 Lectins make things clump together and they make red blood cells clump together. In fact, you've heard me describe in published results that the lectins, particularly in kidney beans, are so mischievous in making red blood cells clump that there are human experiences of eating healthy bean days in Boston where large numbers of children and teachers wound up in the emergency room sick with bloody diarrhea because the beans that they were eating were undercooked and the lectins had not been destroyed. Also, those of you who know the white powder ricin, which was made famous originally in the Japanese subway bombing of years ago, ricin is the lectin of the castor bean and only a few molecules of ricin will actually cause your entire bloodstream to clot, a glutinate. So this is not a theory that lectins are mischievous, this is actually proven and it's used in espionage to this day. Now I'm not the first person to find that lectins were really bad for you. In fact, it's been known about for a very long time and throughout all my books I try to give you the most up-to-date research on the effect of lectins as well as show you some of the older research that first identified lectins as a problem. And we really only have to go back, oh, 20 years or so, to the famous or infamous blood type diet by Dr. Peter Di Amato. Now Dr. Di Amato, actually his blood type diet was a lectin avoidance diet and he decided, and I think there's good reasons why he did that, to rather than tell you to avoid lectins, which I tell you to do, certain ones, but to base your avoidance on your blood type. And he, I personally feel probably indiscriminately said, you owe people out there, and I'm a typo, were hunter-gatherers. And so you really ought to be eating meat. And you A-type people out there weren't hunter-gatherers and you probably ought to be eating more vegetables and so on down the line. Now the reason that book became so popular is, number one, it was a lectin avoidance diet, but number two, about 60% of people are type O. And so most people could eat animal protein and meats on that diet and removing lectins actually worked very well. So it was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy and sold like wildfire. Now his critics, and Dr. Di Amato is not an MD, his critics said this is pseudoscience. There's absolutely no basis on what he's saying. But I've read every one of his books and the science that he uses is actually very true. For instance, we know that the sugar molecule on type A blood cells also lines the wall of your gut if you're a type A. And we know that the sugar molecule in O's line your gut if you're a type O and so on and so forth. And interestingly enough, type A individuals actually have increased risk of viral and bacterial infections compared to type O's. And there is some interesting evidence. It's because you type A's have a different sugar molecule on the lining of your nose, your gut, your swallowing tube, your esophagus. And that's why you're more susceptible because viruses are more apt to bind to that sugar molecule. So rather than pseudoscience, there's actually really good science behind lectins. Now, I had started to ask people to eat certain foods and take away certain foods and do blood tests on them every three months. And very rapidly, I found in my clinic that when I asked people to take away certain healthy foods, like grains, for instance, or beans, for instance, that I could see their inflammation markers go down. And it was actually quite dramatic. Not only could I see that, but these people would come back and say, wow, you know, my hands don't hurt anymore. My knees don't creak. We'd see that their blood pressure plummeted. We'd see that their diabetes was either getting better or going away completely. And we'd see people reverse heart disease. Now, through the years, I've found many individuals, many of them women, that I call my canaries in a coal mine. And these are individuals who, even the slightest little exposure to seemingly very unimportant lectin-containing foods, were the cause of their migraines, their irritable bowel syndrome, their fibromyalgia, their autoimmune disease, the cause of having their tonsils removed, the cause of having their gallbladder have stones in them, that these people kept showing up. And when we took these foods away from people, they got dramatically better. In fact, if you saw my podcast with a husband and wife team who have a YouTube channel about lectins and the plant paradox, Dave was suffering from a severe Crohn's disease, so bad that he'd actually had operations for it, was hospitalized multiple times, was on immunosuppressant drugs, which were making him sick. And Jan had such severe rheumatoid arthritis, even in her late 30s and early 40s, with young kids that she was basically bedridden and an incredibly miserable life. And Dave was given the plant paradox by a friend. And Dave came home and said, you know, I know Crohn's isn't caused by diet, I've been told that by my doctor, and I know rheumatoid arthritis isn't caused by diet, but, you know, honey, we got nothing to lose here. And it was so, you know, exciting, particularly to hear from his wife that within four days of taking lectins out of her diet, following the plant paradox, that her hands stopped hurting, her hips stopped hurting, she got out of bed, and his Crohn's is now gone, he does not have Crohn's. They've completely changed their lives just by getting a few silly plant compounds out of their diet. So these people, when I did blood tests on them, we could measure their sensitivity to lectins. I published a paper about that in the circulation, the American Heart Association Journal, that we could predict who was going to react to lectins and who wasn't. There are some people who clearly, lectins are not that big a deal. And if you're one of them, good for you. Now subsequently, I've published papers in abstract form, in circulation, of 102 patients with auto immune disease, including moi, me personally, I have had a marker for anti-nuclear antibody, which some people associate with lupus, or other autoimmune diseases. And after I had that discovered, I believed it because my father's side of the family has massive psoriasis, and I wasn't surprised. So I was perfect on my diet for two months, and it went away. It became negative. And we published the results of 102 people who followed my program for six months. At the end of six months, 95 out of those 102 were negative for their autoimmune marker, or markers, off of immunosuppressants. The other 6% were actually on less immunosuppressants. Interestingly enough, in that published data, seven people, once they were in remission, went away from the diet, and all of them subsequently became positive for their autoimmune marker. And all seven of them became negative again when we reinstituted the diet. Now, just last fall, I decided it had been a couple of years, I'm going to retest my theory. I'm going to reintroduce over a weekend, aggressively, lectin. I ate bread, I ate pasta, I came back, I drew my blood, and lo and behold, I'm positive again for anti-nuclear antibody. And I go, well, that's pretty cool. I'm going to be perfect for just one week. All I'm going to do, one week, let's see what happens. One week later, same lab, same blood drawer, one of my blood drawers, negative for anti-nuclear antibody. Now, why are we more sensitive? Because quite honestly, as I talk about in the seven deadly disruptors, our entire defense system against lectins has been decimated by the fact that we take antibiotics that kill off our gut microbiome, we feed antibiotics to our cows, our pigs, used to our chickens, and we eat those antibiotics when we eat factory-raised meats. We kill off our bacteria by roundup, and roundup is in everything. It's in all of our conventional crops now. It's in our canola oil. It's in our oats. It's in our wheat. It's in our soybeans. It's everywhere. It's in California wines. And roundup kills our microbiome. It was patented by Monsanto as an antibiotic, and it in itself causes leaky gut. We can go on and on and on, but quite frankly, we're now without a defense system against lectins. Lectins are the plant defense system against being eaten, and we have a major defense system against lectins hurting us. Our mucus membranes, our lectin absorbers, our gut microbiome eats lectins, and we've had traditional food preparation techniques that have really helped to reduce lectins. In the old days, we fermented almost everything because quite frankly, there was no food storage system. That's how we actually detoxified lectins. In the good old days, we soaked beans in water and changed that water every four to six hours for at least 24 hours, and then we cooked them for a long time. And that absolutely helps reduce lectins. And it's amazing talking to people from India or Brazil or Peru. Their mothers and grandmothers used a pressure cooker. Whenever they cooked lentils or pulses or other beans, and they were shocked that we don't use pressure cookers in this country. So things have changed, and we have changed, and that's why we've quite frankly got an epidemic with lectins getting into us.