Our latest adventure is exploring the world of lectin free eating. What are lectins? Lectins are the defense mechanisms plants have developed to keep us from eating their babies (seeds). Since plants can’t really fight or run away from all the creatures that want to eat them, they developed poisons to discourage animals and insects from eating them. These poisons are generally concentrated around the seeds to protect the next generation of plants.
One of the keys to health is to avoid eating poisons. This is pretty basic. We know better than to eat arsenic or rat poison or drink gasoline. We should know better than to eat pesticides, herbicides, and chemical additives to our food, but most people still do this anyway. But how many people are aware that the plant food itself, even if was grown organically and cleaned meticulously, is often full of poisons created by the plants themselves? Welcome to the world of lectins.
Lectins are special proteins that lock onto physiologic sugar molecules found in the various tissues of our body. All of our cells have special sugar molecules combined with protein (called glycoproteins) on their surface that enable the immune system to recognize home grown cells from foreign cells like bacteria. The lectins bind to these glycoproteins and make them look foreign to our immune system. For instance chitin-binding lectins bind to the glucosamine molecules in our joints. This makes our immune system attack our joints because it now thinks that our joints are some foreign invader. This is where inflammatory osteoarthritis comes from.
Lectin free eating is about constructing a diet that does not have these plant poisons in it. Unfortunately this means not eating many of the most popular foods in the average diet, including many foods that up till now we thought were really healthy. Examples of high lectin foods are all beans, almost all grains, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, most dairy, squash family foods, most fruit that is not completely tree ripened, and most seeds. As you can imagine, this cuts into the typical diet pretty heavily. But then it is the typical diet we eat that causes most of the degenerative diseases we die from.
So the idea is to diminish the chances of us getting one of the popular degenerative diseases by eating a diet free from poisons of any sort, including natural plant poisons.
When we are young, we are fairly well protected from most lectins by a strong gut lining coated with a healthy mucous layer. The mucous binds with the lectins and carries them out of the system. Lectins become more of a problem as we age and our gut lining has had many years of abuse. Too many lectins over too many years wear out the mucous producing cells, as does various bacteria like H. pylori, yeast over growth due to antibiotic use, chemical toxins in foods, gut damaging medications like pain relievers, and so on. The gut lining itself gets broken and leaks undigested foods into the blood and body. This is what causes lectins to become a health issue for most of us.
Really the goal of eating lectin free is to reduce the stress load on our damaged gut lining as part of a process of healing the gut. Healing the gut is really hard to do – it takes a lot of diligent work. Many things help, but we each have different specific needs in this process. Lectins are just one part of the whole picture. Gut bacteria management is a big part of the healing, as is avoiding foods that trigger allergy attacks or sensitivities. Many medications mess with the gut health like reflux meds and over-the-counter pain meds. Even alcoholic beverages punch holes in the gut.
It is not possible to avoid lectins completely, as virtually every food has some sort of lectin in it. The idea is to avoid the most common ones known to frequently cause issues while the gut heals, then once healed, try the avoided foods carefully to see if you can handle them.
Low lectin eating is also about how you prepare and cook your foods. Proper preparation and cooking can actually destroy most of the lectins. Once the gut is healthy again, getting the bulk of the lectins removed is enough to be able to eat these foods without concern. So if you are younger or have a good strong digestive system, avoiding lectins is not a concern as long as you properly cook your foods. So folks that are into raw foods need to be much more concerned about these plant poisons.
An interesting idea being kicked around is that part of the current lectin problem is a result of the health food movement push towards whole grains. Most of the lectins are in the outer husk of the grains, so the levels of lectins are much higher in whole grain products compared to their processed white counterparts. For example a real fermented sourdough white bread has 1% the lectins that your typical whole wheat bread has. It has been suggested that some of the current gut inflammation epidemic is a direct result of the switch to whole grains. It is something to think about.
The real bottom line is that each person has to be the authority about how their body does with each food they eat. Diet is extremely individual. Food reactions are extremely individual. We each have to become food reaction detectives if we have digestive issues and want to heal them. Be aware that some reactions can take up to a couple of days to show up. They are not all “oh I ate something an hour ago and now I have a tummy ache.” Maybe your reaction is brain fog, or back pain, or leg cramps. These things can cause about any symptom you can think of.
I wish I could give you a simple “Eat this and not that” handout, but life is not that easy. We are all too different from each other for one size fits all answers. The closest I can do is play the odds and avoid all the common poisons and see how I and you do. If that is not enough to heal up the gut, then we start cutting out other things until we get things settled down. As I said in the beginning, this is an adventure. Make this an exciting journey of discovery and healing will come much more easily.