 Well, welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast and it's that time of year and we're going to be talking about a highly requested topic, how to eyeball lectin content. So happy holidays and I'm going to get rid of these for now but we're going to eyeball lectin content back to normal, okay. So there's people want to know how do you know where electin is? Well it's actually easier than you might think. And plants as you know, we're here first and quite frankly they are subject to evolutionary pressures exactly like animals are and what those pressures are is they want to live, they want to grow up and they want to have babies, seeds and they want to make sure that their seeds germinate and grow and those plants that successfully do that obviously survive and propagate and those plants that don't do that don't do very well. So plants did really great at this until animals arrived. Insects actually had about 60, 70 million years head start on earth before insects, their first predator arrived. So when insects arrived and wanted to eat plants or wanted to eat their seeds they didn't have our advantages of being able to run or hide or fight but they had one incredible advantage and that is that they were chemists of incredible ability. They could turn sunlight into matter and we haven't figured out how to do that. So they basically used biological warfare to make their predators think twice about eating them. Now we concentrate primarily on the seeds of plants because that's where we humans tend to interact with the most lectins. Plants have two strategies in terms of their seeds. Most fruits, particularly the ones that we're familiar with, have seeds in those fruits that are actually inedible and are incapable of being digested by most animals, tracks, GI tracks, including ours. So just to give you an example, I was out running my dogs this morning and we passed a couple of orange trees and it's citrus season here in the California southern area and I was actually just thinking about that plant and its fruit and those orange seeds that used to exist in oranges were inedible and the plant wanted you to actually eat the fruit and made it very attractive to you. It used the colors of oranges or yellows or reds to tell you that the fruit had a lot of sugar in it, fructose, and it would probably be worth your time to eat that fruit. Why bother? Because if you eat that fruit, you're more than likely to eat those seeds and you're not going to sit around and pick the seeds out, you just munch away and swallow the seeds primarily intact and those seeds would pass through your intestines and you would walk off from the plant most likely and a day later poop out of those seeds along with a healthy dose of fertilizer. So the plant had a fantastic system to get you interested in eating its babies and you'll plant the babies some place away from the mother plant which would improve the survival of that baby because it wouldn't be in the shade of that plant. So that works great for a lot of fruits, particularly fruits that we encountered in Africa many, many, many millions of years ago. Now other plants have a different strategy and I talk about this and call them naked babies. In this case, the seeds are not surrounded by a tempting fruit but instead they're just naked. There's no interesting part of them but on these seeds because there's no interesting way to get you to eat these seeds, the plant actually doesn't want you to eat these seeds. And to dissuade you from eating those seeds, they use proteins that are called lectins and I'm not saying lecitin which is an amolient that's used in chocolate for instance and I'm not saying leptin which is a hormone that keeps you from being hungry, makes you feel full. So this is lectin and lectins are proteins. So they're not a carbohydrate, they're not a fat and that's actually important when we get to talk about okay how do you look for lectins. So these proteins are usually on the outside covering of the seed, usually the hall. So the first thing is if a seed has a hall there's libel to be a lectin and let's just use a perfect example, wheat has a hall around it and wheat has gluten and gluten happens to be a rather important lectin. Now most people who are gluten intolerant or have the extreme form of gluten sensitivity which is called celiac disease cannot tolerate the leptin gluten or its cousins that are in the seed. Interestingly, gluten is actually in the white part of the seed but there's a probably more important leptin in the covering of the seed, the hall, called wheat germ glutenant. Now back in the 60s and 70s any decent hippie would put wheat germ on almost everything they ate and you'll still see to this day people telling you how important wheat germ is. But in fact wheat germ actually contains wheat germ agglutin which is probably the most dangerous leptin that you've never heard of. And it's dangerous because most lectins, these protein molecules, are actually pretty big and one of the things that most of us learned in high school biology and promptly forgot is that proteins that we eat are usually digested down into single amino acids, little building blocks of protein and we absorb those amino acids in through our gut and then we reassemble those amino acids into their full proteins again. Well gluten is a very big protein and it's incapable of being digested by our intestines. Believe it or not rats and other rodents who are grain predators have a very efficient digestion system for these lectins which makes it possible for them to eat wheat or other grains but for us the lectins in wheat and other grains we can't digest well. The exception is wheat germ agglutin. Wheat germ agglutin is a very very very tiny protein and it can be absorbed directly through your intestines without any digestion and it's responsible for many of the things that we think are just a process of getting old. It's very responsible for weight gain, it's very responsible for losing muscle mass as we get older and some of my research has shown recently that it's probably responsible for a lot of the atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries or heart disease that's occurring in most of us in western society and if we have time we'll get into why that happens. So lectins are bad actors. They're bad actors because again the plant doesn't want you to eat these particular seeds and it wants to dissuade you from eating these seeds. So the lectin content of a plant varies depending on whether or not it doesn't want you to eat the seeds. So in general all grains have a lectin, all pseudo grains have a lectin, things like quinoa, things like buckwheat. Recently I had a patient who said, well, teff is gluten free and it's true that teff is gluten free but teff unfortunately has several rather powerful lectins and this person still came to see me because of really bad irritable bowel syndrome and also had an autoimmune disease and been eating gluten free and didn't understand why they still had a problem and they were using teff as their primary food. They were making breads with it, they were making cookies with it, they were having teff pasta and it wasn't until we pointed out that that was their problem that the light bulb went on. Similarly corn, corn has actually by count maybe over 20 different lectins and we've recently been able to break down what people react to, which particular corn lectins and an individual react to and one of the striking findings I've noticed in the last six months since we've started to have this test available to us, so far almost 95% of people who are sensitive to gluten or have celiac disease are absolutely sensitive to the lectins and corn. In other words they cross react with each other. So here's the first word of advice, if you've gone gluten free absolutely you have to go corn free. Why that's important is that corn is ubiquitous in most gluten free foods and my research and a number of other people have shown that just going gluten free is just step one in eliminating lectins and most people who go gluten free don't realize that the gluten free foods they're eating probably have equally as bad lectins or in many cases worse lectins. Now there's two exceptions to the grain rule and again most grains have a haul. Most pseudo grains have a haul and in general the lectin is in the haul. Sorghum and millet don't have any hauls. So for the vast majority of people sorghum and millet are perfectly safe. They do not have identifiable lectins. Now we're going to get into well okay so how do we get rid of lectins but one of the important things when we get to talk about getting rid of lectins is that most lectins can be destroyed by using a pressure cooker and a pressure cooker uses high pressure and high temperature. Almost all lectins can be destroyed except for gluten. Gluten can't be destroyed with a pressure cooker. And there is a very similar lectin and oats that looks almost identical to gluten. And we've been unable to destroy that lectin as well. So don't for a minute think that oh I can have my steel cut oats if I put them in a pressure cooker. It's not going to work. And yes oats are gluten free. But they contain a lectin that looks virtually identical to your immune system as gluten. So please stay away from oats. They're really good for fattening horses for the winter. They're not good for fattening you for the winter. Okay so first things first. If it's grain or it's a pseudo grain it's probably got a lectin. The exceptions are millet and sorghum. Next plants from the new world north and south and Central America are plants that none of our ancestors ever saw until approximately 500 years ago when Columbus started trade called Columbian trade. That means that there's a lot of new world plants that were unaccustomed to eating. Now when I say unaccustomed to eating we've evolved with plants. Our ancestors were great apes and great apes have been eating the leaves of trees and the fruits of trees and the jungle for 20 to 40 million years. And we've adapted to the lectins in primarily those leaves. Our microbiome, the bugs in our gut have gotten used to those lectins and they've actually adapted to eating those lectins. You might be amazed many of us carry a bug, a bacteria that likes gluten, really enjoys eating gluten. One of the interesting findings in people who have those bugs but then go gluten free and then restart eating gluten sometimes by accident the bugs don't have anything to eat when you stopped eating gluten and they literally leave. They say, nothing to eat here we're leaving. So when you start eating gluten again and you don't have that microbiome, those bugs you're immediately sensitive to gluten because you got no bugs to eat it. Similarly we've evolved with plant leaves over millions and millions of years and our microbiome has gotten used to eating those lectins and have evolved. Let me give you a recent example which is actually fascinating. There are lectins in seaweed and we, most human beings, don't have a microbiome that's capable of eating the lectins in seaweed with one exception. The Japanese have been eating large amounts of seaweed for so long that their microbiome has evolved in being able to eat seaweed, digest seaweed and digest the lectins in seaweed. There's unfortunately some evidence that the lectins in seaweed can damage the insulin producing cells of the pancreas. So if you're not from Japan and have not been eating seaweed all of your life, you probably haven't evolved the lectin-eating bacteria that exists in the Japanese. Where did they get these bacteria? We think that they've eaten lots and lots of fish and believe it or not the intestines of fish that have those bacteria and so those bacteria have colonized them. So it's just a modern-day example of how the culture that's been eating seaweed for a very long time has finally got a bacteria that's capable of eating the lectins in seaweed. But most of us have only had 500 years to get used to the lectins in American plants. Now some of the worst ones are the nightshade family. The nightshades are potatoes, are traditional white potato, or now the modern, you know, blue potato or red potato. It doesn't matter a potato is a potato is a potato. Also tomatoes, peppers, whether they're bell peppers or hot chili peppers, eggplant and goji berries. Goji berries are actually an American plant, American fruit. They were called the wolfberry. They were actually taken to China in trade and they grew extremely well in China. So that's why you see most goji berries come from China even though they're an American nightshade. In general, the lectins are on the peel and the seeds. So if you see a tomato and say, oh gosh, I really want a tomato, it's actually pretty easy to do. You just peel the tomato and then de-seed it. In fact, another fun fact, the Romans hybridized tomatoes to make a Roma tomato, you know, those kind of oblong guys so that they would have the most pulp to peel and seed ratio. And if you've ever noticed, if you cut it across, you'll notice it's mostly pulp and not a lot of seeds. And what these clever Italians did was they'd throw it in a pot of boiling water for 30 seconds and then cut it in half, the peel would come right out and then they'd squeeze the seeds out and they'd throw it in the pot and start making sauce. The last couple of months I've been in Italy traveling, particularly in the south of Italy and Sicily, where tomatoes are used extensively in cooking. And every chef, every home I went to, the first thing they told me is that, well, of course, you have to peel and de-seed tomatoes. Any idiot knows that. And I said, well, why do you have to do that? And they said, well, because the peel and the seeds are poisonous. Now, they didn't know that they were lectins, but their traditions have taught them that. And amazingly, the Italians didn't use tomatoes until about 200 years after Columbus brought them back, their native son, because they believed that they were poisonous. In fact, Americans didn't start eating tomatoes until about 1850 when a colonel, I love to tell this story, Samuel Johnson, Colonel Samuel Johnson, he was not a colonel, put a note in the Summit County Gazette, Summit County is a suburb of Philadelphia, New Jersey, that he was going to commit suicide on the courthouse steps by eating a bushel of tomatoes. And he obviously drew a rather large crowd and he proceeded to eat a lot of tomatoes. I'm not sure he ate a bushel of tomatoes, but he didn't die. And that was so amazing that that was actually the start of Americans eating tomatoes. But in general, particularly if you have arthritis, please, please, please peel and de-seed your tomatoes. Don't want to do that? Throw them in a pressure cooker. A pressure cooker will destroy the lectins in potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, and I suppose you could pressure cook goji berries, but I don't know why you'd want to. So now, we're going to take time out for an advertisement. Now, if you've been listening at all, you know that I'm very passionate about polyphenols. Polyphenols are these plant compounds that our microbiome, our gut bacteria, change into antioxidant compounds within our bloodstream. As you know, one of my favorite mottoes is the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. Why? Because olive oil has a lot of polyphenols. But it's pretty hard to get the amount of olive oil polyphenols into you. In fact, you need about a liter a week of olive oil to get the appropriate amount of polyphenols. That's a big jug of olive oil. So it's really hard in our everyday diet to get enough polyphenols. And that's why I start my day with vital reds. 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Use the coupon code podcast20 at the checkout. Now, this code is going to expire on December 31st. So make sure to use it. And thanks for listening to this advertisement for Vital Reds. Now, back to the podcast. So interesting, fun fact. This is how traditional cultures have gotten rid of lectins. I'll give you an example. Quinoa, that wonderful healthy pseudo-grain from the Incas, was so toxic that the Incas actually had three detoxification processes to get the lectins out of quinoa. They would soak it for days. And they'd soak it so long that it would begin to ferment. It would rot. And then they would cook it. So they didn't follow our package directions of boiling it for 30 minutes and eating it. They knew that they had to use bacteria, fermentation, to actually destroy the lectins because we don't have the ability. And I have a number of patients from Peru who've been using a pressure cooker or these traditional methods in Peru that move to the United States and start eating quinoa the way the rest of us have been taught to eat it with just boiling it. And they get irritable bowel and leaky gut. And they can't figure it out until their mother tells them, you stupid person, I told you you can't eat quinoa this way. I have many patients who move here from Brazil and one of their traditional dishes is rice and beans. Most of those patients' mothers used pressure cookers and when they came to the United States, they stopped doing that. And they developed leaky gut and autoimmune disease and when we returned them to their traditional way of eating that solved the problem. So if it's grain, if it's a pseudo grain, that's where lectins are located. If it's a nightshade family, that's where lectins are located. There's another class of American plants called the squash family and squashes are primarily native to America. The only exception to that is a cucumber. Cucumbers are actually from India. They're actually a very ancient plant from India that in more modern times were brought from India to the Middle East and subsequently the Mediterranean. But all of these plants, the lectins are in the peels and the seeds. So in general, the flesh may be safe as long as you peel and deseed them. In fact, in Italy and in the south of France, whenever there's raw vegetables for appetizers, the cucumbers are always peeled and deseeded. In Istanbul where I've lectured, the cucumbers are peeled and deseeded and so are the tomatoes. They're peeled and deseeded. So these cultures have traditionally figured out that there's something in the peels and seeds and that something is elected that they have gotten rid of for hundreds of years. So if it's got a peel and seeds, you probably ought to peel and deseed it. Now there's two other important lectin containing foods that everybody think is fabulous. One is a peanut. Peanut is an American plant. It's not a nut at all. It's actually a bean. It's a legume. And peanuts have some of the nastiest lectins there are in terms of producing heart disease. In fact, there's been some very interesting experiments three, in fact, using monkeys, our cousins, and giving them peanut oil. Peanut oil does have the peanut lectin and they would develop heart disease. They would develop hardening of the arteries. If you take that lectin out of peanut oil and you can actually do it with filtration and then repeat the experiment, the monkeys with the peanut oil without the lectins don't get heart disease. So the peanut lectin is a mischief maker. It also has been implicated in causing colon cancer. So don't go to the ballpark and eat peanuts. They contain lectin. Don't. Please have peanut butter. And if it says organic peanut butter, that doesn't mean that it's any good for you. Who cares if the lectin is organic? It's still elective. Now the last important one that makes me very sad because I used to love cashews, the cashew is actually a bean as well. It's not a nut. And the cashew is actually part of the poison ivy family. It's the same family. And it's an irritant. And it's an irritant because of the lectins it contains. And sadly, I've seen many patients, particularly with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and MS, where cashews was one of the big troublemakers that was causing their autoimmune disease. And when we removed cashews from their diet along with these other lectins, their autoimmune disease resolved. In fact, earlier this year, I gave a lecture paper at the American Heart Association Epidemiology and Lifestyle Conference where I had 102 patients with biomarker-proven autoimmune disease who in six months, 95 out of 102 patients, that's 94%, were negative, were completely free of their autoimmune disease and off of all medications, immunosuppressants. That's a pretty impressive result. We've subsequently seen over 500 patients and the same thing has happened. About 95% of patients, if we get these lectin-containing foods away from them, will resolve their autoimmune disease. So that's where lectins are hiding. If it's an American plant, you can be pretty certain that it has lectins in it. Last thing, we're coming into a winter season and we've forgotten, we've been spoiled that in general, fruit ripens once a year, usually in the summer fall. That's because, no matter where we were originally, the winter time is a time of less food. Whether it was a dry season, a cold season, a rainy season, there was less food in the winter. So we would use fruit to fatten up for the winter. That's why fruit is actually incredibly attractive to us. Now, plants don't want you to eat their fruit until the seeds are actually hardened and resistant to digestion. So the plant uses two systems to tell you when it's ready for you to eat its babies. One is the color of the fruit and the colors are usually in the families of oranges, yellows, reds. And the orangier the yellow and the redder it gets, the more you know that it's safe to eat. In fact, you and I have color vision only because we're fruit eaters. The only animals that have color vision are fruit eaters. Primates, monkeys have color vision. A lot of birds who are fruit eaters have color vision. Your dog doesn't have color vision because your dog could care less about fruit. And he could care less whether a squirrel is brown or gray or black. If the squirrel's moving, he's very interested in it, but he could care less about the color. So he doesn't need color vision. So you have color vision because the plant wants to tell you when it's ready for you to eat its fruit. The second reason that the plant doesn't want you to eat its fruit early is because its babies aren't ready to be eaten. So it puts lectins in the fruit that are there to make you not eat it. For instance, in early days of growing up in Nebraska, we had an expression about what happened when you ate green apples. You would actually get some pretty impressive abdominal cramps and diarrhea. Then it was called the green apple to stem because you would too step your way into the bathroom rather quickly. The plant put lectins in there because it's saying, you stupid idiot, what are you doing eating my fruit before it's ready? So what's happened to us now is that most fruit is picked unripe somewhere else in the winter in Chile or Argentina or Mexico or Central America shipped to America where it's then ripened artificially with a gas called ethylene oxide and the color changes but because the fruit was picked unripe, it still has a very high lectin content even if it's, quote, a good for you fruit. So that's one of the main reasons that I want people to only eat fruit in season and it has to be the season where you are living. The season for strawberries in Argentina is the winter and it's not the season for strawberries here and please, if you're getting strawberries in January from California, understand that those strawberries have been hybridized and actually have sugar content and color even without exposure to proper amounts of sunlight. That's why you'll notice strawberries that come from California in the winter, once you cut them open, they're incredibly pale inside. They're actually not a strawberry at all. They've been hybridized to fool you. Compare that to a strawberry that you are in the United States in the summer and you'll notice the strawberries are red all the way through. That's a true strawberry. So just be careful. You're not supposed to eat strawberries in the winter and you're not supposed to eat blueberries in the winter and you're not supposed to have melons and peaches and apricots in the winter. They do not exist in this country. So beware of fruit that comes from someplace else. So that's how you recognize lectins. If the fruit didn't exist in the season you're eating it normally, don't eat it. If it's a grain or a pseudo grain, don't eat it with the exception of millet and sorghum. If it's a potato, tomato, pepper, or eggplant, don't eat them unless you pressure cook them. And if it's a peanut or cashew, please don't come near them. That's your guide to lectins. So as you know, I always like to finish my podcast with an audience question. And we've got one from Tom Hamp at Dr. Gundry. Dr. Gundry, love your work. Could you please comment on tomato juice? That's actually a really good question. So most tomato juices are actually pressed from whole tomatoes, which means they're going to probably have lectin content. Interestingly, tomato juice, like any juice, is mostly sugar. And the stuff in tomato juice has lectins and sugar. So it's one of those, please avoid this. Now, can you have tomato paste or tomato sauce? The answer is, in general, Italian tomato paste and Italian tomato sauce that actually comes from Italy uses tomatoes that are peeled and de-seeded. Recently, we've had several American companies start offering tomato sauces that have peeled and de-seeded. And you'll actually see that on the label. So unless it comes from Italy or unless you see an American product that says peeled and de-seeded, stay away from tomato products. The exception, as I mentioned before, if you want to use these, please use a pressure cooker, like an Instant Pot. It'll solve the problem. You can still have your tomatoes and eat them, too, as long as you pressure cook them. So that's it for today's podcast. I appreciate you listening. We're going to sign off with one final holiday greeting. I'm Dr. Gundry, and I'm always looking out for you.