 Welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast. Now on today's show I'm going to talk to you about something you may have experienced before. I've certainly experienced my father experienced. I mean it can blindside you, it can wreck your day, hurt your relationships. I know particularly a lot of women patients that I have. This was almost a deal-breaker for their marriage, for their relationship. And there is something you can do about it. I really firmly believe from my own experience and certainly from a number of patients. And I'm talking about migraines. As I've mentioned before, I suffered from migraines for many, many years. And as I tell the story, I would get migraine headaches during surgery, during infant heart transplant surgery, where you know what are you going to do about it? This show must go on. So there I would be you know operating with a blinding headache and quite frankly sweat pouring off of me having to do this operation. Now why didn't I do anything about it? Well my father looking back had migraines. We didn't call it migraines back then, but I knew my dad suffered these debilitating headaches. And then when kind of in my midlife, about the time my father had them, I started getting them. So it wasn't until I actually stopped eating lectins that I made the connection in my own mind that son of a gun, I don't have migraines anymore. Isn't that interesting? You know, this is not an unusual problem. A recent study found that one in seven Americans experiences at least one migraine a year. That's a lot of people. So it's not as uncommon as you think. And these flashing headaches which most people think of as migraines can also have completely different manifestations. I've recently seen this entire cluster of particularly in women who have what are called ocular migraines where they actually do not get headaches but they have intense literally blinding changes in their eyes. And I have one woman who is one of my long-term patients who got to me because she actually suffered a stroke from a migraine and you're going wait a minute, how can that happen? Well in some intense migraines you can get such spasm of one of the arteries to your brain that it can actually cause a stroke. In her case it was in the back near the occipital region, the area where you see. And she's thank goodness completely recovered but she literally couldn't see for several days and everybody was looking in her eyeballs and realized that what was happening was an ocular migraine. So in the plant paradox as you know I talk about a nurse who I call Jane that's not a real name. She's now actually in her mid 50s Jane and I actually communicate quite frankly all the time and Jane was one of the first people that really tip me off to the lectin migraine connection. Jane has a very interesting background. She grows zucchinis and tomatoes and if any of you have listened to me or read the plant paradox you know that tomatoes and zucchinis have a lot of lectins and the peels and the skins. And she would put up this relish a tomato and zucchini relish and can it every fall and she loved this stuff it was really her favorite food and you know she'd been on every migraine medication known to mankind and there's a number of them some of them work some of them don't some of them are very specific you may react to one favorably you may react to four not favorably. Anyhow we started looking at some of her favorite foods and jumped right out with it was her you know zucchini and tomato relish. So she you know kind of agreed to eliminate lectins. She also quite frankly loved steel cut oatmeal and we took steel cut oatmeal away from her and lo and behold really within weeks her migraines went away and she has been migraine free for a number of years now but after about a year of this she came back to see me and said you know I feel great I don't have any migraines but the deal is I really miss my zucchini and tomato relish and I said I what's doing experiment let's when you can this fall can some your traditional way and then can some using a pressure cooker. So sure enough that's exactly what she did and she had some of her zucchini tomato relish that she would can normally and boom she got a migraine within minutes and so we she actually called me and she said yeah there it is and I said okay so let's give it a couple days and let's try your pressure cook and sure enough the pressure cooking killed the lectins and she's now able to have her dearly beloved tomato and zucchini relish okay so that's great news so now she says oh good pressure cooking is the answer so she then wanted her oatmeal back and it was actually Jane who discovered that even after an hour of cooking steel cut oats in a pressure cooker she would still get migraine headaches to her pressure cooked oats and there's actually a obscure paper that shows that gluten is very very very difficult to break with a pressure cooker that particular protein is so resistant to heat and pressure degradation that probably Jane was absolutely right she couldn't destroy the gluten-like protein and oats and that's an important point you will see advertisements that these oats are gluten-free but I can assure you that there are multiple proteins and oats that mimic gluten just like there are multiple other proteins in other lectin-containing grains like buckwheat like corn like amaranth that will absolutely mimic gluten recently we've been doing a lot of corn testing and people who are gluten-free but still have celiac disease and about 90% of people who are genuinely gluten-free when we test them against corn they actually have a cross reaction between corn proteins corn lectins and the gluten protein so just beware like I talked about in the book gluten-free does not mean the lectin-free and gluten is just a minimal lectin okay so that was the enlightenment about Jane and I can tell you personally and from Jane's standpoint lectins were a big piece of this now how can that be so I think a little background information about what lectins do and how the heck they can get to the brain is it's probably well worth us understanding that so you know I talk a great deal about the gut brain access and that access actually works in two ways and I'm going to talk a lot more about that in the upcoming book the longevity paradox which will be out March 19th the bugs in our gut number one communicate to our brain in two ways they send hormonal signals to our brain via hormones like feel-good hormones like serotonin like tryptophan like GABA that they produce but there's a second way that the gut communicates with the brain and it's kind of like a buried cable and that's the vagus nerve and you've heard me talk about the vagus nerve and I write about it in the plant paradox and you'll hear a lot more about it in the longevity paradox so for years we were taught that the vagus nerve is the way the brain this brain communicates to the organs in our chest and in our belly that it's primarily a one-way street for the brain to talk to the heart to the lungs to the esophagus to the stomach even to the kidneys about what the brain wants them to do and it's called the sympathetic nervous system now low and behold we now know that for every one fiber from the brain down to the gut there's actually nine fibers going from the gut up to the brain so rather than a brain down communication this is a gut up communication and fascinatingly there are more neurons in the wall of the gut and in your belly and actually around your heart than there are in your entire spinal cord which is a big hunk of neurons so what are those guys doing down there well they're there and they're often called the second brain to tell the brain this guy which I like to think of the second brain what's going on down in your gut it's a second system of the microbiome communicating to your brain and why is that important well like I said in the plant paradox there's a very interesting study that back in the good old days when I was a general surgeon we would do an ulcer operation which was the only thing we could do in those days before the days of ulcer medications was we would go down in the belly and we would cut the vagus nerve in half and low and behold it was actually quite effective in stopping ulcers and there are lots of variations on the theme but a large number of people in the 50s 60s 70s and actually early 80s had these vagotomies as they were called as the treatment for ulcers so what's happened in the interim is we know that people who had a vagotomy had their vagus nerve cut have about a 50% less chance of getting Parkinson's than people who have their vagus nerve intact and one of the papers that I described in the plant paradox showed that lectins can actually climb the vagus nerve from the gut and go to part of the brain which controls movement which is the substantia nigra the other thing that's fascinating is we now know that the typical lesions of Parkinson's which are called Lewy bodies it's basically a dead neuron surrounded by white blood cells which are called glial cells and I talk a lot about this in the upcoming book we now not only find these in the brain of people with Parkinson's but we find them on the wall of the gut which actually means that Parkinson's begins in the gut rather than in the brain and part of that process is actually lectins getting to the brain there's a new paper out that insecticides and other biosides like traditional paraclop now have been found to ride on lectins up into the brain and so that many times we now think that lectins are hijacked by pesticides by biosides by herbicides that are sprayed on our grasses and on our crops that we ingest every day and they're hopping on the lectins in our food and going up to our brain so rather than being kind of pseudo-science or oh come on how can lectins cause migraines we now know that there is an absolute direct route from the gut to the brain that lectins travel on not only to cause their own problem which is irritation and inflammation but also which is now the scariest thing to bring pesticides and herbicides and biosides which are everywhere also into our brain and so I think it's no wonder that so many people suffer from migraines and migraines seem to be getting worse rather than better so one of the things that you can do you know immediately is to follow some of my recommendations in the plant paradox so what do you you know what do you do how do you do that first of all the main lectins that seem to be troublesome are most of the grain based lectins including the healthy ones like quinoa that's a no-no millet and sorghum do not have lectins because they do not have a haul as somebody recently wrote in said what about buckwheat and as I mentioned before I really wanted buckwheat to be okay because I wanted everybody to have buckwheat noodles and man that would be a great alternative for you know pasta unfortunately buckwheat is has a major lectin just like quinoa but you can pressure cook these but you can't pressure cook wheat rye barley and oats as Jane found out it just will not work for most people and I've had other people try and have the same effect now beans beans raw are pretty lethal containing lectins if you pressure cook beans you most of the time will destroy the lectins although I see a number of patients that even pressure cook beans bother them and I've actually had a lot of my patients including me double pressure cook beans as you'll learn in the longevity paradox the Adventists and remember I was professor at Loma Linda the only blue zone in America for many many years the Adventist main source of protein is TVP texturized vegetable protein which can be made into any mystery meat known to mankind we had a spam lookalike called Wham TVP is defatted soy meal that is extruded under high pressure and high heat so the main protein source in the Adventist diet interestingly enough is pressure cooked and extruded soybeans and I don't I think that's not without you know chance I think the Adventists found out that beans had to be detoxified and that's how they did it traditional cultures soak beans change the water every few hours do it for one two three days and then they cook the beans for an extended period and it is absolutely true that soaking will remove lectins they will dilute them out so when we look at traditional cultures they've always used methods to get these lectins out of these troublesome things as many of you know I study the Italian cooking the French cooking and the Italians in cooking always peel and de-seed their tomatoes they always peel and de-seed their peppers the Southwest American Indians whose native food was peppers always roasted the pepper peeled it and de-seeded it before they ate it or made it into chili powder interestingly enough the American Indians always treated corn with lie before they ate it made it into Pasole and one of the big mistakes that Italians made when Columbus first brought corn back from the Americas is that he actually didn't learn you had to treat corn with lie to detoxify it from lectins and also to stop corn from binding an essential B vitamin called niacin and you'll learn more about that in the longevity paradox so long story short keep major lectin containing foods out of your diet that includes the nightshades that includes the American families like peanuts and cashews which are beans they're not nuts I have multiple very sensitive people canaries who react to chia seeds and I have one that was so excited when a particular brand of chips that I recommend their tortillas came out with a chip and this chip unfortunately has chia seeds now I don't react to those chia seeds in that chip but I now have three women with multiple allergies good canaries who were so excited when those chips came out and all three of them reacted actually fairly violently to the chia seeds in the chip so you know there's no human need for chia seeds believe me okay so get rid of lectins second we as you probably know have a sleep deprivation epidemic in this country for multiple reasons and if you didn't see Ariana Huffington on my podcast please pull that up Ariana is kind of a poster child for sleep deprivation in building the Huffington post she you know thought she was one of these people who could go without sleep and only needed na three hours of sleep four hours of sleep a night for maximum performance and efficiency and it wasn't until she literally collapsed at work broke her cheek had to have an operation that she realized she was not invincible and she spent you know the last number of years researching finding the world's experts on sleep and spending her you know years now teaching the importance of sleep and it's interesting most of my migraines occurred when I would fly to you know parts unknown in the United States or Canada and it usually meant finding barbecue or crazy things and eating it on the plane back and most of my migraines occurred without sleep that night and usually eating food that I have no business to eat and looking back I went well of course I didn't have any sleep and I was eating really bad food and of course I'd get a migraine so sleep really sets you up for your brain being damaged your brain actually has to be washed out it has to go through a washing cycle every night and you'll learn about how essential that washing cycle is to get all these inflammatory compounds all of these lectins out of your brain and if you don't do that and if you don't do that systematically we now know that that lack of washing is one of the big things that leads to neuro inflammation and neuro inflammation is one of the big driving factors in all of our memory loss diseases whether it's Parkinson's whether it's Alzheimer's whether it's vascular dementia now speaking of vascular it turns out as you learned in the plant paradox that there are sugar molecules on the linings of our blood vessels that lectins attached to and I recently gave a paper at the American Heart Association I think proving well at least suggesting that lectins attaching to our blood vessels is a major cause of vascular disease of heart disease of stroke of hardening of the arteries and we were able to show by removing lectins from over 400 people's diets that we could actually show blood vessels getting more flexible more reactive and with less inflammation on the blood vessel so in the theory that migraines are a blood vessel issue of dilatation or constriction getting a known irritant lectins out of your diet makes a whole lot of sense to me now I mentioned pesticides we are ramp with pesticides and interesting years ago I interviewed a organic horticulturist and organic gardener who said one of the biggest contributions to memory loss and Parkinson's that he sees in our elderly community is in golfers and he elaborated on the number of pesticides and herbicides that are sprayed on our golf courses to beautify them and how these as you walk the golf course or drive the golf course are aerosolized into you and interestingly enough one of the direct entrances the closest entrance to your brain is via your nostrils your nose and you then ingest those you breathe them in they hopper ride on lectins into your brain and it was a real eye out there the vast amount of Parkinson's and mild cognitive impairment dementia that we see rapidly going up in our elderly particularly in a community like Palm Springs where we have 115 golf courses at last count may be the sprays that we're using to keep our golf courses beautiful so what can you do at home please please please do not spray with roundup roundup is glyphosate glyphosate sorry and roundup gets into you as you'll see in the longevity paradox 95% of pregnant women excrete roundup in their urine almost all of us have huge amounts of roundup in us and one of the places we acquire it is in our homes so every time you see that commercial with the guy with the roundup gun killing weeds remember that you can actually dig out weeds by hand you'll actually get exercise one of the things that's amazing about super old people in the blue zones around the world is that almost all of these communities number one live in hilly villages they walk up and down hills and almost all of these super old people garden they weed their garden by hand they don't spray roundup so we talked about on one of our earlier podcasts about doing an exercise that you like and gardening is one of the great exercises of super old people and gardening is a lot of fun okay blue light you've heard me talk about this over and over and over again blue light is really disrupting our sleep blue light disrupts our eating patterns blue light stimulates you me to be hungry because long ago we would eat during the summer when light was intense and long because that's when most of the food was available and certainly that's when the fruit was available and fruit is intense calories to store as fat so blue light stimulates us to eat it also stimulates us to stay awake because quite honestly the longer we could have stayed awake eating in the summer the better off we would have been in the winter so blue light now is everywhere it's in our TVs it's in our computer screens it's in our phones there is an app on almost every device now to turn it to non blue light at sundown and sunset if you're going to watch TV and I know you will just buy yourself a pair of blue blocker sunglasses and like I've said before get the ones that make you look like bono I mean they're really hip we've done a podcast before with a gentleman who it was nighttime went in Europe and he was wearing his bono blue blocker sunglasses and then was going back to bed there's even lights that you can use in your bedroom in the nursery that will not excrete blue light and mom's out there with newborn babies one of the things that's destroying your sleep is not the baby crying at night there's no fix for that yet but turning on a light either in your bedroom or in the baby's room to change the bedroom and that automatically sets you to wake up and be awake for a long time so do yourself a favor get these lights they're at any hardware store and you'll do yourself a favor last artificial sweeteners please please please do not kill your gut microbiome with artificial sweeteners Duke University showed a packet of Splenda kills off 50% of the gut microbiome one packet sucralose your microbiome is one of your major defense systems against lectins and one of the reasons we're having an epidemic of people being sensitive to lectins when they weren't 100 years ago is we've done in our microbiome with artificial sweeteners with the antibiotics that we take and the antibiotics that are fed to our animals that we then eat so do yourself a favor ditch the artificial sweeteners there's plenty of options out there like stevia and monk fruit inulin just to name three okay so we've got a question from our audience before we sign off and actually this is a great question Lee asks I know white wine is off limits but are there any types of red wine we shouldn't drink so I recently did a video about proper wine etiquette how much you can have and which ones are useful but here's the deal there are a number of people that do react with headaches to the tannins in red wines and often it's specific tannins in red wine my uncle who recently celebrated his 92nd birthday hello uncle Leo sailing his boat through the Caribbean single-handedly reacts to red wine he cannot have red wine interestingly I can spot certain Pinot Noirs that will give me a headache the following morning but other Pinot Noirs won't and so I won't tell you which ones I react to because I'm doing an ongoing going study you know always looking out for you in general though if you are a person prone to migraine headaches do be careful that red wine and the tannins and red wine may be one of your tippers my wife would tell you that champagne is perfectly safe and there is a French study that shows that women who drink champagne have much less dementia than women who don't drink champagne because of the polyphenol content but if you don't drink don't start rule number one okay so that's it for Dr. Gendry's podcast try these tricks for migraines I think you're gonna be surprised and by the way if you do suffer from migraines and this does relieve it please don't run the experiment and cheat because I can tell you personally you will trigger a migraine and Jane my nurse will guarantee you will trigger a migraine so that's it for today thanks for watching the Dr. Gendry podcast we'll see you next time because I'm Dr. Gendry and I'm always looking out for you exciting news my friends my new book the longevity paradox is out now like the plant paradox this will be a game changer in helping you live a long vital life so pick up your copy now at your local bookstore Barnes & Noble or Amazon or my audiobook which I actually recorded this time and make sure you tell your friends and family about it