It’s a common complaint: “I exercise regularly and eat a healthy diet, why can’t I lose this belly?” Why is it that you eat a healthy diet and work out for hours each week, yet you still can’t get the extra flab to go away?

The answer is right under your nose. Do you see it? It’s wheat. Bread, crackers, pretzels, and a million other products all marketed as “healthy whole grains”. They are sabotaging your weight-loss efforts.

Wheat Increases Blood Sugar Levels

The most significant way that wheat feeds belly fat is by spiking blood sugar. Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly, says “wheat products elevate blood sugar levels more than virtually any other carbohydrate, from beans to candy bars”.

When blood sugar levels increase, so do insulin levels. High insulin levels mean that more calories are feeding your fat cells. Your abdominal fat cells, along with those around your organs, are the ones that receive most of this increase.

Wheat Increases Appetite

As your blood sugar rises and drops, you quickly go from fully satisfied to famished within a short period of time. This drop ushers in cravings that tend to be for the very foods that cause this unpleasant cycle.

It has been shown repeatedly that people who eliminate wheat from their diets consume less calories. When people quit eating wheat, they cut hundreds of calories from their diets, without any other dietary restrictions. Without the ravenous appetite produced by the effects of blood-sugar swings, you feel satisfied and full for longer.

Wheat Affects the Gluten Intolerant

Celiac disease can cause great fluctuations in weight. Some who are test positive for celiac can’t put on weight, while others can’t lose it. Many doctors and researchers are finding that even when people don’t test positive for celiac, they may still have some level of gluten intolerance.

Cutting wheat from the diet has helped many to lose weight, whether they have celiac disease, gluten intolerance, or none of the above. Simply by removing a substance that increases your appetite and spikes your blood sugar can have a profound effect on your weight-loss goals.

Today’s Wheat is Not Your Grandparents’ Wheat

People often question–and rightly so–how something that has been in our food supply for thousands of years could possibly have such a devastating effect on health. The answer lies in the fact that the wheat in your snack crackers and morning cereal is not the same wheat that people were eating years ago. Only in the past several decades have people been eating the wheat that is on supermarket shelves today.

Today’s wheat has been engineered to produce more, resist pests and disease, and withstand the elements. This new wheat also contains new strains of gluten proteins that have never before existed, nor have they been tested for human safety.

The effects of wheat in the diet are most obvious around the waistline. Dramatic fluctuations in blood sugar, increased appetite, and gluten intolerance are three ways that wheat can add to an expanding midsection. Give a wheat-free diet a trial run and say goodbye to the flab!

>> Recipe Tip: Try this Wheat-Free Pasta Primavera

Primavera NoOodle™

Ingredients

3 oz chopped mushrooms
3 oz fresh spinach
3 oz chopped squash
3 oz chopped carrots
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp white wine
1 tbsp garlic- minced
2 tbsp parmesan cheese
8 ounces NoOodle™

Preparation

Heat olive oil over medium heat in large skillet. Saute garlic for 30 seconds. Add mushrooms, squash, carrots, and white wine. Saute for 2 minutes. Add spinach and continue to saute for another minute. Toss in Shirataki No-Calorie NoOdle™ and mix thoroughly. Remove from heat and sprinkle with parmesan cheese, serve and enjoy!

>> Nutrition Information

A new brand of noodle, made with soluble fiber from a Japanese yam, promises to deliver exactly that using a no-calorie, no-carbohydrate, no-gluten, no-fat noodle called the NoOodle.

While it may sound like some sort of space-age franken-food, the shirataki yam (also called konyaku) noodle has been eaten by Asians for centuries. Still, it has taken America’s growing concerns about gluten, carbohydrates, calories and diabetes to prompt a U.S. manufacturer to produce it here in a new line of heat-and-eat meals. Flavors include marinara and primavera, with chicken teriyaki and macaroni and cheese rolling out soon.

Composed mostly of water and glucomannan fiber from the yam, these noodles have been sold by Japanese companies for years to put in sukiyaki and hot pot. But American-produced Miracle Noodles and NoOodles, made from Asian-grown yams, are relatively new and aimed squarely at the Western market.

This month the NoOodle entrees have gone out to retailers across the country, along with the plain noodles that are making their way onto restaurant menus.

NoOodles creator, Terri Rogers, said she first heard about the noodles through a customer at her suburban Chicago restaurant, Lincolnshire Gourmet. She tried a packet and was so impressed that she started serving various preparations within months.

“I originally put them on the menu for my gluten-free customers,” said Rogers who introduced them in May. “But then I sold about 300 in three days, mostly to women who wanted noodles with no calories or carbs.”

Rogers’ decision to manufacture and market them here as packaged meals, she says, brought together her passion for cooking and her experience in the wholesale grocery market.

Her prepared meals run from 30 calories for pasta primavera to 100 calories for a dish of pearl-like macaroni and cheese. But, Rogers says, “We’re all about health, so we don’t really see it specifically as a diet product.”

Jonathan Carp, owner of California-based Miracle Noodle USA, says that he gets lots of mail from grateful “diabetics who have finally gotten their sugar under control with the noodle,” but adds, “We really cater to the weight-loss market.”

“Basically it’s a filler that will expand in your stomach,” says Carp, who plans to introduce packaged noodle entrees this fall. “So when you eat a dish that is mostly noodles they will make you feel like you’ve had a substantial meal. Satiety is a reflection of stress receptors in the stomach that respond to volume in the stomach.”

Still, medical professionals remain somewhat skeptical. Although there have been some studies linking glucomannan to nominal weight loss, studies of the actual noodle are few and far between.”The major benefit is that they take up space in your stomach,” says Lawrence Cheskin, director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center in Baltimore. “But whether or not they are useful for weight loss remains to be proven. The studies are still mixed.”

Hannah El-Amin, a registered dietitian and diabetes educator at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, says: “I would warn against building one’s diet around the noodles because they provide minimal nutrition. … While these are fine as an occasional addition to an otherwise well-balanced diet, I would warn against considering them a dietary staple.”

Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and consultant for the NoOodle, doesn’t rule out daily consumption but agrees that the noodle should be eaten as part of a well-rounded diet.

“If you ate nothing but noodle every day, it would not be good,” she said. “But if you ate it with a wide variety of other things, it would be helpful. If someone was watching caloric intake, fiber, or cholesterol and sugar, you could actually sneak 2 to 4 ounces into many meals.”

While El-Amin acknowledges that the noodles “contain a good amount of fiber, which may help slow digestion and make you feel fuller as a result,” she notes that “the benefits of fiber such as lowering cholesterol, lowering blood sugar and providing a sense of fullness are not unique to these noodles. This is also the case with other high-fiber foods like fruits, vegetables and whole grains.”

One final note: Although the noodles are essentially flavorless, they are not odorless right out of the package. Consumers have described their smell as earthy or squidlike, but say that the odor disappears under running water. Their calamari-like texture also becomes more al dente when dry-fried in a pan.

Where to find them

Although the NoOodle (and the Miracle Noodle) are available online, more and more local stores are carrying the product as well. Here are a few places that sell and serve the NoOodle locally. Check nooodle.com for more.

Retail: Hyde Park Produce, The Market Place Foodstore, Potash Brothers and Tony’s Finer Foods in Chicago; Lakeside Foods in Winnetka; Fresh Farms International in Chicago and north suburbs.

Restaurants: Food Life, Ina’s, Pompeii, Wild Fish