 are bananas the baddies. So I've tried to incorporate bananas into my diet without much success. And anytime you try a food and you react poorly, there is an underlying answer to it. Whether something simple like anti-nutrients or more complicated, you know, such as myself quitting the carnivore diet after almost eight years of following it because my liver was failing. It's difficult to figure these things out because the information is not easily available, which is why the anecdotal reaction to eating a banana is more practical. You eat the banana, you don't feel good. Hey, stop eating it. Yeah, you might be able to find out that bananas have anti-nutrients, but which ones? What do they do? You know, do you have a degree in biochemistry? It's too much for the average person to understand. Upon starting my banana research and not the type of banana research that the vegan fairy boys do on a Friday night, you know, I was looking into the food banana. I came across a forum post of someone quoting Lauren Cordain who created the Paleo diet. Big deal, guys. You know, Dr. Lauren Cordain invented the diet. Anyway, he did a lot of grunt work, a lot of research on bananas, figured out what anti-nutrients, and yeah, if you wanted to look into the studies, you might be able to find these things within a few hours, but thankfully I did not have to do that today. And by the way, guys, that's how you credit someone and avoid plagiarism, but if you want to shield supplements and pretend you're smart, then obviously you can't just mention someone's name because then all you'd be doing is crediting other people without creating, I'm not gonna get into that today, but too many dirt bags online, say the least. Both the banana peels and fruit contain a wide variety of anti-nutrients, including saponins, tannins, oxalates, phytates, and cyanide. The concentration is low enough. They pose minimal health risk with the exception of the saponins. The amount of saponins in bananas was reported to be at the safe upper limit. The high saponin content has potential to increase intestinal permeability, one of the main risk factors of autoimmune diseases. Bananas also contain thalamatin-like proteins, which are known to increase cell membrane permeability and therefore increasing intestinal permeability. The TLP content of bananas is extremely high and that function of those TLPs in the bananas is to prevent fungal attacks on the fruit tree while the banana is growing. And I agree with everything he said on that for the most part, although the oxalates, the phytates, and the cyanide, he says they're not that big of a deal, but they probably are if you're eating the food every day. Bananas also contain a lectin called banalic. And I'm sure most of you have heard of lectins in various beans and grains, causing gut permeability issues. Banana lectins are no exception and have been found in high amounts in human blood when people consume bananas. In animal tissue experiments, banana lectins stimulated production of various inflammatory hormones in the metabolic system of those animals. And a normal healthy person with no leaky gut, proteins cannot leak through the intestinal barrier and cause issues. But it's clear that bananas have high enough anti-nutrients, these gut permeability-causing ones, on their own to cause issues. Just eating bananas seems like it can give you gut problems. Not only that, bananas contain protease inhibitors preventing our digestive systems from breaking down proteins. And something else unusual has been found in bananas. High concentrations of neurochemicals, dopamine and norepinephrine, which have been shown to alter the biome to a more negative bacterial profile. So far it sounds horrible because anyone who has had gut issues who understands these components is like, wait, bananas can increase gut permeability. They stop the digestion of protein. They promote negative microbes. So when you have undigested protein, that can cause issues on its own. Gut permeability, that can cause issues on its own. And then promoting negative microbes like candida, it seems like on an anti-nutrient basis, no good. It's a no-go. But that's the physical chemical breakdown. It's also worth mentioning the agrochemicals that are sprayed on bananas. If you're not going organic, oral allergy syndrome is actually a reaction to these chemicals that are being sprayed on our food. So instead of telling us, hey, you have to go organic, they make up medical terminology and say, deal with it, it's perfectly normal. And after all these negatives being said, I was trying to have one, two, or three bananas per meal for the past two weeks. They're calorically dense. I enjoy eating them, but I just do not feel good. Since my gut health has been getting better, I was okay on a few occasions having one or two, but I did get headaches about half the time. That's an indicator for me that it's causing gut dysbiosis issues and I'm not digesting properly. So our bananas good enough from a nutritional profile to consider eating despite all of these negative things. I just said, it's very calorically dense and to have a natural food that tastes good, that's calorically dense, doesn't usually happen. It's usually a combination of several different things, not all of those put together. Bananas do have an excellent balance of starch, sugar, and fiber. The perfect candidate for feeding our gut microbiome, making the bacteria and fungus in our stomach happy. There's a small amount of B vitamins, nothing significant. Some vitamin C, actually pretty high in vitamin A and beta carotene if you're having a few bananas per day, but most notably, excellent source of minerals, particularly potassium, magnesium, copper, manganese, molybdenum. One reason that against bananas is because that high potassium content can actually reduce gut motility because it increases the body's need for other minerals, especially magnesium. But those minerals in particular are the ones people have an issue getting on a carnivore diet. From the animal-based versus plant-based mineral perspective, bananas are an excellent template of those plant-based minerals that aren't as high in meat that occur predominantly in plant foods. And that's really the goal of eating plant foods. How can we feed our gut bacteria and consume a high mineral content while minimizing the amount of anti-nutrients and negative things? Of course, perfectly healthy, breastfed from birth, the perfect gut microbiome, probably not even watching my YouTube channel because they never have to worry about what they're eating. So what can be done in this case? There's various ways to reduce the anti-nutrient content of foods, cooking them, fermenting them, drying them out. So if you don't tolerate raw bananas, then you can cook them, stew them for long periods of time, dry them out and dehydrate them. But really, you wanna try each of those things and see how you feel, what you respond best to. And in the granola bars that we should be having soon on Frankie's syringe foods, hopefully in a week or two, bananas are gonna be the base fruit ingredient in there, but they're cooked, they're dried, heavily reduced anti-nutrient content. So this is really applying to the raw banana. And just like you can't eat raw wheat berries or you can't have raw rice, everything needs to be processed before we can really consume it from that plant-based perspective in many instances. So thank you guys for joining me. Hopefully you have learned a little something about bananas. I know some of you guys remember I was consuming the banana baby food, but they put water in that. I'm not sure the quality of the water. I had a few bad tasting batches. So even though I felt okay on the banana baby food from the supermarket, I stopped doing it. I don't recommend that. Maybe just try to make it yourself or cook it or try different preparation methods. So you guys can go to frank-defaun.com if you would like to support me further through all of my businesses. And outside of that, you can drop a like on the video. Leave a comment down below. Subscribe so that YouTube can unsubscribe you next week. And be sure to check that notification bell so they don't notify you of my videos. I got plenty of ideas guys, but if there's anything you would like me to talk about, leave me a comment below and maybe something will stick out. But I'll see you guys for the next video.