worse, after being on an elimination diet she started to feel better. After reintroducing wheat she discovered that was the issue.
• Most patients are told that their aches and pains are from getting older which is rarely the case.
• Wheat is inherently an inflammatory food and we originally fermented it in order to eat it. Like many foods in the modern diet, wheat contains anti-nutrients.
• Wheat is in many of the goods that we consume everyday including cosmetics, hair care and others.
• We have forgotten or ignored the ancient wisdom around the food that we have been eating for thousands of years.
• Wheat is processed so that the germ and the bran are removed, which leads to vitamin deficiencies, so we then add back in a variety of nutrients. We have to be very careful about synthetic vitamins.
• Ancel Keys was the originator of the theory that saturated fat consumption leads to an increase in cardiovascular heart disease. There were many issues with his research, including confirmation bias. New research has shown that it’s not the fat that’s the problem, it’s the sugar.
• It’s not an all or nothing when it comes to food; we have to look at the way we cook our food, how refined it is, and how we eat it instead of just removing something entirely.
• After we started to use Roundup on our food supply, celiac disease and wheat allergies increased in turn with the increase of the use of the pesticide. Roundup affects both the bacteria in the ecology of the soil and the bacteria in our guts.
• Don’t start with the gluten free packaged foods. Start by removing wheat from breakfast and see how it affects your hunger and mood. Progress to the other meals and eliminating wheat from your diet.

Resources Mentioned for What’s With Wheat:

Book – Changing Habits, Changing Lives

Functional Nutrition Academy

Documentary – What’s with Wheat?

Cyndi’s website

Cyndi’s facebook page

Book – Reclaim Your Energy and Feel Normal Again

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