Originally posted by Dr. Davis on 2018-09-06
on the Wheat Belly Blog, sourced from and currently found at: Infinite Health Blog.
PCM forum Index of WB Blog articles.

PCOS: A man-made situation

Most mainstream doctors believe that polycystic ovary syndrome, PCOS, is a disease.

PCOS is, after all, associated with markedly increased risk for type 2 diabetes, hypertension, endometrial cancer, and heart disease, in addition to outward signs that include excessive facial and body hair, tendency to being overweight or obese, irregular menstrual cycles, infertility. A crisis of self esteem commonly and understandably results. Mainstream doctors tell you to not worry because they have plenty of prescription drugs to “treat” it, not to mention various hormones, fertility procedures, and gastric bypass.

PCOS is a situation faced by as many as one in five females, suggesting that, like blue eyes or being left-handed, it is really just a variation of normal, a genetic variation unmasked by diet—–PCOS is a man-made health condition. The diet advocated by “official” sources of dietary advice is a virtual blueprint to create PCOS in the genetically prone female. Indeed, this formerly rare syndrome is now common.

Once again, conventional dietary advice to “cut fat and eat more healthy whole grains” coupled with overexposure to processed foods such as soft drinks led females prone to this condition down this path, doctors ready and willing to prescribe diabetes drugs and insulin, blood pressure drugs, steroids, oral contraceptives, and advise in vitro fertilization costing many thousands of dollars to deal with a condition that got its start with flawed dietary choices. Want to improve blood sugars while losing 80 pounds? Lap band or gastric bypass to the rescue. Yes: modern healthcare is very good at monetizing mistakes in diet and health.

High blood levels of insulin drive many aspects of PCOS. Foods that raise insulin the most thereby bring out PCOS phenomena, worsened further as visceral fat and inflammation snowball and cause insulin resistance to deteriorate further. Disrupted bowel flora develops, making the situation even worse.

Just as in everyone else, banish all grains (and limit dairy, since the whey protein is a potent stimulus of insulin—yeah, the same protein you put in your protein meal-replacement shake) and women with PCOS lose weight, shrink waist circumference, reduce insulin and insulin resistance, reduce high testosterone, watch excessive body hair recede, reverse inflammation, even conceive babies–—the same benefits obtained by women without PCOS but experienced to an exaggerated degree. Incorporate efforts to reverse disrupted bowel flora, as we do in the Wheat Belly and Undoctored lifestyles, and the situation gets even better.

All along, there was nothing wrong with the individual with PCOS–—but there was something desperately and tragically wrong with dietary advice that encourages consumption of “foods” that create the situation.