Now that you’ve been introduced to the mischievous proteins known as lectins, let’s address the obvious questions: If our forebears have been eating most of these lectin-containing foods for thousands of years, why are they only now undermining our health? And what, if anything, has changed in recent years to make that the case?
This is where it gets really interesting. Lectins have actually been making trouble for humans for thousands of years. Through trial and error, any animal, including our own species, learned which plants to avoid. But about one hundred thousand years ago, humans made a discovery that catapulted us past all other creatures in our war with plants: fire! Cooking partially breaks down many lectins. Plus, it is an easy way to break apart the cell wall of a plant. Previously, only gut bacteria were capable of both feats. This allowed our early ancestors to evolve in a way that dramatically lessened the amount of energy (and surface area of the intestines) required for digestion—a change that made calories more accessible to our energy-demanding brain. While not a perfect solution, cooking also allowed us to utilize the underground starch storage system of plants called tubers—think of sweet potatoes—by breaking down these previously indigestible plant compounds.
After cooking came about, things were looking pretty good for Homo sapiens for about ninety thousand years. Plentiful animals and tubers produced tall, robust humans. In fact, up until ten thousand years ago, the average human stood about six feet tall. But when the last Ice Age ended, trouble began. The huge beasts that thrived in the cold rapidly died off, requiring a new resource for calories for mankind. Enter agriculture and the domestication of grains and beans (legumes) in the fertile triangle of the Middle East. Both could be stored and used later, unlike fruit, which needs to be consumed when ripe. The cultivation of grains and legumes was the ultimate double-edged sword of the plant paradox. Entirely new lectins entered our guts for the first time in millions of years, and we were, and still are—excuse the pun—ill prepared. But as you’ll soon understand, grains and beans were both the best and worst things that could have happened to our species.
Two Types of Lectins
IN THE LAST chapter, you learned about two kinds of seeds, those with and without hard casings. You also learned about the two divergent defensive strategies plants use—either to deter predators from eating their seeds or conversely to encourage predators to eat and transport them. Not surprisingly, plant predators also fall into two categories. Grazers evolved to consume single-leaf plants (monocotyledons, or monocots, for short), which we tend to think of mostly as grasses or grains. Meanwhile, tree dwellers evolved to consume tree leaves and other two-leaf plants (bicotyledons) and their fruits. The lectins in one-leaf plants are totally different from the lectins in two-leaf plants, so the sets of gut microbes in grazers and tree dwellers also evolved in two distinct paths. Gut microbes in grazers digest the lectins in single-leaf plants, while the tree dwellers have a different set of microbes capable of processing the lectins in two-leaf plants.
We know that the longer you are exposed to a compound, the more you become tolerant of it and don’t vigorously react to it. Think of how allergy shots give you a little dose of an allergen until eventually you can handle that food or other substance. But in this case, the time frame necessary for us to come to tolerate certain lectins isn’t weeks or months; rather, it is millennia.
The predecessors of cows, sheep, antelope, and other grazers have had millions and millions of years to develop and pass on microbes capable of handling lectins in single-leaf plants. By handling, of course, I mean digesting and eliminating those lectins; and if not eliminating these lectins, then “educating” the immune system not to be overly bothered, since it has been encountering them for millions of years. Mice and rats evolved as grain eaters at least 40 million years ago and have had far longer to become tolerant of these lectins: on the order of four thousand times longer than we humans. Rodents also have hundreds of times more enzymes called proteases in their gut to break down lectins in seeds, which means a rodent’s intestinal wall is not under the constant threat that lectins pose to your gut.
We humans certainly aren’t grazers, at least in the original use of the term. (We do love to graze on snack foods all day! But I can assure you that the Plant Paradox Program will cure you of that tendency.) Therefore, we are categorized as tree dwellers, or at least the descendants of a long line of tree dwellers that initially were tree shrews. I know. That may seem hard to believe, but it was at least 40 million years ago. And over that time, the microbes that now call your body home and can handle the lectins of two-leaf plants were passed down from generation to generation.1
Four Cataclysmic Changes in the Human Diet
OUR GUT BACTERIA play an important role in “educating” our immune system as to which compounds should be accepted as relatively harmless and allowed in, and which are cause for concern and should be barred from entry.2 This “border patrol” known as our immune system has been built over 80 million years, beginning long before Homo sapiens emerged. But only relatively recently have we (and our microbes) been subjected to new patterns in certain foods. Unfortunately, compounds in these foods mimic a whole different set of compounds that tell our cells, particularly immune and fat cells, what to do.
The four major disruptions in human eating patterns outlined below have upset the sophisticated balance of power between plants and humans, which allowed both of us to coexist and thrive for millennia. Each of these disruptions has forced us to accommodate (or not) a changing diet. And it’s only recently that we have uncovered the role that lectins play in this disruption. The epidemics of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other health problems provide proof positive that we are now losing this war. To understand why this is happening now and what we can do about it, let’s take a short trip back to mankind’s ancient origins.
CHANGE #1: The Agricultural Revolution
The advent of the agricultural revolution about ten thousand years ago meant that a totally new source of food—grain and beans—became the dietary staple of most cultures relatively quickly. At that point, the human diet shifted from primarily leaves, tubers, and some animal fat and protein to primarily grains and beans. Until then, the human microbiome had never encountered lectins in grasses (grains) or legumes, and therefore the human gut bacteria, microbes, and immune system had zero experience handling them.
Fast-forward five thousand years or so. Thanks to its granaries full of wheat, ancient Egypt was able to feed its people, including the slaves who built its pyramids, enabling its rise to a great kingdom. However, analysis of thousands of Egyptian mummified remains has revealed the health status of those wheat eaters, and it wasn’t good. They died overweight, with clogged arteries. Their teeth were also decayed from a diet high in grains, which are full of simple sugars, and worn down to the gums from grinding the grains.3 The mummified remains of Queen Nefertiti suggest that she most likely had diabetes. The legendary queen was not the only one with problems related to her grain-heavy diet. In fact, oatmeal has been associated with dental problems even in modern times. In 1932, researchers found that putting young children with dental cavities and malformed teeth on a diet free of oatmeal but fortified with vitamin D and cod liver oil for a period of six months resulted in almost complete elimination of both new cavities and regression in the growth of existing ones.4 These results were dramatically better than previous efforts using only vitamin D supplementation but that allowed the children to continue to consume oatmeal.
To varying degrees, we can see that the lectins in oats and other grains, legumes, and certain other plants have always been toxic—but given the choice between starvation and some serious health trade-offs, humans will always opt for survival. Our ancestors did come up with ways to minimize the effects of lectins once the agricultural revolution brought them to our plates, using fermentation and various other ingenious preparation techniques. And clearly, without grains and beans, civilization as we know it would not have occurred.
CHANGE #2: A Mutation in Cows
About two thousand years ago, a spontaneous mutation in Northern European cows caused them to make the protein casein A-1 in their milk instead of the normal casein A-2. During digestion, casein A-1 is turned into a lectinlike protein called beta-casomorphin. This protein attaches to the pancreas’s insulin-producing cells, known as beta cells, which prompts an immune attack on the pancreas of people who consume milk from these cows or cheeses made from it.5 This is likely a primary cause of type 1 diabetes.6 Southern European cows, goats, and sheep continue to produce casein A-2 milk, but because casein A-1 cows are hardier and produce more milk, farmers prefer them. The most common breed of cows worldwide is the Holstein, whose milk contains this problematic lectinlike protein. If you think that drinking milk gives you a problem, it’s almost certainly the cow’s breed that is at fault, not milk per se. The black and white Holstein is the classic example of the A-1 cow, while the Guernsey, Brown Swiss, and Belgian Blues are all casein A-2. That’s why I recommend that if you consume dairy, you opt for only casein A-2 dairy products, which grocery stores have recently started selling, particularly on the West Coast. Alternatively, use goat or sheep milk products to be safe.
SUCCESS STORY
It’s the Breed of Cow!
Allison M., a longtime sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis, came to me for help. In her fifties, she had decided that spending the rest of her life on immune-suppressing drugs, which might promote cancer, was too much to deal with. Instead, she stopped the drugs and started the Plant Paradox Program. She began to thrive, and her pain disappeared—and with it the inflammatory markers. But it was the call I got from the Napa Valley that makes this success story so poignant. It seems that Allison was visiting a girlfriend who offered her some yogurt from grass-fed cows on a nearby farm, knowing that she was on this “crazy Gundry diet.” My patient declined, saying that it wasn’t the right breed of cow, which made her friend belittle the diet, saying that was ridiculous. As if the breed of cow made a difference! Allison laughed and agreed that it was silly, and that surely a little bit couldn’t hurt. So to be polite, she ate a couple of tablespoons of yogurt. That night she awoke with three finger joints in her left hand swollen and bright red. She called me, not in panic, but in delight! It was the breed of cow, after all. She told me that never had anything that hurt so badly felt so good, because now she knew that she had the secret formula for lifelong good health.
CHANGE #3: Plants from the New World
It would seem that we should have become pretty tolerant of these new lectins over the past ten thousand years, but let’s take one more trip back in time. Five centuries ago, the last of the major changes in lectin exposure—and perhaps the biggest disruption of all—occurred when Europeans reached the Americas. The explorers brought New World foods back to their native countries, and the Columbian Exchange, named after Christopher Columbus, exposed the rest of the world to a whole array of new lectins. They include the nightshade family, most of the bean family (legumes, including peanuts and cashews), grains, pseudo-grains such as amaranth and quinoa, the squash family (pumpkins, acorn squash, zucchini), and chia and certain other seeds. All are foods that until then no European, Asian, or African had ever seen, much less eaten. Half of the foods you have been told to eat for good health are actually New World plants that most of mankind had no prior exposure to, meaning your body, your gut bacteria, and your immune system are ill prepared to tolerate them. Getting to know a new lectin in five hundred years is equivalent to speed dating in evolution!
CHANGE #4: Contemporary Innovations
In the last five decades we have faced yet another unleashing of lectins in processed foods and most recently in genetically modified organisms (GMOs), including soybeans, corn, tomatoes, and rapeseed (canola). Our bodies have never before encountered any of these lectins. Moreover, with the introduction of broad-spectrum antibiotics, other drugs, and a vast array of chemicals, we have totally destroyed the gut bacteria that would have normally given us a chance to process these lectins and educate our immune system about them. We’ll discuss these deadly disruptors further in chapter 4.
All four of these factors have profoundly disrupted normal messaging within our bodies. There is no way we (and our microbiome) can adapt to deal with these onslaughts of lectins in such a short time span. (Just think about those poor cows that had never encountered corn and soy lectins until about sixty years ago and are treated with Tums in order to get them to eat their weight-promoting new food.) This is particularly true if we make a practice of killing most of our microbiome daily by ingesting certain medications, including antibiotics, and other substances such as artificial sweeteners. It’s akin to expecting one of the first personal computers developed in the 1970s, with perhaps 250 bytes of memory, to allow you to stream videos, check your Facebook page, pay bills, reserve airline tickets, order groceries, and perform countless other functions now possible on even the most basic modern-day computers.
Why Now?
IF ONLY ONE of these four factors is based on modern-day changes, why are we suddenly so much more sensitive to lectins today? The answer to that question is nuanced. As we discussed in the contemporary innovations section above, several recent changes have impacted how we respond to lectins. The pace of these shifts is approaching warp speed, outpacing our ability—and that of our microbiome—to adapt in a comparable time frame.
In the last half century, we have abandoned many of the tried-and-true ways of eating and preparing foods, opting instead for fast food, processed food, ultraprocessed food, microwave meals, and on and on. The makeup of our diet has also changed significantly. Corn, soy, and wheat, all packed with lectins, are in most processed foods. The lectin load on humans is higher than ever before, but there’s much more to the story. In this same five-decade time span, an onslaught of herbicides, biocides, drugs, fertilizers, food additives, skin-care products, and a host of other chemicals has also disrupted your internal messaging system, your gut, and the microbes in your gut. That chemical overload has compromised your ability to deal with grains, legumes, and other lectin-bearing plants.
As I alerted you in the Introduction, much of what I will be telling you can initially be difficult to accept. It may make you question the very concept of who you are. It will challenge your notions of what causes health and disease. It will upend your concepts of what constitutes healthy foods, good foods, bad foods, and even organic foods—and it will certainly make you question the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. At the most basic level, I want you to understand why you cannot ignore the past in order to enjoy a long, healthy future.
Our present-day food supply looks very different from the one that sustained people for generations.
Consider this: In just the last fifty years, the following significant changes have taken place:
• We now eat far more wheat, corn, and other grains, as well as soybeans, in the form of processed foods, which have displaced unprocessed carbohydrates, including leafy greens and other vegetables.7
• More than 43 percent of the average household food budget is spent outside the home, up from just under 26 percent in 1970.8
• Instead of home-cooked meals, we increasingly rely on prepared foods to pop in the microwave, ultraprocessed foods full of questionable ingredients, and take-out meals.
• We have forgotten (or ignored) tried-and-true ways to neutralize the negative effects of consuming certain lectin-containing foods.
• Many once-familiar plants are now grown using petrochemical fertilizers and modified to be more pest resistant, ripen sooner, minimize or eliminate bruising or denting, and to make other changes that increase production and facilitate moving produce long distances.
• Even our healthy vegetables are not being raised with the eons-old help of soil bacteria, which have been wiped out by modern farming techniques and biocides. Levels of zinc and magnesium, key elements that prevent diabetes and metabolic syndrome, in the soil have also dropped significantly.9
• Although we don’t necessarily connect them to obesity and other health problems, nonfood products such as over-the-counter and prescribed drugs, room fresheners, hand sanitizers, and countless other disruptors are not just a problem in their own right but also compound the negative effects of eating lectins.
What Is Healthy Food?
AS YOUR HEALTH is so dependent on your diet, it all depends upon your choice of foods and their relative amounts, as well as the preparation techniques you use. But ironically, most of my patients with disease conditions were already eating “healthy”! Or at least so they thought.
In my original diet plan for my patients, I banished white foods such as flour, sugar, potatoes, and milk, and limited brown foods such as certain whole grains and legumes. But when I subsequently removed all grains and all pseudo-grains (quinoa, buckwheat, and the like) along with all legumes, including tofu, edamame, and other soy products, my patients experienced even greater improvements. It seemed that the more supposedly healthy foods that I eliminated, the more their health improved. Their cancers regressed or disappeared—yes, you read that right—as did their type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, fibromyalgia, and autoimmune diseases. How could that be? After all, we’ve been eating these healthy foods for thousands of years. Or have we?
Many foods, including those that contain lectins, have both good and bad properties. Additionally, individuals have different tolerances for lectins, depending upon the state of their health. But to a large extent, your individual health depends on the health of your gut lining, your microbiome, and its instructions to your immune system. And it’s become clear to me that lectins are leading the charge in the war within your body.
Even when organically raised, certain lectin-heavy foods are the cause of so-called autoimmune diseases, while lectin avoidance in my patients and as reported in scientific literature has been found to cure autoimmune diseases.10 These claims may seem outrageous, but the evidence walks in and out of my waiting room every day. In one study, twenty women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) were put on a water fast, during which the RA disappeared in all twenty—and when they were put on a vegan diet following that, half remained in remission, meaning that their gut had healed. But the RA recurred in the other 50 percent of the patients on the vegan diet.11 In fact, my studies have shown that eating “healthy” lectin-rich foods causes RA. We need to reframe our definition of what defines healthy, which should include limiting the intake of lectin-rich foods.
SUCCESS STORY
Hoping for a Second Child
Beautiful and full of life, twenty-seven-year-old Suzanna K. and her husband were seeking my help. Shortly after delivering her first child, Suzanna had developed devastating rheumatoid arthritis. She was placed on steroids and an immunosuppressant drug, but she still had extremely swollen joints. Any movement was painful, making it impossible to hold her child. Moreover, she and her husband desperately wanted another baby, but they knew that being on these drugs made it too dangerous for Suzanna to contemplate another pregnancy.
Suzanna was ready to try anything. Her blood work showed that even on these powerful drugs, her immune system was nonetheless in full attack mode. Her tests also showed the marker for lectin sensitivity. So we instituted the Plant Paradox Program and stopped her medications. It was tough going at first. We used natural anti-inflammatory compounds such as boswellia extract and high-dose fish oil and vitamin D3. With each passing week, her pain began to subside and her inflammation markers slowly descended, approaching normal. She could now play with her son without pain, and lift or hold him without wincing. About a year into her program, I met with her again, along with her husband and mother, who had both joined the program to help her stick with it. I told her that her markers had improved to the point where I thought she could try to get pregnant. Her face lit up mischievously. “I knew you would say that,” she declared, “so I jumped the gun. I just got the test back, and I’m four weeks pregnant!”
Suzanna recently gave birth to a normal baby girl, and unlike the first go-round, her rheumatoid arthritis hasn’t flared seven months postpartum.
And how about her husband and mother? Despite being a fitness nut, her husband had been plagued by chronic sinus issues, which have disappeared since he started the program. Why might that be? Lectins are the cause of sinus issues, because excessive mucous production is the first line of defense to entrap the lectins we consume. Next time your nose runs after you eat spicy salsa, remember this. And Mom? Her diabetes, high cholesterol, and arthritis are gone, she’s off all of her medications, and she’s thirty pounds lighter—just by helping her daughter change her diet. The issues faced by these three people might seem disparate, but they were all united by lectin sensitivity—and they all found success upon removing lectins from their diet.
Getting to the Bottom of Gluten Sensitivity
AS YOU NOW know, gluten, the protein found in wheat, barley, rye, and often in oats, is just one form of lectin, and the one that has received the lion’s share of attention in recent years. Consumption of any or all four of these “healthy foods” can trigger celiac disease, a life-threatening gut condition. Other people display sensitivity to gluten in an array of symptoms, including brain fog, joint pain, and inflammation.
All gluten foods contain lectins, although not all lectin foods contain the particular plant proteins known as glutens. What’s perhaps worse is that almost all grains and pseudo-grains contain glutenlike lectins. And there are thousands of other lectins—unfortunately, the standard American diet, aptly abbreviated to SAD, is bursting with them. Moreover, many other lectins are more detrimental than gluten. So-called gluten-free products are actually full of lectins in the form of flours made from corn, oats, buckwheat, quinoa, and other grains and pseudo-grains, as well as soybeans and other legumes. That explains why so many people whom I see in my practice who have eliminated barley, rye, oats, and wheat (BROW) continue to have digestive and other health problems, including being overweight or underweight, particularly if they eat “ ‘gluten-free” (but not lectin-free) products.12 In fact, weight gain is a frequent result of going (supposedly) gluten-free. Another issue can arise from going gluten-free as well: we all typically have bacteria that eat gluten, but if you omit all gluten from your diet, the food supply disappears, and the gluten-digesting bugs depart. Then if you are exposed to gluten at a later date, as you almost certainly will be, gluten will create problems for you.13
SUCCESS STORY
The Gluten-Free Myth
Clarence V. cured himself of type 2 diabetes with my dietary changes. However, when I later diagnosed him with celiac disease, he began eating gluten-free breads and cookies, which are sugar bombs. Not surprisingly, he once again became a rip-roaring diabetic. Once he understood what had happened, he stopped eating those products and was able to keep both diseases at bay. But his story doesn’t end there. Clarence’s diabetes had resulted in a very low testosterone level. He had assured his wife, who was forty-two, that he was infertile, so they no longer bothered with birth control. But when he cured himself of diabetes by cutting down on sugar and animal protein, his testosterone level rose, and lo and behold, his wife became pregnant. This was not a pleasant surprise for a couple whose other children were heading off to college. Fortunately, they are now happy with their surprise addition to the family—and with Clarence’s improved health.
Grains and Weight Gain
THINK GLUTEN AND your first association is likely to be wheat. Although barley, rye, and sometimes oats also contain gluten, no grain is nearly as omnipresent in the American diet as wheat. As I mentioned earlier, the weight-promoting properties of wheat prompted us to choose wheat over other less “weighty” grains ten thousand years ago. Although wheat may be our favorite grain, it is not your friend, regardless of whether or not you have been diagnosed with celiac disease or nonceliac sensitivity to wheat.
Wheat is addictive, acting like an opiate in your brain. Like most people, you tolerate its ill effects because you are addicted to it. In addition to its addictive properties, wheat presents another huge problem for us—it actively promotes weight gain. You will learn how this happens in chapter 5, but meanwhile, consider this: to fatten a steer or other animal for slaughter, the farmer feeds it grains (and soybeans and other legumes), along with low-dose antibiotics. Grains with a side of antibiotics have the same effect on humans, plumping us up and playing a major role in accounting for our horrifying health statistics. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 70.7 percent of American adults are overweight, and of those almost 38 percent are obese.14 Twenty years ago, less than 20 percent were obese. Sadly, being overweight is the new normal, and lectins play a large role in this obesity crisis.
And remember, our wheat intake doesn’t just come from the grains we eat directly. Since we feed animals that wind up on our dinner table both grains and beans and antibiotics, that toxic stew also winds up in us, creating the perfect storm. And the storm becomes even more dangerous when we overuse broad-spectrum antibiotics ourselves.
The Most Dangerous but Avoidable Lectin in Wheat? It’s Not Gluten
GLUTEN HAS BEEN the bad boy in the nutrition world for the last few years, escalating the interest in low-carb diets advocated by Dr. Robert Atkins and Dr. Arthur Agatston (creator of the South Beach Diet). Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly, and Dr. David Perlmutter, author of Grain Brain, continue to eschew grains and have brought wheat addiction to the fore in their books, but both focused on the gluten in wheat. In actuality, gluten is just a small piece of the puzzle.
You’ve already met a stealth villain lurking in wheat: wheat germ agglutinin (WGA). Just to be clear, WGA is not associated with gluten; rather, it is found in bran. This means that white bread contains gluten but not WGA, while whole wheat bread contains the double whammy!
Wheat germ agglutinin is an especially small protein compared with most other lectins, which are relatively large. So even if the gut mucosal barrier has not been compromised, WGA can pass through the walls of the intestine more easily than other lectins can. But this is just one of many ill effects caused by consuming WGA. It also:
1. Behaves like insulin, disrupting normal endocrine function by pumping sugar into fat cells, where the sugar soon turns to fat, resulting in weight gain and the development of insulin resistance.
2. Blocks sugar from getting into muscle cells, creating still more body fat, and starving muscles of nourishment.
3. Interferes with the digestion of protein.
4. Promotes inflammation by releasing free radicals, which can thin the mucosal lining of the gut.
5. Cross-reacts with other proteins, creating antibodies that can induce autoimmune responses. These antibodies are distinct from those formed by a reaction to gluten.
6. Crosses the blood-brain barrier, taking with it other substances to which it has bonded, and causing neurological problems.
7. Kills cells, without distinguishing between normal and cancerous cells.
8. Interferes with the replication of DNA.
9. Causes atherosclerosis, the hardening of arteries from a buildup of plaque (which is never mentioned in conventional medicine).
10. Enables entry of influenza and other disease-causing viruses into the body from the gut by bonding to the sialic acid in the mucosal lining.
11. Contributes to the development of nephritis, or kidney inflammation.15
So how do you avoid WGA? Simply steer clear of whole-grain bread and other whole-grain products.
The Whole Story on Whole Grains
ALTHOUGH WHOLE GRAINS have been considered health foods only for the past few decades, it’s worth recalling that a few thousand years ago, once grinding technology made it possible to remove the fibrous parts of wheat and other grains, the privileged classes opted to eat “white” bread. They relegated whole grains such as brown rice and brown bread made with whole grains to peasants. The goal was to refine grains so they were easier on the gut, as well as to make bread whiter. Of course, the rich didn’t know it at the time, but whole grains are considerably higher in lectin content than grains that have been stripped of their fiber, which explains why they were easier on their tummies. Greeks and Romans even debated over which country had the whitest wheat. FYI, Egypt won that contest.
Today, everyone “knows” that brown rice is healthier than white rice, yet the four billion people who use rice as their staple grain in Asia have always stripped the hull off brown rice to make it white before they eat it. Stupid? No, very intelligent; the hull has the lectins and these cultures have been removing it for thousands of years. Although I once believed that any white grain was inferior to any brown (whole) grain, I have since changed my stance. Traditionally, the Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian people have not been plagued with obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions that are so common in the United States.16 I will go so far as to say that if you’re overweight, there’s a good chance that it’s because you’re a believer in the myth of “whole-grain goodness.” Distressingly, the renaissance of whole-grain products has reintroduced WGA and a host of other lectins back into our diet.
This current obsession with “whole-grain goodness” is totally counter to what our forebears had been trying to do with grains, but it is not the first time this fad has surfaced. Back in 1894, Dr. John Kellogg, a physician and superintendent of a sanatorium, was unsuccessful in his efforts to get his patients to eat whole grains. (He was obsessed with “regularity,” which he saw as the key to good health.) When his patients refused to eat them, he and his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, came up with a way to disguise whole grains, in this case corn, in what became Kellogg’s cornflakes. And so started a change in what constituted a “healthy” breakfast, namely cold cereal, and the genesis of a billion-dollar industry. That industry soon moved on to wheat as the “perfect” breakfast cereal, reintroducing WGA and a host of other lectins into our diet. Just so you realize how recent a phenomenon cold cereal is in human diets, no European or Asian had ever eaten it until 1945 when American troops stationed abroad introduced it after World War II. I have many patients who emigrated from Eastern Europe or the Middle East and had never eaten cereal until the 1960s or ’70s.
But the wider interest in whole grains took root only in the last fifty years among hippies, food faddists, and some nutritionists. Now the whole-grain movement has gone mainstream, with breakfast cereals, bread, and other baked goods touted as health foods and often marketed with seductive words such as “whole-grain goodness.” However, this trend has actually wrought damage on our collective gut and opened the door to other health problems. The increased consumption of both whole-grain foods and processed foods translates into a double whammy of lectin exposure.
You may have heard of the French paradox, which refers to the fact that the French are able to eat baguettes (made with white flour), drink red wine, and enjoy butter without gaining weight or suffering the ill health effects, specifically heart disease, that plague Americans. In her book French Women Don’t Get Fat, published a decade ago, author Mireille Guiliano, who was born and raised in France and now lives in the United States, brought the French paradox to our shores, revealing how she enjoyed all these supposedly unhealthy foods while maintaining her trim figure and good health for decades. And the French paradox doesn’t apply just to the fairer sex. Middle-aged French men experience roughly half the rate of heart disease that American men do and live an average of two and a half years longer.17 But the real reason that both French men and women are more likely to keep their shape and have fewer heart problems than Americans is that they are not consuming WGA. It’s also why Italians eating their own version of white bread and only small portions of pasta made with white flour—in Italy, pasta is a first course, not the main dish Americans make of it—don’t get fat, or at least not as fat as Americans. I travel extensively in Italy, studying their food and culture, and the sad news is that they too have been influenced by the American trend: whole wheat pasta is beginning to appear on menus in cities frequented by tourists.
Skip Both Wheat and Glucosamine
The lectin WGA has a particular affinity for attaching to joint cartilage and stimulating our immune system to attack our joints. Both the inflammation and resulting pain can be temporarily alleviated with an over-the-counter nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) such as aspirin (Bufferin, Anacin, or Ecotrin), ibuprofen (Motrin or Advil), naproxen (Aleve, Anaprox, Naprelan, and Naprosyn), or ketoprofen (Orudis KT). Or a physician may prescribe an NSAID such as Celebrex, Zorvolex, Indocin, or Feldene, among others.
All these drugs may provide short-term relief, but they have deleterious side effects on your gut (see “Breaching the Gut Wall”, “A Clue Emerges” and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” for a detailed discussion). Glucosamine occurs naturally in your body and is found in the fluid that surrounds and cushions joints, where it serves its role as one of the building blocks of cartilage. Glucosamine binds to WGA, relieving or eliminating the inflammation and therefore the pain. Taking glucosamine sulfate in supplement form has a salutary effect for many, but not all people. The reason it is effective is not because it magically relieves joint pain, but because it binds WGA and other lectins in the gut, which are then eliminated before they can enter your body. To break the vicious circle of taking NSAIDs to reduce the side effects inflicted by WGA, simply omit wheat and other lectin-containing foods from your diet. You’ll be shocked and delighted to see what happens.
Natural and Manipulated Lectins
UNTIL THE 1950s most people followed organic gardening methods, fertilizing their crops with manure and using mulch to protect roots and the microbes in the soil from extreme cold. By the middle of the twentieth century, thanks to petrochemical fertilizers, a remnant of the munitions manufacturing for World War II, and the development of refrigerated railcars, heirloom produce began to give way to hybrid varieties developed by seed companies to satisfy the needs of commercial growers. A major factor was the need to grow produce in Southern California, Florida, and other warm parts of the country that could be shipped in a refrigerated truck or railcar for distribution across the country. Hybrid vegetables and fruit that could withstand the journey and arrive in good shape meant that, regardless of whether you lived in South Carolina or South Dakota, you could find out-of-season produce year-round. Hybrids that made the cut were deemed desirable and varieties that couldn’t meet the shipping test fell out of favor.
However, shippable hybrids haven’t had hundreds of years to develop the natural ability to deal with inclement weather and insects and other plant predators, as well as to compete with weeds. Because these plants lacked such natural defenses, commercial farmers began to rely on heavy use of biocides (pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides). The next step in the process of making modern farming more efficient and profitable was genetic modification. In bioengineered plants, lectins are artificially inserted. Scientists selectively add foreign genes into a plant’s basic genome to command the plant to manufacture specific lectins that enhance the plant’s ability to resist insects and other pests. This is one form of genetically modified organisms (GMO).
Not only do the food staples we eat today contain far more lectins than did the vegetables and fruits our grandparents ate, they also are more likely to be GMOs. And remember, these fruits are picked unripe, leaving their lectin content intact. Finally, and let me emphasize this point: just because the produce you are eating is grown organically doesn’t mean that you were designed to eat that plant. Lectins are naturally concentrated in the leaves and seeds of all plants, regardless of whether the plant is grown organically or conventionally. This means that while you can avoid GMO foods, you cannot avoid lectins. The solution then is controlling which ones (and how much of them) you consume.
Hormesis and the Lectin Paradox
Without question, plants can mess with your body, but at the same time, they contain compounds that can be beneficial. Their toxic nature actually educates the innate immune system (the nonspecific immune system passed down from mother to infant at birth) to assist you in fighting off pathogens such as pneumonia and viruses. Other lectins are antimicrobial. One lectin inhibits the growth of the HIV virus. Lectins in garlic, bitter melon, and other herbs possess healing properties. Researchers are currently investigating the potential of some lectins to treat cancers, because they bind to cell membranes. Nonetheless, if you are lectin sensitive, the fact that lectins initiate chronic inflammation likely offsets the benefit of any anticancer action.
To understand the lectin paradox, that certain foods can be both good for you and bad for you, it helps to understand the concept of hormesis, which refers to the fact that compounds that are bad for us in quantity are often simultaneously good for us in moderation. This concept is often expressed as “the dose makes the poison.” Eating such foods educates and mildly stresses the immune system and cells in general, and therefore increases the likelihood of a longer life span. In the case of lectins, a little bit of the toxin can be protective. For example, bitter plants warn you to eat just a little of them. In general, long-lived cultures have a history of eating bitter greens and herbs. As I said in my first book: more bitter, more better!
Hormesis is actually an argument for eating a varied diet. We humans evolved as a traveling species. There is evidence that our hunter-gatherer forebears ate about 250 plant species on a rotating basis. Most humans don’t even eat a tenth of that number, which in my opinion is an excellent argument, which we will get to later, for why we need to take supplements.
The Gluten Distraction
LET ME RETURN to the particular lectin called gluten for a moment. Like a guy whose car was hijacked by bank robbers and used to commit a crime, gluten is just a minor player, and not the primary culprit in the debate surrounding the healthfulness of eating grains. In fact, in countries that depend on gluten as a major source of protein, people do just fine. Seitan, for example, a dietary staple in Indonesia, contains no WGA, just gluten. For most people, going gluten-free is like throwing out the baby (the protein) with the bathwater (the gluten). In fact, a lot of people who struggle to give up gluten actually continue to eat foods that are more problematic, thanks to the other lectins they contain. Many people assume so-called gluten-free foods are grain-free. Not so. Wheat, rye, and barley may be eliminated in gluten-free foods, but a look at the list of ingredients reveals that these grains have been replaced with corn, rice, or teff, each of which contains multiple forms of glutenlike lectins, including zein, oryzenin, panicin, kafirin, and penniseitin. These products also often include soy or other bean flours, which of course also contain lectins. And again, sugar in one form or another frequently appears high on the list of ingredients.
There is another reason that people may mistakenly think that the problems they have with bread and other baked goods stem from sensitivity to gluten. Since 1950, commercial bakers in the United States have replaced the rising agent of yeast with transglutaminase, which is also a binding agent. When I do eat bread in the United States, it makes me feel bloated, but I have no such reaction with white bread made with yeast when I am in Europe. That’s because yeast ferments and destroys the lectins in wheat, taming their effects. And guess what? In France and Italy, where bread is produced by traditional yeast-rising techniques, almost all the bread is white, not whole wheat. It contains gluten, which has been digested by the yeast, but no WGA. Would it surprise you then to learn that sourdough bread, made by fermenting wheat with bacteria and yeast, consistently ranks as one of the safest and least injurious breads, in terms of blood sugar spikes? The bacteria and yeast together “eat” the lectins and a good deal of the sugars!
And here’s the kicker: Most “gluten-free” baked products are also treated with transglutaminase to make them fluffier and more appealing. Transglutaminase is also used to bind together ground meat and seafood (fake crabmeat is one example), which is why it’s often referred to as meat glue. Unfortunately, transglutaminase can pass the blood-brain barrier and act as a neurotransmitter disruptor, making it extremely harmful and often responsible for the condition known as gluten ataxia, which is similar to Parkinson’s. Nonetheless, transglutaminase is FDA approved and does not need to appear on product labels.
It is important to note that transglutaminase also sensitizes us to glutens even if we’re not gluten-sensitive. Read that last sentence again. This means that if you assume you are sensitive to gluten because you have certain symptoms after eating store-bought bread and other products made with wheat, you may instead actually be reacting to transglutaminase.
Finally, when whole grains are used in processed foods, including bread and breakfast cereals, it is necessary to add dangerous preservatives such as butyl hydroxytoluene (BHT) to block the oxidation of the polyunsaturated oils in those whole grains. I’ll get to BHT and its cousins soon, but for now, let’s just say that you might as well be spiking your bread or cereal with estrogen. These oils reside in the germ of the grain. Unlike a saturated fat such as coconut oil, polyunsaturated fats are always on the lookout for oxygen atoms with which to bond, and when they do, the fat can become rancid. Rancid bread or crackers taste, well, rancid. A few years ago, I was lecturing in France and had to catch a very early flight back to the United States. I asked if breakfast could be delivered to my room at about 4:00 a.m. The front desk manager assured me that they would be happy to provide breakfast at that hour but said they could not deliver any croissants, since those would not yet have been made. When I suggested that leftover croissants would be fine, he became apoplectic, assuring me that they would never do that, as they would be unfit to eat.
Remember this story when you peruse the sell-by date of any commercial bread or cracker or snack product. If the date isn’t the day it was manufactured, then the product for sure contains BHT or another similar deadly preservative. There are many reasons you want to avoid BHT—among them the fact that it is a major endocrine disruptor, acting like estrogen. This is the last thing in the world you want your kids to be consuming, because estrogen prompts fat storage; it also promotes early puberty in girls and “boobs” on seven-year old boys.18 And if you need further incentive to avoid this preservative, know that BHT is used in embalming fluid, among other commercial uses. I kid you not!
Patient Patterns
BEFORE I REALIZED that lectins are largely responsible for our poor health and excess pounds, I observed specific patterns in the health of my patients—and then in the benefits they derived from my diet program. When I shifted the focus of my medical practice to restorative medicine (sometimes referred to as functional medicine), many of my first patients were overweight men with heart disease. In the most basic terms, “restorative medicine” refers to medical practices that enable the body to heal itself rather than just treat the symptoms of disease. Usually my overweight patients were dragged in to see me, kicking and screaming, by their slim wives. Each woman wanted me to “fix” her husband. Changing habits is a team sport, so in addition to the various sophisticated blood tests and genetic markers I would draw from the husband, I usually asked the spouse to have the tests taken as well as a new patient. I also took a complete medical history from them both.
Much to my surprise, these thin, supposedly healthy women had a number of health issues in common with one another. A shocking number were hypothyroid, most due to Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease supposedly of unknown cause. (Not so, as you’ll learn.) A great number of them also had arthritis, often with very tender nodules in their finger joints. To relieve the pain, they typically took one or more of the NSAIDs, and most of them had also been using a stomach-acid reducer such as Prilosec, Prevacid, or Nexium for years. In addition, a huge number of them relied on antidepressants. Many would tell me, “If you were married to my husband, you’d be on them, too!” But that’s not all. Often, they were also taking one or more drugs for osteoporosis and had been told that they had IBD (irritable bowel disease). In fact, my average (supposedly healthy) female patient was on seven medications!
This compilation of hypothyroidism, arthritis, acid reflux, osteoporosis, bowel issues, and depression (and the drugs they took to relieve them) formed a pattern in these slim women. I started looking for other things they had in common. What were they eating? If you guessed “healthy” foods, you’re right! They dined on whole wheat pasta, whole wheat bagels with fat-free cream cheese, egg white omelets, and salads with dressing on the side. They avoided fats like the plague. And yet, most of them were on a statin drug like Lipitor or Crestor to reduce their cholesterol levels, as well as the fistful of drugs for ailments that they considered “normal.” It seemed that the “healthier” they ate, the unhealthier they became.
And what of their husbands? Almost to a man, they followed a now familiar pattern: the use of medications to reduce high blood pressure, acid reflux, and cholesterol, to relieve arthritis and other forms of pain, and to induce sleep. The medicine cabinets in these households must have been a regular pharmacopoeia!
When the results of these specialized tests came back, certain markers of inflammation and immune cell activation also emerged with remarkable consistency: the immune systems of my patients and their wives were in full attack mode. But once I put them on a two-page food list I had modified from the one in my earlier book, Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution, and advised them to remove certain household and personal grooming products from their homes, I consistently witnessed their body’s natural ability to heal itself.
Word gets around. Soon women with similar health issues were turning up at my office on their own, minus a portly husband. But this time, a significant number of these women were either overweight or obese. Many told a similar story: that their often vague complaints would be tossed aside by their doctors as “female issues”: hormone disorders, depression, or anxiety. Most of them had tried every diet under the sun, having gone to Weight Watchers, Lindora, Medifast, etc. Many had made a genuine commitment to exercise programs and yet here they were: fat and miserable. They carried with them the same cluster of prescriptions as my skinny women. They came because they knew something was wrong and their friends had said that I could “fix” them. And sure enough, the same dietary prescription that I gave my other patients fixed these folks as well.
Then other patients appeared with autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and multiple sclerosis, and immune-system diseases, such as lymphomas or multiple myelomas, Crohn’s, and ulcerative colitis. I soon became known as the Fixer. Next, stage 3 and 4 cancer patients arrived. You’ll be shocked to hear this, but not only did these autoimmune and cancer patients match similar patterns, most got better by following my food list.
Lectin Detection
FROM THERE, HOW did I specifically identify lectins as a primary cause for so many patterns of health problems in my patients? Good question. It actually happened in a roundabout way. In my thirty-plus years of practicing medicine, I have come to the conclusion that the problems we have with our health are actually caused by very small things. This is particularly true of big health problems. Once more with feeling: Very small things (like lectins) can cause huge health problems. And it was a simple observation by one of the earliest adopters of my original dietary program that started me down a path that resulted in this book.
The tests I order on all my patients reveal many patterns that have helped me understand what is happening to our collective health, but it wasn’t until I worked with a patient by the name of Tony that I experienced my eureka moment. Tony was a strikingly fit, energetic, mostly vegetarian—he called himself a flexitarian—man in his early forties who had fully adopted my principles. As a result, he was eating lots of greens, and banishing grains and pseudo-grains, potatoes and other starches, as well as beans and other legumes. He had also dramatically cut back on fruit and seeded vegetables (which as you now know are botanically fruits). Tony had also upped his intake of fish, shellfish, fish oil, olive oil, avocados, and macadamia nuts.
Like all of my patients, Tony experienced improved vitality and athletic performance shortly after starting the program, and he lost ten pounds. But Tony suffered from vitiligo, a skin condition in which pigmentation is lost. (That’s why Michael Jackson, who suffered from the same problem, became paler and paler over the years.) Vitiligo is caused by the gradual destruction of the pigment-producing cells of our skin called melanocytes, which are modified nerve cells that migrate to our skin in the embryonic stage of development. Why these nerve cells die in people with vitiligo was unknown at the time, but an autoimmune process was suspected.
The term “autoimmune process” is a catchphrase used to describe how the body’s immune system gets confused and begins attacking its own cells. Patients with autoimmune disease are told that their immune system is making a mistake. In Tony’s case, his melanocytes were being treated as if they were foreign invaders and had to be killed, leaving him with patches of unpigmented skin. And, to be sure, his immune system was doing a good job of killing the cells it had misidentified.
Now, I’ve seen just about everything in my years as a physician, and I like to think of myself as pretty unflappable—but I was shocked to see and hear what happened when Tony started on my diet. Within weeks, he saw the pigment return to his skin. That’s right: His vitiligo vanished—or more properly reversed itself—and his skin pigmentation returned to normal. How did that happen? Frankly, I didn’t know at the time. I did know that my dietary protocol was highly anti-inflammatory, but that didn’t explain the resolution of Tony’s vitiligo. Thousands of years ago, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, had described the body’s ability to heal itself, which he called veriditas (green life force). He believed that the physician’s job was to identify which forces were keeping the patient from healing himself and then remove them. Veriditas would take it from there. Clearly, Tony’s new eating habits had removed the roadblocks to his body repairing itself. There was veriditas in action, right before my eyes!
So back I went to the review of my research—specifically, my xenotransplantation research as a pioneering surgeon in the art of heart transplants. What was in my program (or what wasn’t in his new diet) that made Tony’s body stop attacking his melanocytes? Had he added something, or had he removed the external force that was preventing his body’s natural process of self-healing? Based on my transplant knowledge, I picked door number 2, the removal of an external force. But what was the external force?
A word of explanation is in order. Most people with various health problems believe that certain foods or supplements are anti-inflammatory, meaning that they dampen inflammation. What I was looking for is the actual cause of inflammation, which, if Hippocrates is right (and he is), would stop inflammation in its tracks. In other words, it wasn’t that my diet was quelling the inflammation in Tony’s body, which most healing diets purport to do. It was, in fact, that my diet was removing the root causes of inflammation, and once those were removed, his body was capable of healing itself without the need for any anti-inflammatory compounds. This seemingly small discovery will change how you think about how your body functions.
Clearly, inflammation was causing Tony’s problem, but where did the inflammation come from? Strange as it seems, what I discovered was that there was inflammation in his melanocytes because they look suspiciously like lectins to the immune system. Tony’s immune system had been attacking his melanocytes because, through no fault of their own, they bore a striking resemblance to lectins. And because my diet had purged lectins, the cause of the inflammation was removed.
Over hundreds of millions of years, plants have evolved a strategy of creating proteins (like lectins) that bear a striking resemblance to critical structures in their predators. When lectins get through the gut wall, they activate the immune system, which starts shooting without first asking questions—and that means it may shoot both at the lectins and also at the critical structures that resemble the lectins. Don’t forget that one of the original purposes of lectins is to prompt an immune response on the nerves of an insect to paralyze it. In this instance, Tony’s melanocytes—remember, they are modified nerve cells—were being misidentified as foreign. It was a case of mistaken identity, or what scientists call molecular mimicry—and it led to my eureka moment. Once Tony eliminated lectins, normalcy returned. I now knew lectins were causing this problem. But how did they get into Tony’s body from his gut in the first place?
Pattern Matching
PATTERN MATCHING, a term borrowed from the computer science field, refers to the act of checking a sequence of items to find the constituents of a pattern. It happens every time you search for information on the internet using Google, Bing, or Ask. As you enter each keystroke, the search engine pattern matches and offers up what you appear to be looking for. The more information you type in, hopefully the better the match. But, as you know, the search program often mismatches, sometimes in frustrating or humorous ways. For example, perhaps you are planning a wedding and start to enter the words “white flowers,” but the search engine jumps the gun and offers up content on white flour. That wasn’t quite what you had in mind!
You will recall that I had found strikingly common patterns in all my female patients’ medical complaints, as well as in their eating habits. And many of the findings that I presented in Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution came from observing patterns in blood tests, particularly for triglyceride and cholesterol levels, that matched people’s food choices. These patterns were predictable each and every time, and in every person. This observation is so important that I am repeating it here (and you will understand the full implication when you get to Part II). The patterns followed simple time-of-year food availability and predicted whether the body was in a “store fat for the upcoming winter during the summer” mode or “burn fat to survive the winter” mode. The choices of food, even the sweetness of food, communicated with our cells, via pattern matching, about which season it was, and we responded accordingly, either by gaining weight (summer) or burning calories in the form of fat for energy (winter). Pattern matching is the secret to how every living organism—no matter how small or large—operates. And by using those sophisticated blood tests, I came to realize that pattern matching and my ability to measure their effects on my patients underlie most positive or negative health states.
Immune System Scanners on Patrol
WE’VE COME TO know only in the last few years that your immune system uses quite simple scanning systems that look for and match patterns. I mentioned these systems in chapter 1 when discussing the second of the three strategies lectins use to fool your immune system. As a reminder, these scanners are known as TLRs; that stands for toll-like receptors, but I like to think of them as tiny little radars. They are found in all cell membranes of your body (and that of every animal).
Every protein, whether it is a virus, lectin, or cell wall, possesses a unique bar code. The TLRs in your body and on your white blood cells of your immune system behave like a Star Wars early warning system, looking for patterns that indicate foreign invaders, mainly bacteria and viruses. The TLRs constantly scan and “read” the molecular “fingerprints” or bar codes of whatever protein enters your body, just as a scanner at the checkout counter reads and interprets the UPC bar code on each product you purchase, identifying it and determining its price. Once the TLRs ascertain whether a particular bar code represents friend or foe, they decide how to respond, either by letting the protein pass without a challenge or by turning on alarms and air raid sirens to alert your body and immune system that an invasion is under way.
Now envision another set of receptors, which act like a USB port on a computer, that literally scan incoming hormones, enzymes, and cytokines for instructions about what those hormones and enzymes want the cell to do. This second set of receptors, known as G-protein coupled receptors—let’s call them G-spotters—serve as docking ports on all cells, similar to those on the space station. When an incoming shuttle wants to unload its cargo and information, its docking mechanism must fit the mechanism on the space station, just as you can only use a charger with a compatible plug to recharge your iPhone 7. Likewise, only if a hormone or enzyme fits into the receptor can information be exchanged.
If this communication system within your body sounds fantastical, consider that we take for granted that our cell phones operate using invisible electrical pulses emanating from satellites or cell phone towers. Our bodies’ cellular communication works in much the same way.
In other words, your immune system’s job is to scan for friend or foe patterns, and to sound the alarm whenever it encounters recognized patterns of foreign proteins. It then shares the knowledge of the foreign protein patterns with the rest of the body, so that troops can be more easily rallied against the enemy in the future. This is what happens when you get a flu shot. A protein from the outside surface of the flu virus is injected into your arm. Your immune system sees this protein, reads its bar code as foreign, attacks it—and then it makes scanners on white blood cells and immune-signaling proteins that will be permanently on the lookout for the flu protein bar code. If the real flu virus gets in your system, wham, your body is ready. The TLR scanners—remember them as tiny little radars—recognize the incoming missile as a foe, they send out messages to alert the body, the missile defense system is launched, and white blood cells attack the foreign protein like a smart bomb. Result: no more flu virus. Victory!
The Search for Patterns
THE DESCRIPTION OF these scanners won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2011. A year later the discovery of the receptors (G-spotters) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Together, these discoveries allowed me to connect the final dots between patients who had what initially appeared to be completely unrelated problems.
As I discovered, the cause of all my patients’ problems was that their cells’ TLRs and G-spotters were scanning for patterns, detecting patterns, turning on alarms, or activating cellular machinery. That’s because their TLRs and G-spotters were receiving information from input sources that never existed fifty years ago, thanks to a fundamental alteration in the foods people eat and the drugs and personal care products they (and you) use. In short, you have been hacked. And as a consequence, this process had devastated the health of my patients—and is almost certainly responsible for your health problems as well.
How can I know for sure that this is what is happening, and that the constant scanning is largely responsible for an array of health problems? After all, these lethal events are unfolding within you at the cellular, molecular level without your knowledge. The compounds that trigger these receptors are so small, so invisible, that they seem insignificant. But thanks to the inflammatory hormone measurements and tests that I use, I’ve been able to track them for the last few years.
The information I have gained from working with my patients has helped me find patterns in the immune system and the inflammation it generates that until now have been hidden from view. And what I’ve found is that lectins, and perhaps other foreign proteins, play a big role in disrupting communication between cells. Because lectins are master pattern mimickers, much of the information they communicate to cells is inaccurate. And the cause of all of my patients’ problems is that their TLRs were inappropriately turning on alarms or that their receptors were receiving inappropriate information. Regardless of my individual patients’ health issues, the common denominator was a disruption in messaging. The patterns being detected by their immune system had set off an immunologic and hormonal firestorm within each and every one of them, devastating their health. These conditions resolved when proper communication was restored. And the good news? It’s all about making simple changes in your diet and lifestyle.
A Deadly Case of Mistaken Identity
WHEN YOU WERE a kid and got a sore throat, your mother probably worried that it was caused by a bacterium called beta-hemolytic streptococcus, known colloquially as strep throat. If you have kids of your own, you have the same concerns. Strep throat can lead to rheumatic fever, a very severe illness. But rheumatic heart disease, which is what happens after surviving rheumatic fever, is what interests heart surgeons like myself. This condition used to be the primary reason for heart-valve replacement, because survivors’ valves were almost always destroyed later in life.
How valve destruction happens in rheumatic heart disease is important to you, even if you’ve never had strep throat. The cell wall of the streptococcus bacteria is made of fats, sugars, and proteins and is identified by its characteristic bar code. If you’ve been infected with this particular strain of streptococcus, your immune system makes scanners that patrol your bloodstream, ever on the hunt for the same bar code. Unfortunately, this bar code looks remarkably like the ones on your heart valve’s cell wall surface. Imagine the streptococcus scanner’s surprise as it floats past your heart valves and comes across what it perceives is a streptococcus bar code! The scanners send messages to attack and kill what it mistakenly identifies as streptococcus. Then your immune system goes into full attack mode, day after day, year after year, silently and painlessly attacking your heart valve. Finally, the valve is so damaged that it stops functioning, and I’m called in to replace it.
As I remove that valve, I notice that the contents of the valve look a lot like the crud inside of the coronary arteries on which I do bypasses. That’s another clue to the puzzle: modern coronary artery disease looks just like the immune system attack that causes rheumatic heart disease. I’ll tell you what causes that immune attack on your coronary arteries a bit later, but be prepared. Scanner confusion in response to apparently similar bar codes results in unwarranted attacks, and it is the underlying cause of most of our current diseases and health issues.
Dangerous Impostors
EACH PROTEIN HAS a unique bar code, but as you just saw with streptococcus bacteria, many bar codes are remarkably similar. And some lectins are specifically designed by the plant to resemble compounds that are considered harmful by the body—such as lipopolysaccharides (LPSs), which are molecules that make up the cell walls of certain bacteria in our microbiome. I’m not one for swearing, but I can’t resist calling them “little pieces of shit,” because that’s exactly what they are! LPSs are fragments of bacteria that are constantly being produced as bacteria divide and die in your gut. They travel through your gut wall and out into the body by riding on and hiding in saturated fats.
Your immune system cannot tell the difference between a whole bacterium and a fragment of one, so it treats LPSs as a threat, just as though a true bacterial infection was present in your blood or elsewhere in your body. Your immune system then summons your white blood cells—I think of them as fighter jets and troops—into the attack, causing inflammation. But the extra bad news is that our immune cells, which are ever on patrol for these foreign bodies, can mistake the pattern of lectins for the pattern of LPSs and attack them, as though bacteria were loose in your system—further inflaming your body as a result.
But the most dangerous trick pulled by lectins, which I now see on a daily basis in my patients, is that they bear an uncanny similarity to the proteins on many of our important organs, nerves, and joints. Now, in an abundance of caution, your immune system doesn’t want to make a mistake in defending your body by not attacking something important. In the days before antibiotics, you would have been in big trouble if bacteria were present in your body, which is why your immune system is hypersensitive to anything that even remotely resembles a bacterial cell wall or other foreign protein.
My colleagues in rheumatology call this response autoimmune disease, but it is actually “friendly fire.” If an animal eats something containing lectins and gets sick, doesn’t feel well, or doesn’t thrive, it rapidly figures out that eating that particular plant seed or product isn’t a good idea. Remember, a weakened enemy is the best kind of enemy from a plant’s standpoint. And if you can get your enemy to shoot himself in the foot, you’re ahead of the game. When a plant predator (including a human) attacks itself with an immune reaction, it becomes less likely to eat the plant (and therefore its “babies”). Equally as important, it is less likely to reproduce and create more plant predators, again helping ensure the survival of the plant species.
SUCCESS STORY
A God Learned How to Cure Himself
My good friend Tony Robbins called me about five years ago, looking for help. An eminent guru, a holy man considered a “god” to twelve million people around the world, was in a hospital in India, awaiting an urgent five-vessel coronary artery bypass grafting for severe coronary artery disease. Could I intervene and help him avoid surgery? My answer was a resounding yes! It’s not every day that I meet a god.
The sixty-two-year-old guru’s blood work did not look promising. Not only did he have severe coronary artery blockages, he was also terribly diabetic, with HbA1Cs—a marker of sugar and protein intolerance—of greater than 9.0 (normal is less than 5.6), and advanced kidney failure. When he consulted me via Skype, I asked him if he was indeed a god, and he replied that people call him a god because he performs miracles and cures people. I responded by asking, why he doesn’t just cure himself, if he performs miracles. His reply? “You know how this god thing works; I can cure anyone else, but I can’t cure myself! That’s what I need you for.” We hit it off immediately.
The guru was being treated by an ayurvedic physician, and he ate a traditional Indian diet heavy on rice, legumes, and naan, a kind of flatbread. He had a classic “Delhi belly,” aka a beer belly. When I made it clear that the foods of his faith were the cause of his diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure, he was shocked. These were the foods recommended by all the gods before him. How could they be so unhealthy? My reply was the same as it is to anyone else who eats “healthy”: How’s all that healthy eating working out for you if you have all these diseases?
As Einstein was fond of saying, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I put the god on the Plant Paradox Program, and within a few weeks his chest pain was gone and his blood sugar level started to decline. Things were going well for about three months, until his blood tests results were suddenly terrible again. When we next Skyped, I asked him what happened. Apparently, every three months there is a festival to worship him and all the monks, and his followers shower him with foods for the gods, which he is obliged to eat. This pattern repeated itself for about two years; two steps forward, one step back every three months when another festival occurred.
Finally, on a Skype call a few years in, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Aren’t you god to your followers?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “Well, doesn’t god make the rules about what god likes to eat and what pleases him?” I asked. “I never thought about it like that,” he said. “I will tell my monks and my followers that we must all eat Gundry style to please me.” And that’s just what he did.
Today, the guru’s skin has a radiant glow of health. His stress tests on his heart are normal, and his kidney failure is history, as is his diabetes. Without medications, his HbA1C is an acceptable 5.5 and going down. Oh, and one more thing: His ayurvedic doctor now also eats Gundry style!
Each one of us has the power, the green life force energy, to heal from within once the external forces that prevent that natural ability are removed. The god had the power to heal himself, after all. As he and I agreed, I can show you the path, but it is you who must walk it.
Patterns Causing Problems
ANOTHER IMPORTANT LESSON I’ve learned from my patients is that your immune system reacts to lectins to a greater or lesser degree depending on who you are—meaning your family history and genetics—and, more important, whether those lectins are getting past your previously intact intestinal barrier. It seems simple, right? Not so. In the next chapter, we’ll look more closely at our current health crisis and specifically the rising tide of obesity and related diseases. Most important, we’ll look at how to reverse it. Because as it turns out, the ability of lectins to mimic other proteins and confuse the body’s messaging plays a major role in many, many conditions. By using the forthcoming principles and my updated dietary program, I have seen patients resolve the following health problems:
• Aching joints
• Acid reflux or heartburn
• Acne
• Age spots, skin tags
• Allergies
• Alopecia
• Anemia
• Arthritis
• Asthma
• Autoimmune diseases (including autoimmune thyroid disease, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s, colitis, and lupus)
• Bone loss (including osteopenia and osteoporosis)
• Brain fog
• Cancer
• Canker sores
• Chronic fatigue syndrome
• Chronic pain syndrome
• Colon polyps
• Cramps, tingling, and numbness
• Decline in dental health
• Dementia
• Depression
• Diabetes, prediabetes, insulin resistance
• Exhaustion
• Fat in the stool (due to poor digestion)
• Fibromyalgia
• Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), Barrett’s esophagus
• Gastrointestinal problems (bloating, pain, gas, constipation, diarrhea)
• Headaches
• Heart disease, coronary artery disease, vascular disease
• Hypertension
• Infertility, irregular menstrual cycle, miscarriage
• Irritability and behavioral changes
• Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
• Low counts of immunoglobulin G, immunoglobulin M, and immunoglobulin A
• Low testosterone
• Low white blood cell count
• Lymphomas, leukemias, multiple myeloma
• Male-pattern baldness
• Memory loss
• Migraine headaches
• Nutritional deficiencies due to malabsorption—e.g., low iron levels
• Parkinson’s disease
• Peripheral neuropathy
• Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)
• Skin rashes (including dermatitis herpetiformis, eczema, and psoriasis)
• Slow infant and child growth
• Unexplained bouts of dizziness or ear ringing
• Vitiligo
• Weight loss or weight gain
Okay, okay. I know what you’re thinking: I’ve cited just about every illness and health complaint out there! How can one thing cause them all? Believe me, twelve years ago I myself would have tossed this book out the window if you had suggested that everything on this list was caused by consuming lectins, in collaboration with chemical and other disruptors that have infiltrated our bodies. However, my experience with tens of thousands of patients is proof that this is in fact the case—and that following my protocol will heal what ails you.
What Has Changed?
IF WE’VE KNOWN about lectins for more than a century and we eat lectins daily in a huge variety of foods—you’ll find a complete list on “The Just Say “No” List”—why isn’t everybody being attacked by lectins? Well, maybe they are. Or, if they weren’t attacking us in the past, why are they attacking us now? And what has changed? I have uncovered how lectins are infiltrating our bodies, and we’ll look at those disturbing factors in the next two chapters.