 So welcome to the Dr. Gundy podcast today. We've got a special guest back by popular demand me Because as you probably guess I get a lot of questions and one of the most Frequent questions I get even two years after the plant paradox has been published How did I first come up with my lectin theory? well It's not a theory and I didn't come up with it. Believe it or not lectins have been known about since the 1800s in fact if you've ever been told your blood type You were told your blood type by using lectins to figure out what your blood type is It turns out that in those days. They found that these plant compounds, which are sticky proteins had Individual red blood cells that they would stick to Depending upon the sugar molecule what that was on the outside of the red blood cell and When they stuck to a particular red blood cell They would then make other red blood cells stick to that Red blood cell and they'd all clump and it's called a glutenation so if you had type O blood you put in Lectin that like to bond to typo blood and all the red blood cells would clump and you'd shake it around in a test tube And there you go your type. Oh If you put in a lectin that like to bond to the sugar molecule on a type a you would Only if you were type a would you clump and so that's How lectins have been known about for so long and I think that's actually a really important point for those of you Who are doubters about lectins? Lectins make things clump together and they make red blood cells clump together In fact, you've heard me describe in a 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 Rison which was made famous originally in the Japanese subway bombing of years ago Rison is the lectin of the caster 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 and every time you get your blood type You can thank lectins for telling you your blood type Now I'm not the first person to find that lectins were really bad for you In fact, that'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 We're 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 oh 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 typo 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 How did I get interested in them? Well number one I? Began seeing a lot of patients with autoimmune disease Following the publication of my first book now 12 years ago Dr. Gundry's diet evolution and in that book I wrote about a few patients with Fibromyalgia for instance or an autoimmune disease that Got a whole lot better by following my program and my program for the most part was eliminating a lot of Lectin containing foods now. I was doing it actually for a different reason at that point I had started to ask people to eat certain foods and take away certain foods and do Plud 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 or 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 So I compiled a list with the original book Which is rather humorous story that I've told before And Random House bought my book and They had done all the South Beach Diet books and all the Dr. Adkins books and They liked my book because one of the reasons that Dr. Adkins eventually became a fat man Was that he had morph from being a high-fat doctor to being a high protein doctor? But when they looked at my original list my original list looked Remarkably like the yes foods and no foods from the plant paradox and the longevity paradox But my editor said well, this is great. We're going to do this for phase one of the diet But in phase two of the diet You're going to reintroduce healthy foods like whole grains and beans and I go Wait a minute. No my research on my patients Says that this is really a dumb idea and besides don't you realize that in The phase one of the South Beach Diet and the Adkins diet You're taking away all these healthy things all these carbohydrates and in phase two of their diets you Reintroduce these quote healthy carbohydrates and people start gaining weight and then what do you do in those books? You go back to phase one where you take away all those healthy things They says don't you see that's the mistake they made and they said well We don't care if that's a mistake it you're doing a health book You're doing a diet book and everybody knows that whole grains and beans are good for you and they're going in the book and We actually had some fairly vigorous arguments about this But they were correct. They had bought my book and so to this day those Changes are in that book and my critics say well He used to be a fan of beans and whole grains. There's there's soy milk in his first book and yes, there was But it's called diet evolution for a reason and My thoughts have evolved certainly over the 20 years that I've been doing this Based on research that wasn't available in the past For instance, if you've seen my interview with dr. David Perlman on this YouTube channel and on this podcast He came out with the fifth year anniversary of grain brain With 40% new information that he didn't have five years ago when that book was written Including the knowledge of the human microbiome when that book was originally written We had not sequenced the human microbiome and If you've listened to that podcast that Perlman or and I Say, you know, it's interesting. You know, he says 40% of my book is new in the last five years because I learned new things and My thinking has evolved with every patient. I see Based on new research that either I've done or that somebody else has done that's changed my thoughts And yet out there particularly some of my most vehement critics have not changed their diet recommendations in 40 years Despite 40 years of research that's accumulated Including information about the microbiome that was not known And so whenever you hear these criticisms remember that number one Those critics have actually never treated an actual human being We call it the practice of medicine for a very good reason We practice and quite frankly practice makes perfect and I hope in five years that I'm not Saying the exact same thing I'm doing today because I'll have five more years of experience with patients Those of you who know me know that I'm one of the few physicians who write in the nutrition space that actually sees patients I see patients on Saturdays and Sundays. I even saw them over the Holiday weekend a full clinic on Saturday and two-thirds of a clinic on Sunday on holidays That's because as I talk about in every one of my books I've learned from every one of my patients and almost everything I've learned is Because patients ask me a question or because they volunteered to let me look at a bunch of blood every three months and ask them To add foods take away foods add a supplement take away a supplement and there's very few people in the nutritional space who can make that claim and Publish I published Huge numbers of papers in my career But when I started this and started writing books I realized that if I could write a book that could reach Millions of people and affect their lives It would be much smarter for me than to write a paper that would be read by maybe 500 a thousand doctors So my effort is put into writing books that can help a huge number of people One of the reasons I stopped doing heart surgery. I could operate on 10,000 people which I've done But teaching people to avoid operation teaching millions of people Eclipse that so that's why I do that but those abstracts are peer reviewed by professional organizations For instance, I'm giving a paper next month at the American Heart Association vascular biology meeting That I can't tell you all the results Suggests that lectins attaching to the wall of our blood vessels are a major cause of an autoimmune attack on our blood vessels causing Chlorosis causing cholesterol deposits and I will present that paper and doctors will have the right to criticize and question my paper So just because it's an abstract doesn't mean that a bunch of doctors didn't review that paper and didn't listen to that paper and then critique it and Just because I'm not going to write something for a journal anymore and instead write a book doesn't make it any less scientifically valid now Through the years, I 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 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 start. She got out of bed and His Crohn's is now gone He does not have Crohn's and it's so exciting to hear that, you know They went to Disneyland and you know, this was a bedridden woman and a man who you know Was so afraid to be not far from a hospital because the severe abdominal pain or diarrhea with blood in it He was going to experience they've completely changed their lives just by getting a few silly plant compounds out of their diet and You know, wow, how empowering is that, you know, and wow this can happen for you And I never met them. All they did was read the book and follow what I asked them to do. Okay 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 is 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 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 talked 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 Vidal Igo the loss of pigmentation that Michael Jackson had and He had it on his hands. He had some on his face Tony a great-looking guy and He came after he started on the plant paradox and he came up to my office He said hey, you got to look at this and I knew him before He says my Vidal Igo is gone all the pigments back in He says what what do you think's going on? And you know, I'm going well, you know, I know this is an anti-inflammatory diet but Boy, that's a real stretch and then you know, I go back to Medical school and I go anyway. Wait a minute. Melana sites 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 Paralyzed 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 this was first described not by me but by the famous paleo Dr. Lauren Corden from Colorado State who actually wrote the original paleo diet and Dr. Corden 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. Corden'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? You know how that happened? He says, ah You know, I'm cheating. You know, it's pretty hard to do what you want me to do and yeah, it's okay I said, well, wait a minute. You know, you're a smart guy. Let's run the experiment again I said, you know, here's the list, you know, it's called the matrix back then for my longtime listeners Take this and let's see and you know see in a couple months come up to my office and sure enough he Came back and the vitiligo is gone and Went holy cow, you know that actually proves that in fact for him Lectons 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. I said, oh, wow You know, this looks like the problem, you know, because zucchini and tomatoes have lots of lectins in them I said, you know, I want you to get rid of all the lectins in your life but don't come near that relish and You know, watch what happens. So She called me a few weeks later said migraines are gone. You know, that was it migraines are gone and so the next time I saw her about a year later She said, you know, things are great. No migraine medications. No migraines, but I miss my relish I really really like my relish and my garden, you know, it's just finishing up and I got all the zucchini and tomatoes Please what are we gonna do? I said, okay? 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 said, oh my gosh, you know migraine that caused my migraine I said, okay, just you know, 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 I can't you know eat oats And I said, oh, yeah, 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. I said, you know, that's interesting. I don't 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 pressure cooking it will not break and so that's why you see on my list You know, do not pressure cook wheat rye barley and 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 a hundred and two patients with autoimmune disease including Muah 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 a hundred and two people Who follow my program for six months at the end of six months? 95 out of those hundred and two 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 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 So what's going on here? So number one. Okay, so I'm a canary number two, I am 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 of 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 back in the good old 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 and I tell my patients 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 and Those foods contain lectins 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 take 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 is 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 And 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 you know, 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. So the question people say, okay, how do I know if I'm lectin sensitive? first of all, I'll make a blanket statement that Almost everyone in America has a leaky gut. I wouldn't have believed that 15 years ago But now almost everyone who I see has a leaky gut If you suffer from anxiety or depression You have a leaky gut if you have arthritis You have a leaky gut if you have irritable bowel if you are bloated if you are You know constipated or diarrhea you are sensitive to lectins and have a leaky gut if you have diabetes Pre-diabetes insulin resistance if you have a wheat belly or a beer belly You are sensitive to lectins if you have an autoimmune disease or think you have one You are sensitive to lectins and here's the really scary thing if you have mild cognitive impairment If you have a loved one who has Alzheimer's or Parkinson's You are almost certainly sensitive to lectins now. I realize that's a huge Oh, and if you have skin issues if you have eczema if you have hay fever if you have Neuropathy peripheral neuropathy where you have tingling in your fingers and toes Get lectins out of your life. There are now two papers That show that lectins climb the vagus nerve to your brain and are responsible Partially for causing Parkinson's disease Think about that two papers that now show that lectins are the way Parkinson's disease can occur and watch what happens when you take these out of your diet You'll be really pleasantly surprised, you know, I touched on a Molecular mimicry But let me let me expand on that for a second And I think it's an important to understand what Molecular mimic mimicking means the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2012 might have been 2011 was won by some doctors who found that our immune cells are white blood cells Use a barcode scanner to determine whether a foreign protein is a Protein they recognize or not foreign or known and they're called toll-like Receptors in the book I call them tiny little radars because they're abbreviated TLRs and that literally looks it reads the barcode on a protein and it's literally like Putting your passport in the passport scanner and it says oh, you know this guy can come in to this country or oops He's on the you know no fly list So your immune system literally scans the barcode of everything it sees and Plants are so clever and please don't get me started about how smart plants are They've had you know 300 million years to work this out Plants make the protein barcode on lectins mimic look Almost identical to other proteins in us like our thyroid gland like our joint lining like the lining of our blood vessels And so when our immune system with their barcode scanners scan Lectins they go oh, but like answer bad I need to go look for lectins wherever I see them and then they go by our Skin in the case of psoriasis or our thyroid And they see a protein that looks virtually identical, but not quite They go that looks really like a lectin protein barcode not quite But I really don't want to make a mistake, so I'm going to kill this thing and I'll ask questions later You know very much like sometimes happens in friendly fire And so think about it from a plant standpoint if you could get an animal to shoot itself in the foot That would be a great defense system, and it makes so much sense and remember a plant that can survive or a plant's baby that can survive Evolutionarily speaking Wins so you know we don't even have to conceive that a plant thought of this It just means that if that system kept you or your baby from being eaten That's a great system, and that would survive Yesterday I was on a podcast with an evolutionary Biologist, and he basically said this is so great to talk to somebody who actually knows that plants have the same evolutionary you know power that animals do and that plants Think and believe it or not plants can see it's actually really cool Google it So let's give plants their do All right, so why did I write the plant paradox because Even though Dr. Gunther's diet evolution did very well. I Knew that I had to correct That the false hoods in that book And so the plant paradox when it was bought by Harper Collins the first thing I Did is that you're not going to touch Anything about lectins You know I'm not signing a contract unless we spell out That you're not gonna touch this and they go touch it. We love it. It's so crazy That people need to hear this and your research is so iron-clad That how could anybody you know disagree with this because here's the research And so, you know to this day I thank Harper Collins for having their faith in me and as it turns out, you know that book Became a monster bestseller. It's been translated into 34 languages And it spawned three additional New York Times bestsellers including the longevity paradox which takes this concept of leaky gut caused by lectins to Showing you how you can take control of your fate and your longevity and your long-term health So in in all my books particularly the plant paradox and the plant paradox cookbook There are phases that I want you to go to and in phase one I want you to get rid of lectins and that doesn't last very long in phase two. We start showing you how to Detoxify lectins tricks like peeling and de-seeing a tomato or a zucchini or a pepper In phase three once we've kind of healed your gut and we give you the tricks for doing that then we actually let you reintroduce one at a time lectin containing foods that you're particularly interested in trying and And Most of the time you'll find out really right away whether you're going to be able to tolerate that food or not So it's not all doom and gloom in a fact. It's actually incredibly empowering how you can Get to a point where many of us can enjoy lectin containing foods as long as you know how to handle them and There's tricks in every one of the books to get lectin containing foods in you by you know detoxifying the lectins to Breaking them down in a pressure cooker like an instant pot. It's just one of the best devices in the world Want a tomato peel and de-seed them my mother did all my life. She was taught by her mother to do it I was just up in Canada being interviewed by a Paper and we were talking about this and the the woman talking to me said Well, of course, you always have to peel and de-seed tomatoes Everybody knows that because they're toxic. She said I said, yeah And last I'll leave you with this no American ate a tomato until the mid 1850s when a Colonel decided to say he was going to commit suicide on the Salem County Courthouse steps outside Philadelphia by eating a bushel of tomatoes and he got a big audience Obviously and he proceeded to eat a bunch of tomatoes and he didn't die Now one of my critics uses that example to prove that tomatoes won't kill you My critic needs to come in and talk to the number of patients in my office Who got rid of their tomatoes or pressure cook their tomatoes and there are? arthritis went away Their migraines went away They reintroduced tomatoes their migraines came back there are arthritis came back They pressure cook their tomatoes. There are arthritis went away and their migraines went away my critics treat patients practice medicine publish your results Please then we can have a conversation. So One audience question we get all the time Does commercial canning of tomatoes remove the lectins? So here's the deal in Italy they have to peel and de-seed tomatoes before they can make sauces and pace so please look for an Italian brand of sauce or canned tomatoes or Not canned tomatoes because they may have seeds in them or pace We are now seeing American brands Using peeled and de-seeded tomatoes and it will say so right on the front and those will be perfectly safe But remember if you have diabetes or prediabetes Please remember that tomatoes are a fruit and they have a very high sugar content That's why I like to use a like Italian tomato paste where you'll get really Concentrated flavor of the tomato without all the sugar content Now the second question that comes up You astute readers have noticed that in the longevity paradox. I become quite a fan of lentils now I Allow lentils in phase three of the plant paradox and beans in phase three of the plant paradox always have as long as you pressure cook them or by Eden brand beans which are pressure cooked and they have BPA free cans So don't get me wrong. I've never been against beans and lentils as long as you destroy the lectins But lentils are particularly interesting because they contain this compound called polyamines and Polyamines have been shown particularly in animal studies to promote longevity And when I visited the Italian village at Ciroli south of Naples last year I was amazed that number one even though they're Italians They don't eat bread. They don't eat pasta. They don't eat grains And they actually don't eat tomatoes, but they eat lentils And so when I read and the research on lentils containing polyamines I Said aha those clever at Cirolians. They're eating a life Promoting substance in lentils. The other thing I like about pressure cook lentils is that lentils are mostly protein and very little Sugar content as opposed to many other beans have much higher sugar content last but not least Lentils because their surface area is so small Soaking actually if that's what you're going to do soak your lentils for 24 hours Change the water every four to six hours and you'll do a pretty good job of getting the lectins out of lentils So that's it for the dr. Gundry podcast and I did this and I'm doing it today Because I'm dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you Before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes Google Play Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you