Originally posted by Dr. Davis on 2018-08-30
on the Wheat Belly Blog, sourced from and currently found at: Infinite Health Blog.
PCM forum Index of WB Blog articles.

Malchemy: Converting health to sickness

Alchemy is an ancient pursuit dating back some 40 centuries, an effort to explore immortality, panaceas that cure any and all human diseases, and the conversion of, say, lead to gold to generate endless riches. It was also a collection of efforts that helped divine scientific exploration and explore early chemistry.

So what is “malchemy”?

Malchemy (mal = bad) is my term for the magical conversion of healthy, slender, well-adapted humans with healthy skin, bones, teeth, and gastrointestinal tracts to that of obese, fatigued, bloated, red-faced, disease-plagued humans, a startling and dramatic transformation. While most aspects of alchemy have never been achieved over the millennia, in the space of 50 years—1% of the time that alchemy was practiced and failed—the magic of malchemy has been mastered.

The wisdom of the USDA, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Diabetes Association and others have refined malchemy into a science. Having engaged in several decades of advice to cut total and saturated fat, pack the diet with wheat and grains, consume sugar in moderation, move more and eat less, and they have achieved the equivalent of converting a bowl of molten lead into 24-karat gold.

If you would like to view the official dietary version of gold that makes the alchemist hugely wealthy, just go to your nearest Walmart or shopping mall: huge people who walk with feet set far apart given their enormous thighs; arms splayed to the side, suspended by enormous folds of chest and abdominal fat; red, seborrheic faces; hobbling gaits due to painful feet, knees, hips, and edematous legs; oodles of motorized scooters; prescription pill dispensers filled to the brim.

So where is the gold in this modern version? Well, it’s not gold in the pockets of Walmart shoppers—it’s gold in the pockets of people who sell processed junk food, pharmaceutical companies who “treat” health consequences of conventional dietary advice, multi-billion dollar hospital systems who deliver what is now passed off as “healthcare” for perverse sums, medical device companies who live in the shadows but are among the biggest wealth recipients of all, doctors who drank the healthcare Kool-Aid and believe that they are doing public good but are complicit in this perverted chemistry.

Americans are therefore the victims of a peculiar and perverse form of health alchemy. If you’d like to undo this thing I call malchemy and return to your natural state of being slender, vigorous, healthy without need for medications, doctors, or procedures, I can just wave my magic wand and—voila—you can be restored to your natural, original state. But it means doing the OPPOSITE that all conventional healthcare advisers tell you: DON’T cut your fat or saturated fat. DON’T eat more “healthy whole grains.” Do NOT engage in moderation, do NOT move more and eat less. Do NOT ask your doctor whether “Enbrel is right for you.” Do NOT ask your doctor whether fish oil is safe because it “thins the blood.” Do NOT ask the doctor why you have excessive gas, bloating, and abdominal discomfort when the solutions are an endoscopy, Prilosec, and a pat on the back because you don’t have colon cancer.

You can perform your own version of magic and, like a wizard converting a frog back to a handsome prince, return to the person you were meant to be before these evil spirits got tangled in your life. That is what we do in the Wheat Belly lifestyle: we perform our own version of alchemy and convert big, bloated, inflamed, people reliant on the blundering of the healthcare system into sleek, slender, highly-functioning people, restored to the way you should have been all along.