 What's a lectin, exactly? Short answer, it's a dangerous plant protein designed to poison you. Yes, you read that right. Poison. Now, chances are lectins won't kill you, though eating a lectin-heavy diet your whole life might. But they'll make you pretty sick. You see, plants don't want to be eaten. But it's not like they can run and hide or even bite back. So instead they make lectins to make predators sick in hopes that the next time they'll pass by that plant and eat something else. It's actually pretty smart, right? So that's lectins for you in a nutshell. But how do they make you sick? Well, it helps to think of lectins are like little barnacles that look for specific sugar molecules in your blood, the lining of our gut and on our nerves. When they find a good spot to land, they cling to these cells, breaking down their ability to communicate with our immune system and then ripping them to pieces, which could lead to things like leaky gut, a weaker immune system, weight gain, food poisoning, and so much more. After all, there's nothing worse than an intruder in your system. And lectins are just that, an unwanted intruder making you sick. So clearly they should be avoided at all costs, but what exactly does that mean? Well, there are certain lectins in most fruits and veggies, but some are worse than others. And there are five categories of food you want to avoid at all costs. First, beans and legumes, including peanuts, lentils, and cashews, they carry more lectins than any other food, which is why eating undercooked beans makes so many people sick each year. So skip them entirely, or if you must eat foods like lentils, which do have health-boosting compounds, make sure to pressure cook them, because pressure cooking kills the majority of lectins outright. Second, squash. Most squash are New World foods, which means our bodies did not evolve to eat them, plus they're heavy in lectins, so skip pumpkin, butternut squash, even zucchini whenever possible. And if you must eat squash, although I don't recommend it, peel it and take out the seeds first, because that's where the lectins are. Third, grains. For the most part, grains are a relatively new food to us. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't search for grains. Without processing, there was no way to eat them. Plus, most grains, even gluten-free grains, are lectin bombs, as well as those gluten-free grains substitutes. Fourth, the nightshades, tomatoes, potatoes, even eggplants. These lectin bombs are another leading cause of food poisoning, and they're closely related to some of the most poisonous plants on the planet. And last but not least, number five, fruit, especially out-of-season fruit. And remember, if it's got a seed, it's a fruit, so skip that pineapple, papaya, and strawberries in the winter. But also peppers and cucumbers. Remember, they're fruits, too. So now you know what they are, what they do, and where to find lectins. But why should you avoid them at all costs? This one's simple. Lectins are designed to cause disease and weight gain in humans. And you deserve to live a long, healthy life. But one of the guys who really turned me around on the power of lectins and how we reacted them was a guy who I talk about Tony in the plant paradox. And Tony is a friend of mine, he still is. He came to me early when I actually wrote Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. He was one of the original adapters of that book. And Tony had vitiligo, the loss of pigmentation that Michael Jackson had. And he had it on his hands, he had some on his face, Tony, great looking guy. And he came after he started on the plant paradox, and he came up to my office and he said, hey, you've got to look at this. And I knew him before. He says, my vitiligo is gone, all the pigments back in. He says, what do you think is going on? And I'm going, well, I know this is an anti-inflammatory diet, but boy, that's a real stretch. And then I go back to medical school and I go, wait a minute, melanocytes are what make pigment. And to get really nerdy here, a melanocyte is a nerve cell that in the embryo migrates basically from your spinal cord and brain out to the skin. And it's a nerve cell. And lectins were originally devised by plants to paralyze insects, which makes great sense. If you have somebody who is eating you and eating you makes them paralyze, that's a really good defense system. And so I'm going, huh, lectins are mimicking nerve cells and your immune system is attacking nerve cells as if they were lectins. And this was first described not by me, but by the famous paleo doctor, Lauren Cordain from Colorado State, who actually wrote the original paleo diet. And Dr. Cordain said that lectins mimic other proteins in our body, other cells in our body to get our immune system to have friendly fire, attack normal cells by mistake. And it's called molecular mimicry. He coined the phrase. And so I said, son of a gun, I've been taking lectins away from Tony. And he's no longer attacking his nerve cells, just like Dr. Cordain's theory predicted. So then I lost track of Tony. And I actually saw him at a meeting a few years right before the plant paradox came out and his vitiligo was back. And I said, well, what's the deal? How'd that happen? He says, ah, I'm cheating. It's pretty hard to do what you want me to do. And it's OK. I said, well, wait a minute. You're a smart guy. Let's run the experiment again. I said, here's the list. It was called The Matrix back then for my longtime listeners. Take this and let's see. See you in a couple of months. Come up to my office. And sure enough, he came back and the vitiligo was gone. And I went, holy cow. That actually proves that, in fact, for him, lectins were the cause of his problem. Then actually kind of right after Tony, Jackie from Oregon came down. She's a nurse. And Jackie had massive migraine headaches. And she tried everything. Now Jackie was a home gardener. And Jackie loved to can a tomato and zucchini relish that she dearly loved. And she was telling me about all this. And I said, oh, wow, this looks like the problem. Because zucchini and tomatoes have lots of lectins in them. I said, I want you to get rid of all the lectins in your life. Don't come near that relish. And watch what happens. So she called me a few weeks later and said, migraines are gone. That was it. Migraines are gone. And so the next time I saw her about a year later, she said, things are great. No migraine medications, no migraines. But I miss my relish. I really, really like my relish. And my garden is just finishing up. And I got all the zucchini and tomatoes. Please, what are we going to do? I said, OK, this is great. Let's have an experiment. I want you to can your zucchini and tomato relish the usual way. But I also want you to can some in a pressure cooker. And let's see what happens. So sure enough, her regular stuff, when she ate the relish, she called me. She said, oh my gosh, migraine. That caused my migraine. I said, OK, just calm down. Let's give it a few days. And then I want you to try the pressure cooker stuff. Sure enough, no migraine when she pressure cooked her zucchini and tomatoes, just like we would predict. So Jackie through the years has become one of my best canaries. And Jackie eventually had grandchildren. And she wanted to give them steel cut oats. And she wanted to try cream of wheat. So she decided to use a pressure cooker. And she pressure cooked her oats for like a half an hour. And then 45 minutes and finally an hour. And every time she ate it, she would get a migraine. And she said, oh my gosh, I can't eat oats. And I said, that's interesting. I said, I tell you what, do it with cream of wheat. And so she did the same thing with cream of wheat. And even after an hour of doing this, it wouldn't work. And I said, you know, that's interesting. I don't get it. So I went down a rabbit hole and I found this obscure paper. I don't even know if I have it anymore. That says you cannot destroy the gluten lectin with high heat and high pressure cooking. It will not break. And so that's why you see on my list, do not pressure cook wheat, rye, barley, oats. It will not work. And that's actually all thanks to Jackie making me say, why doesn't that work? And sure enough, somebody had figured that out. Now subsequently I've published papers in abstract form, in circulation of 102 patients with autoimmune 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, lectinous. 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. So what's going on here? So number one, okay, so I'm a canary. Number two, I'm very sensitive to these things as anyone with autoimmune disease is. I can guarantee you, if you have autoimmune disease, you can't cheat. Sorry about that. But number two, the reason things have changed so much, the reason most of the commercials you see on TV every night for an immunosuppressant, for an autoimmune disease like Crohn's, like rheumatoid arthritis, like psoriasis, you choose the disease. These were very infrequent diseases 50 years ago. Yes, they existed, but they were so infrequent that the tests we used to look for them in our little days were called funny tests because they were so funny, we rarely got them because we rarely saw these things. And now most of the commercials you see at night are for these diseases. And as I tell all of my patients, these are immunosuppressants. These are transplant drugs that I use when I do a heart transplant. Look, you don't have a heart transplant. You don't have a kidney transplant. You don't have a liver transplant. There is absolutely no reason for you to be on a transplant medication to treat your autoimmune disease. You have to treat it by removing certain foods. Thanks so much for watching, but don't go anywhere. This next one is sure to surprise you. And people who ate one bowl of curry per week had dramatic, better memories than people who did not eat that bowl of curry per week. And the reason for is the two essential ingredients to make turmeric work is black pepper and curcumin.