 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 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 feed antibiotics to our cows, our pigs, used to our chickens, and we eat those antibiotics when we eat factory-raised meats. We kill off our bacteria by roundup, and roundup is in everything. It's in all of our conventional crops now. It's in our canola oil, it's in our oats, it's in our wheat, it's in our soybeans. It's everywhere. It's in California wines. And roundup kills our microbiome. It was patented by Monsanto as an antibiotic, and it in itself causes leaky gut. And 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 are 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, OK, 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, prediabetes, 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 molecular mimicry. But let me expand on that for a second. And I think it's important to understand what molecular mimicking means. The Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2012, might have been 2011, was won by some doctors who found that our immune cells, our 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 into 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 lectins are 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, eh, 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 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. 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 the falsehoods 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. I'm not signing a contract unless we spell out that you're not going to 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 ironclad that how could anybody disagree with this? Because here's the research. And so to this day, I thank Harper Collins for having their faith in me. And as it turns out, 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 faith and your longevity and your long-term health. So 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 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 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 detoxifying the lectins, to breaking them down. And a pressure cooker, like an instant pot, is just one of the best devices in the world.