Hi, I'm Monica Reinagel, the nutrition diva.

Thanks for joining me today. In his new book, Grain Brain, Dr. David Perlmutter argues that a diet high in grains, especially

modern wheat, may be a hidden cause of Alzheimer's disease, dementia, migraines, and even ADHD. In fact, he's convinced

that these conditions are primarily driven by dietary choices and that you can

prevent or reverse them all by following his program.

Now those are some pretty big promises so I thought it would be worth checking out

the evidence to support them.

The book Brain Grain starts out with a familiar paleo refrain. Our digestive systems are not adapted to grains, which entered the human diet roughly 10,000 years ago.

According to this theory, any food that wasn't part of the human diet then is potentially toxic.

Now this makes it sound as if the Paleolithic era were some sort of magical

moment in history when the human body was perfectly adapted to its environment.

But that's really kind of silly when you think about it.

Just like us, our Paleolithic ancestors had certain genetic traits that work to their

advantage, others that slowed them down, and still others that were for the moment neither helpful nor harmful.

And just like us, Paleolithic humans didn't all have the same genetic traits,

they didn't all live in the same environments, or have the same diets.

But the whole paleo debate is really moot here, because as soon as Perlmotor lays out this argument, he abandons it, for a different conflicting argument,

one that you'll probably recognize if you read William Davis' book, Wheat Belly.

Apparently, eating grains didn't actually cause too much trouble for the first

9900 years that they were part of the human diet, but now modern strains of wheat, which are

higher in gluten, are causing widespread health problems.

William Davis points out that the rise in obesity and diabetes in the 20th century

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