David PerlmutterPresident,, Perlmutter Health Center · Board-Certified Neurologist | Functional Medicine Pioneer | #1 New York Times Best-Selling Author | International Speaker | Host of The Empowering Neurologist Podcast

Gluten: A Most Addicting Drug

6 Jan 2014 · 1 min

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In this segment, Dr. David Perlmutter explains that many patients experience withdrawal-like symptoms when they stop eating bread or gluten-containing foods. He attributes this to chemicals in wheat/gluten that bind to the brain's morphine (opioid) receptors, effectively creating an addiction to wheat. He references Dr. William Davis’s book Wheat Belly, noting that when a drug blocks these opioid receptors, patients no longer experience withdrawal after quitting bread, supporting his claim that wheat can act like an addictive drug.

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You can only imagine that when I'm in my clinic dealing with patients and I tell them, you know, you've really got to stop eating bread, you've got to stop eating gluten-containing foods, and oftentimes people just can't make that happen. They say, you know, I tried it for a few days and it was almost like I was in drug withdrawal. And in fact, that's what's going on. There are chemicals in gluten that are in bread. There are chemicals in gluten-containing foods, in wheat, that actually stimulate the same parts of the brain that are responsive to morphine. So in a sense, you can absolutely be addicted to wheat because of the, the presence in wheat of these chemicals that bond to the morphine receptors in the human brain. My colleague, Dr. William Davis, described this in his book Wheat Belly, how when you give a drug to block those receptors, then individuals don't have withdrawal anymore from when they go off of bread.