Are Lectins the New Gluten? One Doctor's Controversial Claim Against the World's Healthiest Foods
He’s a renowned Cardiac Surgeon with a surprising claim about some of the health community’s favorite foods. Author of The Plant Paradox, Dr. Steven Gundry is arguing that foods like fruits, legumes and whole grains are at the root of our digestive issues and weight gain. It’s the latest food controversy shaking up the nutrition world, and in this interview, Dr. Gundry breaks down what he says you need to know about lectins. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Foods from the Americas are new to us, and unfortunately, the squash family is new to us.
The nightshade family, like tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and potatoes, are new to us.
Quinoa, corn, these are all new.
Oh, no.
I just learned how to spell quinoa.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll be right back.
Today a renowned cardiac surgeon is making a shocking claim about some of the health community's most favorite foods.
Things like fruits, legumes, whole grains, things you think are healthy.
But he's arguing they are the root of the digestive issues and weight gain so many of you are plagued by.
It's the latest food controversy shaking up the nutrition world.
Today we'll get into it.
Author of The Plant Paradox, Dr. Stephen Gundry joins us now.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I've had you on the TV show as well, and we've touched on some of these things, but I love podcasts because you can dive deep into the areas that I sometimes just don't have the time to go into.
And what you're arguing is so profoundly important that I want to take a step back and understand a little bit more about why you even started to wander if the advice you were giving was incorrect.
So you're a busy heart surgeon, actually famously, and I'll brag on you a little bit, involved with one of the first xenograft heart transplants.
We're taking a heart from a different species and putting it into a little baby.
And if you don't mind, share with the audience a little bit about what that was like and then your clinical practice taking care of bread and butter coronary surgery woke you up to a fundamental disconnect and with the advice we're giving America.
Well, thanks.
Yeah, I've had an interesting career.
Looking back, you go, how the heck did you do all those crazy things?
But, yeah, shortly after my longtime partner, Leonard Bailey, did Baby Fay, I actually was at the University of Maryland and wanted to set up a baby heart transplant program.
So, almost after he did this, I flew out.
And anyhow, one thing came to another.
He says, you know...
Love at first sight.
Yeah, it really was.
We call him the gentle giant for a good reason.
But he said, you know, you want to come out here, you can be my partner, and we'll split everything 50-50.
And, you know, when Leonard Bailey calls...
People listen.
Yeah, you answer.
So we had an amazing...
We're fortunate to be in the forefront of infant heart transplantation.
We still see these kids now who are in their 20s, who graduate from college, and they'll stop by my office in Palm Springs and It's really amazing.
By the way, just to give everyone context, if you are on the forefront of transplanting and saving the lives of little children, what you say about nutrition becomes interesting.
Because I would think it would be fairly orthodox, what you would say.
And yet, in your clinical practice, you found that wasn't the case.
Yeah, absolutely.
Interestingly enough, when I arrived at Loma Linda, I weighed 154 pounds.
I remember distinctly.
And when I met Big Ed, the guy who changed my life...
In 1997, I weighed 228 pounds.
Living in a blue zone, eating an Adventist diet, primarily vegetarian, I was running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour a day.
And I had arthritis.
I had prediabetes.
I had hypertension.
I literally did baby heart transplants with migraine headaches.
I don't recommend it.
But somebody's got to do it.
And I had high cholesterol.
And, you know, I was told by my colleagues that this was all genetic because my father had virtually everything that I had.
And nothing I was really going to do about it, manage it.
And then I, into my office one day, one fateful day, marches this very large man from Miami, Florida, 48 years old, who was going around the country, as you and I know, looking for a surgeon to operate on him because he had inoperable coronary artery disease.
All his blood vessels were clogged up.
You couldn't put stents in them.
You couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't any place to land a bypass.
And as you and I know, there were centers, yours and mine and Stanford and Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Heart and Texas Heart, where people would go with inoperable problems and looking for some idiot like me and maybe you to take these guys on.
And that's part of our claim to fame because we would do it.
So I'm looking at the angiogram of this very large man, 265 pounds, and I agree with everybody else.
Everybody's turned him down.
I'm kind of the last stop on his six-month tour.
And, you know, I look at the angiogram.
I said, you know, I don't like to turn people down, but I agree with everybody else.
I just don't think I'm going to be able to help you.
And he says, yeah, yeah, that's what everybody said, but here's the deal.
I've gone on a diet and I've lost 45 pounds in six months.
Actually, very impressive.
And I've gone to a health food store and I've been taking all these supplements.
And he literally has this bag, shopping bag, of supplements.
And he says, you know, maybe I did something here in my heart.
And, you know, I'm scratching my professor beard and going, well, you know, good for you for losing weight, but that's really not going to change anything in here.
And I know what you did with your supplements.
You made expensive urine.
I truly believe that.
And he said, well, look, you know, I've come all this way.
It's been six months.
Why don't we just do another angiogram and see?
I'm kind of rolling my eyes and, well, don't get your hopes up, but we do.
And this guy, in six months' time, had cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coronary arteries.
Oh, my goodness.
Gone.
I mean, gone.
Now, he still had blockages, but now there are actually places that I could land a bypass.
So...
Knowing what I knew then, I operated on him the next day and did a five-vessel bypass and said, you know, well, good for me and good for you.
Why wouldn't you just not operate at all and let him keep going on his trajectory of healing?
That's exactly what I would do now.
Okay.
I was like, why would he need surgery if he's healing himself?
Well, because I was unenlightened.
I was uninformed.
And, you know, you could say, well, this is miraculous.
But so the researcher in me...
After we're done, I said, you know, tell me about this diet of yours and let me look at your supplements.
So, first things first is he starts telling me about his diet.
I'm old enough to have lived in the dark ages of education where at Yale...
For undergraduate, you could actually design your own major.
And you could actually choose a subject that you were going to investigate for four years, work with three of the chairmen of departments, and defend a thesis.
And you had to basically defend the thesis as your work.
And my thesis was you could take a great ape, manipulate its food supply and its environment, and conclude that you would produce a human being, that nothing else could possibly happen if you did that.
And I actually did my thesis and got an honors for it.
I defended it.
And then I gave it, all 200 pages of it, I gave to my parents.
They paid for it.
Yeah.
And, you know, I went off to medical school and kind of forgot all about it.
But as big Ed is...
Sitting here telling me about his diet, I'm going, wait a minute, you know, that's actually the thesis I wrote at Yale about what our ancestral diet really was and what made us human.
So the next thing I do is I'm on the phone to my parents, who live in San Diego, and say, hey, you know, do you still have this thesis?
And, of course, they say, yeah, it's in the shrine.
Of course, your mom's there with the other Gundry shrines.
Exactly, you know, in the internal flame, the whole bit.
So I said, send it up to me.
So they did.
And I put myself on that and lost 50 pounds my first year and 20 pounds subsequently.
By eating what apes ate?
Yeah, by eating what a transitional human ate, but basically what apes ate.
There was actually a distinct difference between what we ate and what they ate that made us human.
Explain that a little bit.
Well, it's not the next book, but the book after that.
Let me just dive into the current controversy.
So let's talk about liquids, if you don't mind.
Explain to everybody how these plant defense proteins work.
So plants don't like us.
They were here first.
They had it really good before animals arrived.
Nobody wanted to eat them.
They can't run, they can't hide, they can't fight, but they're chemists of incredible ability.
They turn sunlight into matter, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet.
So what they use are, among other things, a protein that's called a lectin.
Some people think I'm saying lecithin.
Some people think I'm saying leptin, but it's lectin.
And these are called sticky proteins that like to bind to particular sugar molecules.
And interestingly enough, these sugar molecules are on the lining of all of our gut.
They're in actually the lining of our joints.
They're in the lining of our brain.
They're in the lining of our nerves.
They're in the lining, as you and I know, of our blood vessels.
And what plants have done is use these sticky proteins to, for lack of a better word, cause inflammation, to make the animal sick, to make the animal hurt, to make the animal depressed.
Believe it or not, you can inject lectins into the belly of rats and the rats will become so depressed and anxious that they will cower in a corner of the cage.
They will not seek out food.
They will not go out on a maze.
And if you think about it from a plant standpoint, if you have a predator who won't come looking for you to eat, that's an incredible defense strategy.
Do the animals, though, recognize that?
If you're a rat in the wild and you nibble on some corn, does the rat have enough cognition to say, ooh, I don't feel well after that corn, I'm not going to eat that again?
Well, the best example is cows.
Cows, as you and I know, are supposed to eat grass.
And they have a system in their microbiome and in their immune system that recognizes the lectins in grass.
And for millions and millions of years, they've adapted to those lectins.
Your immune system says, oh yeah, we know those lectins, they're a pain in the neck, but they're not a big deal.
And besides, we've got bacteria that like to eat them, so all's good.
If you then give them food that they are not adapted to, corn and soybeans, for example, the lectins in corn and soybeans in cow feed gives such heartburn to the cows that they stop eating.
Now, that's actually not good for business.
So, What is interesting is that half of the world's production of calcium carbonate is mixed into cattle food so that they don't get heartburn.
You're kidding.
No, I'm not kidding.
It's referenced in the book.
For instance, if it hurts to swallow, a smart animal would say, you know, every time I eat this thing, I shouldn't eat this thing.
But we're not very smart, as all of us know.
We take Tums too.
Yeah, we'll take Tums too.
And go, you know, it's like Larry the Cable guy is having a Prilosec OTC so he can have a corn dog.
And, you know, without realizing, and we can get into that, that a proton pump inhibitor is killing his mitochondria in his heart, in his brain, just so he can have a corn dog.
I didn't know any of that was happening.
Oh yeah.
So take me back to the, is the only reason plants have lectins is to hurt mammals trying to eat them, or is there some benefit to them as well?
Well, lectins as a whole are actually a communication system that both animals and plants use to give information from one cell to another.
They're also a recognition system.
You and I know about blood typing, and in fact, blood typing was done with lectins.
The ability of a protein to bind to a sugar molecule on red blood cells and then agglutinate, make red blood cells clump together, was how blood typing was discovered in the late 1800s.
And it's really interesting, this is a perfect example of how lectins work.
We do know that lectins can agglutinate red blood cells.
We do it every day in the lab.
And so, one of the great effects of a lot of lectins in someone who has no good defense against them is you can actually coagulate blood cells.
I was doing a radio show in Boston a couple weeks ago, and there's a very famous example in the Plant Paradox of a healthy food day in the Boston public school system where they were given beans and rice as their healthy food.
And the beans were undercooked.
And no offense, beans are the worst lectin sources in the world.
But you can pressure cook them.
You can pressure cook them and eliminate the problem.
True.
And please do.
But so 30 students and 10 teachers were admitted to Boston hospitals with bloody diarrhea, all caused by the undercooked beans.
Oh, my goodness.
We have a lot more to talk about.
about.
But first, let's take a quick break.
We've been eating legumes for millennia.
I I mean, if you go back to Jacob and Esau, right?
I mean, I'm pretty sure Esau made that porridge that Jacob got Esau's birthright for.
Jacob had made the porridge that Esau traded him.
That was lentils, right?
Nobody was having bloody diarrhea from those lentils.
And we've been doing that for thousands of years.
Why now are these legumes an issue?
Yeah.
Well, remember that we've only been eating beans and grains for 10,000 years.
There's no evidence that early man ate them.
There's no evidence that a great ape has ever eaten a grain or a bean because, quite honestly, unless they're cooked and cooked effectively, they're fairly poisonous.
And I actually, if you look at the historical record of human height, which was part of my research at Yale, Humans, up until about 10,000 years ago, were about six feet tall.
We were actually pretty impressive creatures.
We shrunk about a foot between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago with the advent of grains and beans.
And just to bring to modern fore, we have always been taught that Asians are genetically smaller.
Just look at them.
And yet...
That's been completely dispelled over the last generation as a Western diet has entered much of the Asian community.
And they've shot up like weeds.
Why?
Because they've actually taken a lot of the lectin-containing foods, like rice and soy, out of their diet.
And if you think about it from a plant, having a smaller predator is much better than having a larger predator.
You'll eat less.
All right, so some plants have more lectins than others.
This list confuses me a little bit.
So how can someone identify if a food is high in lectin?
So any grain or pseudograin has lectins.
All legumes or beans have lectins.
And that includes peanuts and cashews, which are legumes.
They're not beans.
The nightshade family has lectins.
And the nightshades are potatoes, eggplant, peppers, and vegetables.
Tomatoes.
Those are the nightshades.
Oh, and goji berries are a nightshade.
Darn it.
And chia?
Chia seeds.
American, original American plants like chia seeds, sunflower seeds, corn, quinoa have lectins.
The part that gets me is some of my favorite foods, peanuts, cashews, chia, sunflower, pumpkin seeds.
These are foods that I have from day one of the TV show been recommending in part because I personally eat them a lot.
So explain if you can, you know, whether these are all equally bad.
Why is it that some people like me, I don't think I have a problem with nuts.
I do have a problem with beans.
I get, you know, even with that little extra little work we do, sometimes it comes as a problem for me.
But nuts have never been an issue for me.
So, for the average person listening, if they're eating those foods and they feel fine, why should they try this program?
Yeah, so, I mean, most nuts are actually pretty doggone good for you.
Walnuts, in particular, are fantastic.
Pistachios, macadamia nuts.
Pecans, there's a recent paper that I talk about in the Plant Paradox Cookbook that pecans may actually cause an autoimmune attack against the beta cell of the pancreas, and it breaks my heart because I lived in Georgia for many years.
Now, peanuts.
So, peanuts and cashews are not nuts at all.
They're beans.
They're part of the legume family.
And the interesting thing about peanuts, and again, I went to medical school at Georgia, so sorry.
No.
But peanuts have a really interesting lectin that in three separate rhesus monkey and red velvet monkey studies show that they cause a direct attack on the inner lining of our blood vessels.
And if we get time, I'll share a paper I just gave at the American Heart Association last week about measuring a particular autoimmune attack on blood vessels and then removing lectins from the diet and finding that that autoimmune attack went away.
Yes.
You're kidding me.
No, I'm not kidding you.
No more peanuts for you.
Peas and cashews, those are the two main things I eat.
I'll tell you about chia seeds.
Funny, I was a big chia seed fan, and I had chia seed bags in my office to show patients to eat chia seeds.
And then one day I was talking to Lorraine Cordain, the father of the paleo diet, the Colorado State professor.
Who really was fundamental in understanding lectins.
And I was telling him how great chia seeds were.
And he says, don't you read the literature?
And I go, you know I read the literature.
And he says, oh no you don't.
I'm going to send you two papers that were in human studies of where they wanted to show that you would absorb the omega-3 fats in chia seeds.
And that was the purpose of the study.
But they wanted to show how good that omega-3 fat was, so they measured C-reactive protein, one marker of inflammation.
In one group, they got the chia seeds, in the other group, they didn't get the chia seeds.
And sure enough...
The omega-3 level went up in their blood, but the people who got the chia seeds, their C-reactive protein went up rather than down.
And he said, see, you moron, you don't read the literature.
And ever since then, I said, oh my gosh, of course.
How about pumpkin seeds?
So pumpkin seeds, yeah.
So they're an American plant.
And it gets back to one of my favorite expressions, none of us are from America.
We're We're all immigrants?
Yeah, we're all immigrants.
And in fact, we're all European, African, or Asian ancestry.
And in fact...
Long ago, we're all African.
So, none of us, none of our families were exposed to an American lectin-contained plant until 500 years ago.
So, foods from the Americas are new to us.
And unfortunately, the squash family is new to us.
The nightshade family, like tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and potatoes, are new to us.
Peanuts and cashews, chia seeds, sunflower seeds.
Quinoa, corn, these are all new.
Oh, no!
I just learned how to spell quinoa.
Switch to millet, darling.
Well, you know, the Incas actually had three detoxification processes to get the lectins out of quinoa, so it wouldn't kill them.
They soaked it for 48 hours, then they fermented it, they let it rot, and then they cooked it.
Now, getting back to your point about all these healthy lentils and things in the Middle East, What's interesting is we forget that there was absolutely no storage system, no refrigeration system.
And so almost everything that we ate or cooked eventually rotted, and we would cook the rotted things to kill the bacteria, and then we'd eat it because there's only so much to go around.
So I think when you look at what traditional cultures did to have a food that they could get energy from— It's rather impressive.
A great example is corn.
The Native American Indians knew Don't ask me how they knew that you had to soak corn in lye to bind a chemical in corn that would bind niacin, vitamin B3. And niacin is critically important for brain development, among other things.
So when the Spaniards brought corn back to the New World, the Italians in northern Italy adapted it like wildfire because corn grows great around Milan.
And they did not bring back the culture that you had to soak in and lie.
Pozole and grits are originally soaked in lie.
So they started eating corn, polenta, that had not been soaked in lie.
And there was a whole two generations of children who were born with mental retardation that were called Cretans.
The word Cretanism described Cretanism.
The children in Northern Italy who were born mentally retarded because they were eating corn without knowing that they should have treated it with lie.
That was so impressive to the French that the French in 1900 banned corn as unfit for human consumption and should only be used to fatten pigs.
And I perfectly agree with that.
You don't think we should eat corn?
No.
Now, if you pressure cook it, it's perfectly safe.
Or if you treat it with lye.
Well, how do you treat it with lye?
I mean, I used to...
Soak it in lye.
Actual lye.
Yeah.
Like the kind that you spread around the...
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
That you make cement with.
But that's what they did.
Yeah, that's what they did.
Isn't that toxic in and of itself?
Yeah, well, you rinse it, of course.
But it's easier to buy canned pozole.
It's in every grocery store.
How many?
How long do you have to pressure cook the beans or the corn for in order to knock off the lectins?
Yeah, it's interesting.
Most of the modern pressure cookers, if you just set the setting for beans, it'll destroy the lectins.
You have to have a combination of high heat and high pressure to destroy lectins.
But interestingly, there are some studies that show even an hour of pressure cooking gluten will not destroy that protein.
So I don't think you can get away with pressure cooking those grains, gluten-containing grains.
The other interesting thing about pressure cooking, obviously some of my critics point to Loma Linda, one of the blue zones, and say, hey, you know, Loma Linda, eat lots of grains and soy, and, you know, they're the healthiest people in the world.
Well, having been a professor there for many years, I guess I can tell you what we ate.
Why don't you come visit and see?
What's interesting about the Adventist diet, the Adventist protein source is TBP, texturized vegetable protein.
And TVP, as any vegetarian hopefully knows, is defatted soybeans that have been extruded under high pressure and high heat to make this mystery meat.
And you can make this mystery meat into anything.
And so the major source of protein in the Adventist Loma Linda diet and in our cafeteria is pressure-cooked, high-heat extruded soy.
And so these clever Adventists actually got around the fact that soy— We didn't have tofu.
We had TBP. And so I always look back and say, how did they know, you know, to do that?
How about the other blue zones?
How about Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica?
Let's take Okinawa.
The only true study of the formal Okinawan diet was done by the U.S. military in 1949. And it's available.
Anybody can Google it.
The Okinawans, the traditional Okinawans, 85% of their calories was a blue, purple, sweet potato.
85%.
Wow.
Six percent of their calories was white rice, not brown rice, white rice.
Now, how could they be so stupid?
In fact, the authors of the Okinawan diet actually were presumptuous enough to say, wow, imagine how much healthier they'd be and how much longer they'd live if they'd eat brown rice.
It's like, huh?
You're here to observe why the longest living people in the world and what they eat, and they're eating white rice for a purpose because they're getting rid of the lectins and brown rice.
And soy is also only about 6% of their diet, and it's in the form of miso.
So, when a blue zoner says, oh no, you know, they eat all these soy and rice.
No, they eat yams, you know, sweet potatoes.
And does miso have less lectin?
Yeah, miso is fermented.
Oh, it's fermented.
Yeah, so if you ferment, you know, the bacteria eat the lectins.
That's what they like to do.
Now, Sardinia, great question.
So Sardinians actually eat about 10 pieces of bread a day, and it's a combination of buckwheat and wheat.
The Sardinians have the highest incidence of autoimmune disease in Europe.
And it's something that, once again, Google it, and you'll find that it's right there.
And my contention is that, sure, they're very long-lived, but a huge number of them have an autoimmune disease.
And I think it's from the high lectin content of the food.
Does white bread have less like than brown bread?
Yeah, it actually does.
Remember we did that segment on your show, and that's come back to curse me so much.
Well, so if you remember, you love bread so much that you had to get something that people could eat.
Well, Oprah loves bread.
She says, just give me some bread.
And so anyhow...
Sourdough probably eats a great number of the lectins in bread.
It doesn't eat the gluten.
And so a lot of my patients will hold up our episode and say, you said it's perfectly fine to have sourdough bread.
And I go, no, I actually didn't.
I said, Dr. Oz made me do that because he loves bread.
And But sourdough should be okay.
I mean, the bacteria should eat a fair amount of the lectin.
Correct.
But sourdough is the best of a bad thing.
How's that?
There's last more to come after the break.
We'll be back.
We'll be back.
Lectin.
The foods you can eat that don't have lectin in them.
And just so I'm clear, tomatoes, because we didn't touch on them, are nightshades.
Is the reason nightshades are a problem the lectin in them?
Yeah.
The peel and the seeds have the lectins.
And it's fascinating when you look at cultures.
Let me tell you another one.
Your family peels and seeds them before they serve them.
Yeah, of course.
Turkey.
Yeah, I've been to Istanbul and, you know, I have salad on the street.
And, you know, they came out with peeled and de-seeded cucumbers on the salad and peeled and de-seeded tomatoes.
And I go, wow, you know, I must be famous in Istanbul because they did this for me.
No, they've been doing that, you know, since they were introduced.
And, you know, the Italians didn't eat tomatoes for 200 years after their native son brought them back because they were so dangerous.
And the Italians will not make tomato sauce without peeling and deseeding tomatoes.
My grandmother on my mother's side was French, and she taught my mother to peel and deseed tomatoes before she served them.
So, I mean, I had a sliced tomato that was always peeled and deseeded.
And it wasn't until I went to Yale that I had my first, you know, tomato slice with peels and seeds.
And I said, this is the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life.
Tomatoes were not eaten by Americans until the mid-1850s when, I'm not making this up, Google it, there's a guy by the name of Colonel Samuel Johnson who put an ad in the Summit, New Jersey newspaper.
It's a suburb of Philadelphia.
That he was going to commit suicide on the Summit County Courthouse steps by consuming a bushel of tomatoes, which all Americans knew were deadly poison.
And of course, he consumed that bushel of tomatoes.
That's a rather impressive feat in itself.
And he didn't die.
And that actually started the whole idea that you could eat tomatoes safely.
So I'm learning a couple of things.
First, that foods with lectins, there are ways of naturally removing the lectins.
Correct.
Or pressure cooking.
Or modern technology, pressure cooking them.
So there's a list of things.
By the way, the Plant Periodic Cookbook is out, which is a beautiful book.
And kudos to you.
Thank you.
Like everything else you do, being thoughtful and researching this well.
But the recipes themselves look fantastic.
You have Jerusalem artichoke in there, Korean sweet potato noodles, Korean rather.
Walk me through some of the surprising foods that will not mess you up if you've got an elected issue.
Well, one of the things I really, number one, we're designed to eat leaves.
A gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every day and certainly is not fat and has more muscle mass than will ever have.
When people say, you know, I have to have my animal protein, well, apparently a gorilla doesn't and an horse doesn't.
And they have more muscle mass than will ever have.
In fact, all the largest animals on earth eat nothing more than leaves and grass.
And they apparently do extremely well.
I do.
I'm what I call a veg-aquarian.
I eat mostly leaves and tubers and olive oil.
So during the week in general, I'll eat primarily vegan.
And then on the weekends, my wife and I will usually have shellfish or wildfish.
About, oh gosh, once every three months, my wife breaks down and has to have a grass-fed and grass-finished steak from a farmer that we know that never feeds their cows anything but grass.
But that's one of the rare occasions.
Veg-aquarian.
Veg-aquarian.
That's my issue with the paleo thing, is that people translate that into meat three meals a day.
Yeah.
And it's funny, the plant paradox is right now on Amazon the number one paleo book.
And I get a kick out of that because the true paleo diet, and I talk about this in my next book, The Longevity Paradox, was clearly not a meat-centric diet.
We have pretty good evidence on how early humans ate and what transitioned a great ape into a human.
In the next book, there are going to be some real eye-openers on why the Okinawans live an extremely long time.
And it's not what the Blue Zone people actually think it is, but anyhow.
So, we're designed to eat tubers, quite frankly.
So, Jerusalem artichokes.
There's beautiful evidence that there's a sugar molecule in Jerusalem artichokes and also in artichokes called inulin.
And if you want to have the bugs that protect you in your gut and that actually foster the mucus production in the lining of your gut that you really need, then inulin is their favorite food then inulin is their favorite food by far.
And you can prove this over and over again in every experiment.
So, you know, I eat a lot of Jerusalem artichokes.
I eat a lot of artichokes.
Anytime I can get inulin into me, I figure, give my bugs what they want to eat.
You have a picture in the front of the book.
Is that a cauliflower mash?
That's cauliflower and Parmesan cheese.
This particular pizza was invented by a great local chef who runs Berba in Palm Springs.
And she was nice enough to give me her recipe.
And it has Parmesan cheese in the crust.
And that's buffalo mozzarella.
And, ooh, those broccoli puffs are great, by the way.
And the tomato sauce is peeled and deseeded tomato sauce.
And it is available.
It's actually fairly easy to find.
So we're going to tweet individual parts of each of these recipes, which is hard to do, or just go out and buy the Plant Paradox Cookbook, because it's a much more elegant way of digesting the material.
I've got to say, boom, boom, we'll be here all week.
Stephen, as always, provocative, thoughtful, well-researched.
I have so much homework right now to go do myself.
To figure out what to do.
Clean out the peanuts and cashews.
I'm bummed.
I know.
Because I actually feel good at it.
Actually, we started this whole story off with your big guy, Big Ed, who had lost 40 pounds.
You did a bypass on him.
And I suspect he did well.
Yeah, he did well.
And I suspect he also kept his diet that he's been doing.
Was he eating a lectin-free diet?
In fact, he was.
That's what's so fascinating.
When I started going through what he was eating...
But why?
Why would he even think of doing that?
He was not...
If you met him, and as far as I know, he's still alive.
He stopped by the office a few years ago to say hi.
He just...
He looks like a biker, quite frankly.
And...
Ed, I don't know your basic level of learning and intelligence, but I don't think...
He did all this very willy-nilly.
In fact, all the supplements he chose.
I said, how'd you come up with this?
He says, oh, you know, I went through the horse.
I said, that looks interesting.
Well, he probably washed his body and he noticed subtle things that maybe I'm not noticing about myself because that's really the last question I want to get to.
There's people listening right now who say, you know what?
I'm eating the things that he says I shouldn't be eating and I feel pretty good.
What do you say to them?
So all I can tell you is, you know, for years now, I've been privileged to have a lot of really advanced blood tests available that look almost at a cellular level at inflammation.
And, you know, I've published results on this.
And early on, I noticed that one Of the markers, which was called adiponectin, seemed to be elevated in people who had autoimmune diseases.
And I said, that's interesting.
So they would also have a marker called TNF-alpha elevated.
And there's a lot of other ones.
But when I took lectin-containing foods from them, these markers would go away.
Let me give you a personal example that I presented at an American Heart Association meeting a couple months ago.
We had, in this paper, 102 people with autoimmune disease by biomarker positivity or with symptoms.
And we put them on my program for six months.
95 out of the 102 were biomarker negative for their autoimmune diseases and off of their immunosuppressant drugs in six months.
Biomarker negative.
Now, I happen to be one of those people.
Now, my father's side of the family had impressive psoriasis.
My dad took methotrexate for 45 years for his psoriasis.
In fact, I credit my father for me developing methotrexate as a rescue therapy for our infant heart transplant.
Because you knew so much about it.
Yeah, because we were having these kids and they're still rejecting even with everything we had.
And one day I said...
You know, my dad's been on methotrexate.
And I said, why don't we just, you know, calculate his dose for, you know, a five-pounder?
And it actually worked great.
So my dad was the inspiration, getting back to me.
So I knew I had, you know, autoimmune disease lurking.
So when we first started testing everyone for all the autoimmune disease markers, I was positive for anti-nuclear antibody with a titer of 1 to 160. And, you know, my...
My staff comes in and says, oh my gosh, you got an autoimmune disease.
Duh, you know, I'm sure I did.
I said, so, okay, so I'm going to turn it off.
And they go, yeah, right.
So I went, you know, pure.
I didn't cheat a bit.
And three months later, my marker is negative.
And I go, well, that's pretty cool.
So I'm going to cheat again and see if I can make it come up.
And sure enough, when I cheated, it came right back up.
Now, did I have any symptoms of it?
No.
So I actually showed myself to the American Heart Association, and I'm telling the world.
So people say, well, what do you know about autoimmune disease?
Well, you know, I have one, but I can turn it off.
I can turn it off with eating.
I think there needs to be a summit between the Paleos, the Gundryites, the Ornish's, Esselstynes groups.
Because when I get in a room, and I was recently at a conference in the Vatican with people who have very differing views on which foods are good for you, and we couldn't get guys to agree.
At a high level, yes.
Fried food's bad, trans fat's good.
I mean, all that stuff I got.
But at the subtle level that people who are trying to get healthier need to know this stuff, it's not clear yet.
So I'm hoping through this podcast and through reading The Plant Paradox we'll learn more about it.
