I Don't Eat Wheat in Québec. In Europe, I Eat It Every Day.

The one real trauma of my childhood is watching my father unable to walk.

Not for a day. Not for a weekend. For weeks.

It started when he was 26. A flare-up would hit, and his body would just lock down. His back, his joints, everything. He could stay like that for days — sometimes weeks — before becoming semi-functional again. Semi. Never fully.

I never once saw him run.

And the worst part is he never stopped trying. That was my father. He'd push, he'd force it, he'd try to move his body the way a man his age was supposed to be able to. And it was exactly in those moments that he'd end up the most wrecked.

Today, my father does somersaults with my kids.

He runs. He moves. He has a normal life. It has nothing to do with the man I knew for my entire childhood.

What changed: wheat came out of his diet. His posture got worked on. Ketones came into his life.

And I want to be clear about this, because it matters: it's never ONE factor. Nobody removes a single thing and wakes up cured. It's a stack. Each piece removes a load, and at some point the body has enough margin to repair itself. Wheat was one piece. A big one — but one piece.

And me? I had the same origin story. Around 25, my body started talking like my father's. Same family, same pattern.

Except I had a head start: I knew what to watch for.

Today I do martial arts. A rough sport, hard on the body. And my back almost never locks up.

But there's one thing that still gets me, every single time.

One slice of pizza. That's all it takes.

In Québec, one slice is enough. That same evening, my back locks up. Not the next day — that same evening.

It's so reproducible it's become a test. So at home, the answer is simple: zero wheat. That's just our normal.

Then I landed in Europe.

Pizza on Monday. Pizza on Wednesday. Bread with every meal. Three weeks straight.

Zero pain. Zero locked back. Zero inflammation.

And — sorry for the image, but when you've lived what I've lived, you notice these things — my digestion was clean enough that the difference was visible every morning.

I've spent years wondering why. Here's what I found.

The myth we need to kill right now

The easy answer, the one you read everywhere: "European wheat was never modified, North American wheat was."

That's false. And it matters to say so, because if you build your understanding on that, you'll go looking for the fix in the wrong place.

Italy is the birthplace of modern wheat. An Italian agronomist, Nazareno Strampelli, created the first dwarf wheat varieties in the 1910s-1930s. His work is what kicked off the global Green Revolution. The durum wheat in your pizza in Rome comes from the same kind of intensive breeding programs as Canadian wheat.

Same family. Same ancestors. Close cousins.

If it were just the grain's genetics, Italy would lock up my back the same way.

It's not the grain. It's what we do with it.

Culprit #1: what gets sprayed before harvest

In North America, one practice is common: spraying the field with glyphosate a few days before harvest. Not to kill weeds — to dry the crop evenly and harvest faster. It's called pre-harvest desiccation.

So the grain arrives at the mill carrying residue.

In Europe, this practice is heavily restricted, and banned outright in several countries. Pre-harvest glyphosate use on cereals grown for human food is largely prohibited there.

Is it THE cause of my back locking up? I can't prove it. But it's a major, measurable difference between my pizza in Québec and my pizza in Barcelona. And the research on glyphosate's impact on the gut microbiome keeps piling up.

When your system is already reactive — like my father's, like mine — you don't have margin for one more irritant.

Culprit #2: the ingredient list you don't read

Grab an industrial loaf of bread in Québec. Flip the bag. Read it.

Now grab a baguette from a French bakery. Flour. Water. Salt. Yeast.

North America allows a whole range of additives in bread-making — oxidizing agents, emulsifiers, enzymes, dough conditioners — many of which are banned in Europe. These molecules exist for one reason only: to produce faster and keep bread on the shelf longer.

Your body, for its part, never asked to go faster.

In Québec, you're not just eating wheat. You're eating a production system. In Europe, you're a lot closer to the grain.

Culprit #3: time (and it's the biggest one)

This is the one that best explains my own experience.

A real Italian pizza, a real French baguette: the dough ferments for 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours. Often on a sourdough starter, with wild lactic bacteria.

An industrial North American dough: two hours, sometimes less, with fast-acting yeast and additives to compensate.

This isn't a matter of tradition. It's biochemistry.

During a long fermentation, bacteria and enzymes do a job your gut would otherwise have to do itself: they break down part of the gluten proteins, and above all they consume a large share of the FODMAPs — those fermentable sugars responsible for bloating and discomfort in a huge number of people.

In other words: Italian pizza arrives in your body already partly digested.

Industrial pizza, on the other hand, arrives intact. Your colon ends up doing the fermentation work, with the results you already know.

The fermentation happened in the dough instead of happening in my gut. That's why my mornings are different over there.

And what about wheat's "drug-like" effect?

This one needs to be addressed, because anyone with kids has seen it with their own eyes.

Bread, pasta, cookies: these aren't neutral foods for a child. There's a seeking, a need, an insistence you never see with broccoli. At home, the difference between a kid who eats these and a kid who doesn't shows up in behaviour, not just on the plate.

The science behind it involves exorphins — protein fragments produced when gluten is digested, which can bind to opioid receptors in the brain. The phenomenon is documented.

Where you need to be careful: some authors have pushed the idea that modern wheat is literally a drug because of some new protein created through genetic modification. That part has never been solidly demonstrated, and wheat geneticists have largely pushed back on it.

The truth is simpler, and no less important: fast-absorbing refined carbs create a spike-crash-craving cycle that looks a lot like a behavioural addiction. Add exorphins on top of that. You don't need a monster-protein to understand why your kid keeps asking for more.

What this means for you

My story isn't scientific proof. It's a case. Mine, my father's, and thousands of people coming back from Europe saying the exact same thing: "I don't get it, I ate bread every day and I felt fine."

But it leads to a freeing conclusion.

If the problem were strictly genetic — if it were the grain itself — you'd be stuck for life.

But if the problem comes from what we do to the grain — the desiccation, the additives, the express fermentation — then it's fixable. And the levers belong to you.

My father spent from age 26 to his sixties believing his body was broken.

It wasn't. It was reacting.

And the day we removed what it was reacting to, he started doing somersaults with my kids.

The real principle behind all of this

It's never just one ingredient. It's a context.

That's why the first KetoZen principle isn't "cut the carbs" — it's eat naturally. The closer you get to real food, the less work your body has to do to defend itself.

Your body isn't broken. It's reacting to a system.

And when your body stops fighting... you get to be capable again of everything you kept putting off.

Even running, at sixty, for the first time in your adult life.