The Plant Paradox: Are Lectins *Really* That Harmful Or Is Dr. Steven Gundry Wrong?

Hey, everybody. So there is this book called the Plant Paradox. Now this book has been creating a lot of controversy lately because we're finding out all these plants that we are supposedly not supposed to eat. I figured I'd go straight to the source and get the doc that wrote this book, Plant Paradox on the show, Dr. Stephen Gundry. He's a renowned cardiologist, he's a New York Times best selling author. The guy's brilliant. During his 40 year career in medicine, he's done over 10,000 heart surgeries, done a bunch of life saving medical technologies, meaning that he's developed them. He patented nine different cardiac surgery devices. He's not really a slouch. He's a cum laude graduate of Yale University. He has pioneered the field of xenotransplantation. If you don't know what that is, that's a study of how the genes of one species react to the transplanted heart from something else. Like putting a baboon heart into a human. Crazy stuff. He has been able to himself cure obesity and chronic disease using some of the techniques that we talk about in today's show. He's the founder and director of the center for Restorative Medicine also, by the way, which prevents and reverses the chronic diseases of aging with diet and nutraceutical interventions. He's amazing. Granted, a lot of his stuff is controversial, as you're gonna find out during today's show, but either way, definitely worth listening to this gu perspective on plants, particularly lectins. You can access the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Gundry by the way, I happened to be traveling when I recorded this, so I was like all over the globe and I was literally like in a hotel room as I was doing this interview. So the audio might not be the extreme high quality that you're used to, but I had to get him on the show, Just had to. How can you blame me? In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, 4 billion people use rice as their staple. Why do 4 billion people go to the trouble of taking the hull off of brown rice and eating it white? Because they've been getting rid of that lectin. Plants don't want you to eat their fruit until their seeds, their babies, are fully protected against digestion. And to make sure the predator doesn't eat their fruit, their babies are protected. They use lectins to make the animal think twice. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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So, Dr. Dr. Gundry, I know that based off of everything that I've just said, you're quite the underachiever. And there's really not that much at all that we could talk about. However, I want to talk about the topic that seems to be hot on the lips of everybody in the health and nutrition and fitness sector these days, probably thanks to you, and that is lectins. And for the people listening in, and by the way, take as deep a dive as you want to into the science, because most of our audience loves to wear propeller hats and really, you know, get. Get their heads wrapped around this stuff in a pretty thorough way. What exactly is, is a lectin? How do you define a lectin?

Well, a lectin is defined as a sticky protein, and they are proteins that seek out and try to stick to particular sugar molecules, and they bind to sugar molecules in a fairly irreversible form. Now, lectins are used by both animals and plants for cellular communication. And without lectins, quite frankly, there would be one less form of cellular communications from one cell to another. And lectins work by binding onto a sugar receptor and then turning on the membrane of a particular cell. So without lectins, not a whole lot would happen.

And when you say they're sugar binders, that could be synonymous with them being a carbohydrate binder, Correct?

Correct. Okay, yeah, exactly. But that's what they attach to. And so we don't have to go around and say, oh, my gosh, we have to fear lectins because they're in everything. And that's one of the things I think people should take away. I'm not telling people to avoid lectins. That would be physically impossible. Nor would you not want lectins in you, because they do a lot of important things. And there's actually some lectins, like I talk about in the book, that seem to be quite useful for fighting cancer, for instance, or to increasing the susceptibility of insulin, talking to certain cells. There's a lectin and bitter melon that does that. So. But there are lectins that are used as a major plant defense system. And that's where the plant paradox came from. And that's where I like people to think about, you know, why we should be interested in certain plant lectins.

And how exactly does, does lectin, based on its carbohydrate binding, act as, as a plant defense mechanism? Like, how exactly is that occurring? Is it acting like, like the plant's own insecticide, or what exactly is occurring? Like if a, if, if, let's say, I suppose like a bug or a bacteria were to attack the plant, what's the lectin doing?

Yeah, so the original, you know, plants were here first, and they had a great. Before animals arrived because nobody wanted to eat them. The problem is when animals arrived and insects were obviously the first plant eating animal. Plants couldn't run or hide or fight, but they're chemists, and so they produce, among other things, lectins. And lectins in insects are fascinating because one of the sugar molecules that lectins enjoy binding to is a very important sugar called sialic acid. And sialic acid is actually in our lining of our gut. They line our joint spaces, and interestingly, they are between nerve endings, and nerve impulses have to cross sialic acid over to the next nerve to give its information. So from a plant standpoint, if you had a protein that bonded to sialic acid and did it well, you could potentially and in actuality paralyze an insect. And so a paralyzed insect is obviously a rather lousy predator. And so we think, not just me, but a lot of researchers think that lectins, the original purpose of lectins was to paralyze their predator, which was an insect. I happen to think that we're, to a plant, just a giant insect. And one of the fascinating things to me is that a number of people with peripheral neuropathies seem to definitely get a whole lot better when we take major lectin containing foods away from them. They do a whole lot of other things. But I think that's kind of a starting place now. As predators got more sophisticated and became bigger and bigger creatures, plants had more and more interesting problems. But as the gastrointestinal tract of animals became more and more sophisticated, lectins were used by a plant to open up the tight junctions that your readers may or may not know about.

Okay.

That line our entire GI tract, and they, they attach to a molecule on the enterocyte, the lining of our GI tract that makes a compound called zonulin. And zonulin is. Breaks the tight junctions that hold enterocytes together. Now, I think this is a rather clever idea from a plant because the tight junctions. Let me back up for a second. Most people hopefully know that the lining of their intestines is actually only a cell thick. And that lining occupies about the space of a tennis court in terms of surface area. So within all of us is actually a huge surface area where we meet the outside world in the things we swallow and also in our microbiome. And this wall in the intestinal tract, being only one cell thick, has to be permeable to proteins, fats, and sugar molecules, but it shouldn't be permeable to large molecules or things like bacteria. So our individual cells are literally locked arm in arm, like the game we played as kids called Red Rover. Red Rover, right? And those locked arms are called tight junctions. Well, lectins actually release zonulin that dissolves these tight junctions, flips the switch to open them up. And what you do is produce a space between these, the wall. And not only can lectins go across through this space, but also, and I think equally as important, these either whole bacteria or small pieces of bacteria called lipopolysaccharides or LPSs actually go through these gaps. And it's creating this gap that creates inflammation. Now, why does it create inflammation? One of the things that drives me crazy is there's all these attempts to, well, we've got to stop inflammation, or inflammation is the cause of all diseases, which is true, but it doesn't really address, well, where the heck did the inflammation come from. Inflammation is not necessarily bad. It depends on if it's chronic or not. Well, so on the other side of the wall of our intestines sits our immune system. About 65% of all the immune cells in our body are congregated on the wall of the intestine, along with a huge collection of nerves and neurons. And this forms, if you will, our border patrol. And our border patrol is constantly monitoring what's happening at our border. And they're constantly looking for, excuse the expression, illegal aliens. And these illegal aliens are foreign proteins like lectins, which we don't recognize as self, and also foreign cell walls of bacteria. Now, the receptors that monitor this, your listeners probably know toll like receptors, right? The discovery won the Nobel prize for medicine, I think, in 2011 or 2012, I've forgotten. But so toll like receptors actually are turned on and recognize foreign proteins. They're basically barcode scanners. And if they see a protein that looks unfamiliar, they then send out, literally, air raid sirens. Inflammatory cytokines that alert our body and our immune system that we've been invaded. And it's this actually that is the start of inflammation. Just as an aside, one of the interesting things your listeners may or may not know is that statin drugs, things like Lipitor or Crestor, actually work by blocking or muting toll like receptors to prevent the actual release of inflammatory cytokines. Now we didn't know this when statins first were introduced.

If I could interrupt real quick, what's the link between that and statins ability to reduce cholesterol?

Well, it turns out there's absolutely none. It turns out we thought that statins worked because it lowered ldl. In fact, the LDL lowering has very little to do with how statins work. But we didn't know until this discovery of toll like receptors that statin drugs worked on muting toll like receptors. And that's how they work. They reduce.

Because cholesterol is, is, is used to quell an inflammatory response in many cases. What you were saying is that by reducing inflammation you would reduce the body's need to ramp up cholesterol production.

Yeah, that's, that's one of the reasons. But in fact, statin drugs in the liver block cholesterol formation. But we got totally distracted by thinking that was the LDL reduction that was making statins so good at what they did. But in fact it was the fact that statins were actually anti inflammatory. And to this day, the vast majority of cardiologists have no idea that that's how statin drugs work.

That's very interesting. So by, by reducing things like HSCRP or interleukins or some of these inflammatory cytokines, essentially you're keeping the, the cholesterol from becoming damaged or by keeping it from becoming atherosclerotic. And that would, that would be how a statin would actually work, correct?

Yeah. You actually, you know, Michael DeBakey, one of the great heart surgeons of all time, used to, I got to know him fairly well, used to say that cholesterol has nothing to do with atherosclerosis, that it's actually an innocent bystander. And he, I always liked his analogy. And one of the things that I like to tell people is let's suppose that we're an alien spacecraft and we're noticing that every time there is a car accident, there is an ambulance that appears. And if we didn't know any better, one of the conclusions we could make is that ambulances cause car accidents. Because every time there's a car accident, we see an ambulance, and therefore an ambulance could certainly be the cause of the car accident. And Debakey, I think, correctly pointed out that just because we see cholesterol associated with atherosclerosis doesn't mean that the cholesterol caused the atherosclerosis. It could be just as probable that the cholesterol was an ambulance that was picking up the pieces or the dead soldiers in the war zone and was caught. And I actually, I like that theory a whole lot better.

Yeah. And I don't want to get too deep because I know we have a limited amount of time too deep down the cholesterol rabbit hole. But when it comes to lectins, you talk in your book about many sources that people are probably aware of, like corn and kidney beans and peanuts and legumes. But then there are some other things that actually surprised me, like, you know, cashews and zucchini and pickles and even, you know, our dear friend the avocado. And so I'm curious when it comes to those, those common and uncommon sources of lectins that we find, is, is there a way to, to know whether or not something has a lectin? Like, is it pretty much the fact that anything that has a frame fruit and a seed is a lectin or will have lectins? Is it a plant that would contain lectins? I mean, how do we actually know? And how is lectin content usually, like, measured or quantified to discover these type of things?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the easiest way to think about lectins, and I talk about it in the plant paradox, is the longer we've been exposed to particular plant lectins, the longer we've had for not only our microbiome, our bugs to actually handle and eat lectins. Believe it or not, there are gluten eating bacteria. And gluten, by the way, is a lectin. It's actually a fairly minor lectin, but we can get into that later if we want. But the longer we've been exposed to this, the longer our bugs have grown accustomed to eating them. And more importantly, I think the longer we've had the ability for our microbiome to educate our immune system, our border patrol, that, hey, these guys we've known for several million years and they're okay, they're not the nicest guys we've ever met, but we don't have to get all bent out of shape whenever you see them. And that's Give you an example. We know that 94% of human beings are born with an antibody to the peanut lectin. And yet up until a few years ago, there were very, very, very few people with peanut allergies. And certainly no one was walking around with EpiPens in case, you know, they handed out a peanut in the schoolyard. So we know that, in fact, a great number of our attention to a particular lectin can be quelled by the bacteria in our gut, teaching our immune system who we should be worried about and who we shouldn't.

Right. Unless you have something like gut dysbiosis or you're a child via C section, or you're in some state where you have poor gut bacteria.

Yeah, exactly.

Or you're stressed out and you're an athlete and you have leaky gut or you exercise. Not what I know that you list in your book a whole. And most people who listen into our show are pretty familiar with the idea that people with a damaged gut can't digest the same foods as people with an undamaged gut. And it's certainly an important point to dwell upon is that. And this is something I kind of wanted to ask you. It seems that human beings should actually be able to deal to a certain extent with some of these lectin rich foods, which I know you didn't quite describe yet, how to identify what the lectin is. But in a moment, I want to talk a little bit about what you've seen as far as human data and how damaging these things really are versus how much is hype, so to speak. But first, let's go back to that question about how we actually determine how much lectin is actually in a food or how that's even measured.

Well, it's almost impossible to actually measure lectin content, but you can certainly, you can do experiments that I talk about in the book. I think one of the most dramatic, since we were talking about peanuts, is we know that the peanut lectin is a principal cause of atherosclerosis in rhesus monkeys. And the way you do the experiment is you take rhesus monkeys and give them peanut oil, and then they develop very impressive atherosclerosis. You do the same experiment and you take the peanut lectin away, you actually put some sugar molecules in and bind the peanut lectin and then give them peanut oil without the peanut lectin, and they get no atherosclerosis. And so that is a pretty good proof that, in fact, the peanut lectin is a pretty impressive cause of atherosclerosis. Now why does it cause atherosclerosis? Because lectins, among other things, bind to the sugar molecules on the linings of our gut. And I go into fairly big detail about that. So we know the peanut lectin does that. We know that.

But isn't that, I mean to play devil's advocate here, I mean, there's some studies also that have linked peanuts to health benefits like reduced risk of heart disease. And I'm just curious how much of that was the actual oil content of a concentrated peanut oil versus say eating a. If someone were to eat a handful of peanuts at a baseball game, for example.

Well, that's just the point. You can give people rhesus monkeys tons of peanut oil without the peanut lectin and they don't get atherosclerosis. So it's not the oil, it's rarely the oil that's the problem. It's the lectin in the peanut oil that's the problem. Now do peanuts, you know, eating peanuts at a ballpark give some people problem? Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you a great example. I just literally saw her this morning. She's 33 year old woman who was sent by her brother to me 10 months ago with what's called chronic pain syndrome. And many of your readers probably know about it. Brilliant woman, looks perfectly normal from the outside but was wracked with chronic pain and you know, dismissed with well, she's crazy or she's depressed or she's anxious and had been going around trying to find someone who would believe her. And when we looked at her markers of inflammatory cytokines, they were impressively high. So I believed her. And then I saw her back in January, about three months into this and her pain was definitely better and her markers were definitely better. And she walked into the office today and actually had a big smile on her face. And I said, how you doing? She said, perfect. And I said, what do you mean? She said, I mean perfect. She said, I'd forgotten what it was like to be pain free and now I remember what feeling normal feels like. She said, I've been like this for several months now. And she says, you know, the amazing thing about this is I know that whenever I cheat a little tiny bit, I'm going to pay for it for the next several hours. She said, for instance, I went to an office party last week and they had a little guacamole with tomato in it and they had some chicken and I'm thinking, well, you know, what am I going to eat? She said. So she said, I had a little guacamole and I had a few bites of chicken. And within 30 minutes I had to go to my desk. I was just racked with pain in my elbows and my hands. I felt like I was going to have to fall asleep. And it subsided in about 2 hours and I was fine. But she says, you know, the better I am at avoiding these things, the more sensitive I am to them. And I realize now that I was so constantly eating these sorts of things that I couldn't tell the difference. And now she's one of my canaries that I talk about in the book. And we can look at her inflammatory markers. And this is not a placebo effect because her inflammatory markers are now normal. And the more I've done this, looking at people's blood work every three months for 16 years now, the more impressed I am that taking certain foods away from individuals makes a huge difference in their outcome. And she's just an example from today.

Yeah, interesting. And I see this study that you referred to on the rhesus monkeys, I misunderstood at first, but yeah, you're correct. They took the lectins out of the actual peanut oil and concentrated it and put that into the monkeys. And there's certainly other sources that I know you cite in the book as being even higher in lectins, like wheat, I know is a biggie, and soybeans and red kidney beans are others. But, you know, again, you know, a part of this obviously referreturns to, you know, the dose being in the poison and, you know, it depends on how much that you consume. But that kind of reminds me of gluten, for example, you know, and this idea that, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, that many people do fine with trace amounts of gluten. Like my wife's slow fermented sourdough bread, which, granted, it's made from a local red wheat crop on the Palouse, and it's got low levels of glyphosate, so I'm not getting holes poked in my gut wall, but it has gluten. A lot of the gluten is pre digested, however, and compared to eating Wonder Bread, I can digest that just fine. So is there a way to actually know how much you could get away with?

Well, we can spot it in blood work, number one, but I don't think everybody has to go around and get, you know, the sophisticated tests that we do. I think the more what I like people to do is take all this stuff away and, you know, take it away for a month, take it away for two months, and then start reintroducing these things and choose a group to reintroduce, whether it's, for instance, sourdough bread, sourdough with, you know, yeast and bacterial starters. These guys do a lot of the work of eating the lectins, and they do pretty doggone good job. The Incas, believe it or not, always fermented their quinoa before they ate it and before they cooked it, and not on the package directions. And so reintroduce some of these things. And if you notice that, for instance, you start having bloating or certain joints hurt or you get brain fog, then there's one of your problems. One of the nurses that I talk about in the book from Oregon had severe migraine headaches. And we traced it back to her cucumber, sorry, zucchini and tomato relish that she canned every year. And we got her off of all of this stuff, and her migraines completely resolved, but she really missed her zucchini and tomato relish. So I said, okay, let's do a little experiment. Let's can some of it the regular way and can the rest using a pressure cooker. And pressure cookers are pretty doggone good for destroying all lectins except gluten. And she did it. And sure enough, a couple bites of her regular relish. She developed a migraine headache and waited a couple days and then ate her pressure cooked relish. And she's done fine ever since. So it's just, again, she's intolerant to these lectins.

And what is it about the pressure cooker? Because you get into a whole bunch of different prep methods in your book, you know, like soaking and sprouting and fermenting and cooking, which you do say in your book, can significantly decrease the lectin content. Like if I take my sweet potato and I bite into that thing, you know, raw while I'm standing in the pantry, it's a completely different response than if I say, used a pressure cooker and then baked it in avocado oil or something like that. But the pressure cooker, one in particular kind of fascinates me. What is it about a pressure cooker that has such a significant effect on lectins? Because we have a pressure cooker in our kitchen, I don't use it for much, and admittedly, I haven't yet started to slice up my potatoes and put them in the pressure Cooker, like you recommend in your book. But I'm curious, what is it about the pressure cooker?

So a pressure cooker will actually break the lectin protein into smaller fragments that are not antigenic. And it's been shown to break all lectins except gluten. And there's some interesting obscure studies that show that even an hour of pressure cooking won't destroy wheat germ and gluten or the gluten lectins, which is unfortunate, but. So there's far better ways to probably deal with gluten, such as fermentation, like you were mentioning, or have gluten eating bugs in your intestines.

What about the time of year that you eat certain food or this concept of eating things in their ripened versus unripened state? You have a whole section in your book about, about. For example, you say that you should only eat fruit when it is in season. Tell me about why you are so particular about fruit especially.

So I, I did Tony Robbins big seminar in the Prudential center in Newark last weekend. And one of the things that I talk about in the book, I think it's so important, is we know that great apes only gain weight once a year during fruit season. And even in the jungle, fruit only ripens once a year. And we are designed to seek out fruit. Two thirds of our tongue receptors, taste buds, are sweet receptors. So it's clear that fruit had a major contribution in us as great apes and us as humans. But what's happened to us is our computer program that we run in our brain runs version 1.0 and we've never had an upgrade. So when we eat fruit, it actually tells our brain that it's summer and that we should be storing fat for the winter. That's number one. Number two, plants don't want you to eat their fruit until their seeds, their babies, are fully protected against digestion. And to make sure the predator doesn't eat their fruit before their babies are protected, they use lectins to make the animal think twice. For instance, I grew up as a kid in Omaha, Nebraska, and we all knew the consequence of eating green apples long before Granny Smith existed. And we get some pretty impressive abdominal cramps and diarrhea. And that was from the plant lectins in the unripe fruit. Now, what's happened to us is because of 747s, we can pick fruit unripe in Chile or Argentina in February and bring it to the United States and then ripen it with ethylene oxide. But what Happens is the fruit lost its communication with the mother plant, and the mother plant never gave the word to reduce lectin content. And so we've entered a time when modern fruit is actually never to a point where I think it's safe to eat unless it's local and it ripened on the tree and got the communication system from the plant that lectin content should be reduced.

So you're saying you shouldn't eat fruit that's been artificially ripened using a chemical based ripening method. You should allow the fruit to naturally ripen if it's going to ripen. And otherwise you should choose the more unripened fruits if you want to minimize your exposure to lectins from the fruit. Right. Okay, gotcha. And I know you talk about in the book too, the seeds, from what I understand, are some of the more concentrated sources. So by doing things like de seeding tomatoes or zucchini, you can actually reduce the lectin content even more. Now, what about avocados? Because from what I understand, the agglutinin that is in the avocado doesn't actually interact as much with sugar. It's not sticky for sugar, and interacts with things like proteins and amino acids instead. So is every fruit created equal? Or can we say that, for example, an avocado would be just fine because the gluten in that is different?

Yeah, I think it's very different. And in fact, we do see a few people that react to avocados, but it's pretty rare. And it may be that it's not so much the lectin content of an avocado that's the problem. But yeah, you're right, avocado does not seem to bind to the sugar molecules that we experience. Expect most lectins to bind.

You just made a lot of people very happy. Of course, I still don't recommend necessarily eating the entire pit of the avocado, but I'm sure that will make a lot of people happy to hear that the avocados are probably on the list.

I try to have an avocado every day.

Quite frankly, I'm a sucker for avocados. They're one of my guilt foods because I know that they still got to burn some jet fuel to bring those bad boys into my backwoods of Washington state. But I still eat them them. Now, how about tomatoes? I couldn't find any evidence that the lectin content on tomatoes, even uncooked, had any significant adverse effects in humans. So for some of these fruits or things like tomatoes. Because I love to take a whole tomato and slice it up and put some olive oil and some sea salt and sometimes some nice goat cheese on there and have that as a meal. And I couldn't find any evidence that the lectin content of tomatoes has a significant adverse effect on humans, even though there were studies that show that the tomato lectins can cross the gut and enter the bloodstream and appear to be associated with any deleterious issues. So are there bodies in the streets with some of these fruits? I mean, can we say that because lectins can cross the bloodstream from a certain fruit that they therefore are going to cause something like atherosclerosis or inflammation or something of that nature?

Well, I think the history of the nightshade family is fascinating because as you know, nightshades like tomatoes and eggplant and peppers and potatoes are American. And so those lectins that we have actually never been exposed to until 500 years ago when Columbus started trade. The Italians actually refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back because they knew how dangerous they were. And in fact, I've been trained by Italians to always peel and deseed tomatoes before making sauce.

Really?

Because the lectin. Yeah, the lectins are concentrated.

I'm guessing that they were approximating this From n equals 1 and how they looked and felt after consuming the tomatoes and not from actual studies done on the tomatoes. I mean, I still attribute the same as the Japanese. You mentioned bitter melon extract earlier. Right. We know that Okinawans use. Use that to lower postprandial blood glucose. And I don't think there were many studies done on it when they started that practice. They just kind of knew.

Exactly.

Interesting.

And, and I think, you know, for instance, my. As I mentioned in, in the book, my. My grandmother on my mother's side was French, and she taught my mother to peel and deseed tomatoes before she served. And it wasn't until I actually went to Yale that I actually had a tomato slice with a peel and a seed. And I thought it was the weirdest thing that I'd ever eaten in my life. So I think when you look at how cultures deal with certain novel, at least to that culture's food supply, that you find some interesting things that people do, and that happens to be just one of them. And it's fascinating to me the number of people who, with arthritis, who. We take their tomatoes away from them and their arthritis pain just dramatically reduces.

That's interesting. And I did find evidence that Tomatoes, especially when consumed by people with a genetic predisposition to rheumatoid arthritis. In particular, they did seem to have a deleterious reaction to tomatoes. They had the genes that put them at the high risk of rheumatoid arthritis. So I don't know if the entire country of Italy has the gene for the, for the risk of rheumatoid arthritis, but I suppose if you're listening in and you did a 23andMe analysis and you did have that particular gene, it'd be all the more reason to be especially careful with. Same as Tom Brady does get very careful with nightshades. He's on one of those nightshade free type of diets, and it seems to have helped him out a little bit. Now, what about our ancestors? I mean, didn't they eat plants and lectins? I mean, they didn't have pressure cookers. I don't like to throw around the word caveman days, but I don't think King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table had pressure cookers either.

No, but remember, they were never exposed to modern lectins from the Americas.

Okay, so we're talking about concentrated lectins from the commercial crop growth.

Well, for instance, all of us are not from America. We're from Europe, Asia or Africa. So that means none of us were ever exposed to an American lectin until 500 years ago when Colombian trade started. And again, one of my premises is the longer that we're exposed to particular plant lectins, the longer we have the ability for our gut microbiome to eat these particular compounds and to also educate our immune system not to be too concerned about these. So we've been eating leaves for millions and millions of years, and we've been eating tubers ever since fire was harnessed, which was probably 150,000 years ago. But we have not been eating grains or beans until about 10,000 years ago. And we have to realize that these are very modern in terms of our immune system. And one of the things that fascinated me in my research at Yale on human evolution was humans up until 10,000 years ago were actually very tall creatures. We stood about 6ft tall and our brain size was 15% bigger than it is today. But once we introduce grains and beans, we shrunk to 4 foot 10 inches by 8,000 years ago. And so people have this impression that we are actually little people that then in recent years grew. And in fact, that's not the case at all. One of the examples I used at Tony Robbins seminar was up until the last generation, Asians were thought to be extremely genetically small people, and they were small. But as their diet has become westernized in the last generation and we've taken away, or they've taken away a lot of their grain and pulse based diet, they've shot up like weeds. And in my first book, I actually showed how plants want you to be smaller and retard your growth because you'll eat less.

And if you think you mean, well, technically plants that have not been cooked or fermented or soaked or sprouted or plants that have been eaten by a dummy, in other words.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. And again, I don't want to sound harsh and call people who aren't familiar, familiar with traditional cooking methods or ways to reduce lectins in food dummies. What I'm saying is you can't. Like I hunt. And there's no way that I would just jump on the back of like a whitetail deer and try to wrestle it to the ground. I would probably get killed. Right. I would use proper harvesting methods. And the same should be said for plants. But with what you're, what you're saying about legumes and plant consumption in the Japanese, a couple of things come to mind. First of all, it's almost like an inverse curve, isn't it? Because we see that we went from a greater stature to a smaller stature, possibly upon the introduction of agriculture, then back up to a larger stature with estrogenation, with all the milk and the dairy and the phytoestrogen. So now we're seeing girls going through puberty when they're 12 and guys getting enormous man boobs. Yeah, you're right. Eight single digits. It's scary. Yeah. So now we're dealing with the opposite issue in a way. But that's an aside. What I was going to ask you was what about Dan Buettner's book Blue Zones, Right. Where he has all these different characteristics and two that you see in there are consumption of wild plants and consumption of legumes of all things, which I know kind of irks a lot of paleo enthusiasts, but it's still, it gives me pause. How is it that we see areas of longevity having a very high intake of, of plants and legumes?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I did this on Facebook live with Maria Shriver last month, and she knows Dan really well. I think Dan and I would agree on a lot of things except that here's the deal that I think Dan missed is that there are a couple studies that I cite in my book. Let's look at the Mediterranean diet, which he and I both. There are negative factors in the Mediterranean diet that are offset by positive factors. And it turns out in meta analysis, the negative factors of the Mediterranean diet are grain and bean consumption, and they're actually offset by all the polyphenol consumption of the Mediterranean diet in terms of red wine, in terms of olive oil, in terms of the fruit. Fruits and vegetables they eat. But it's these negative factors that are counteracted. Now, I'll give you an example. The okinawans. The Okinawans, 80, 85% of their diet is a purple sweet potato. The old Okinawans, it's not that anymore. And they eat almost no tofu and they eat almost no rice. But fascinatingly, if you read the Okinawan diet book, the researchers actually said, I can't get over this. They said, gee, this is the some of the oldest living people in the world, and we're studying their diet, and wouldn't they be so much healthier if they ate brown rice instead of the white rice they're eating? And you go, wait a minute, guys. You're studying some of the oldest living people in the world. Maybe it's the white rice instead of the brown rice that is helping keep them, you know, healthy to a very old age. But because we know that brown rice, which has the lectins in it, is so much healthier for you than white rice, they actually went so far as to say, wow, think of how much healthier they'd be if they brown rice, which is just, you know, intellectual superiority at its worst.

So what you're saying is that brown rice has more lectin content because the whole grains and the seeds with the hard outer coatings are still in the brown rice. But what you're saying is that they should be eating more of the brown rice and less of the white rice. Or they should.

No, no. That's what the Okinawan researchers said.

Okay, gotcha. Interesting.

Yeah. It's like, Really? I mean, 4 billion people use rice as their staple. Why do 4 billion people go to the trouble of taking the hull off of brown rice and eating it white? Because they've been getting rid of that lectin. Yeah.

Interesting. Now, what about this idea, though, potentially, again, to throw another devil's advocate type of question there, this idea that lectins might have a hormetic effect, that some small amounts of immune and inflammation modulation might actually give you some type of longevity or some type of stress resilience. Especially in the gut.

Yep. I like that theory a lot, and I talked a lot about it in my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. I like the idea of that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And that's why the lectins in bitter greens, I think, are so incredibly useful, because from what we can tell, they don't have the ability to penetrate the gut wall like the lectins in, for instance, grains and beans do. And they don't seem to have the ability to attach to receptors in our endothelium in our blood vessels. So, yeah, I'm a huge fan of the lectins and bitter greens. But let me give you an example, a personal example. Few I. My wife and I. Large amounts of dark green leaves. Large amounts. But my wife, a couple years ago brought. Bought a nutribullet. Remember when that was the fad?

Yeah.

And she started hardcore. She made kale smoothies out of basically pure kale. And after my first kale smoothie. Now, let me preface this. When you grind everything into a fine pulp, you've actually now made every possible lectin in that leaf available instead of going through the digestive process of breaking the leaves down with your digestive enzymes. And after my first nutribullet of kale, about three hours later, I was in the bathroom with explosive diarrhea. And you go, well, how the heck did that happen? Well, I was perfectly tolerant to kale that went through the digestive process, and my bugs had a shot at it. But when I released it in molecular form, my gut decided to get rid of it as quickly as possible. And I'll never forget that. So the dose is the poison, but the way the dose is consumed is also part of our elegant system. There weren't any neutral bullets. You're right. In case we didn't.

We didn't have. Well, we had mortar and pestle. But still, there's not a lot I can do. I own a mortar and pestle, and I also own a Vitamix. And I can tell you that I can do a lot more to kale with the Vitamix than I can with a mortar and pestle. Now, you have plenty of other little simple hacks in your book in addition to the pressure cooker. We talked about shopping for fruit in season, about swapping brown rice out for white rice. We talked about peeling things like vegetables because the lectins are in the skin or in the seeds. We talked about soaking and sprouting and fermenting and even you know this concept of buying a pressure cooker. Are there any other little things that you would recommend? And actually, you know what? I know exactly what I want to ask you when I ask this question because I've talked with people before who say, well, I've had gluten, so I'm going to take a gluten polypeptidase enzyme to digest that gluten. So I guess what I want to know is, let's say I've gone out and I've just gone ape nuts on my fresh tomatoes and I haven't skinned them or taken the seeds out. Is there some type of biohack, some type of supplement that one could take to reduce the damage, for example, or some type of nutrient that could combat the inflammatory effects of lectin?

Yeah, well, there's some, actually. There are clearly things that bind lectins. One of the ones that most people know is things like glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate and msn. And these are actually all capable of binding lectins. And they're something that anybody can find in any store or Costco or Trader Joe's. There are a number of products on the market that I think are really quite good. To toot my own horn, I make lectin shield from Gundry md which has six different lectin absorbing compounds. There's a number of other ones out there. There's a lectin defense. So. But if worst comes to work, yours.

Is called lectin shield.

Yeah.

Is that what that is? Like glucosamine and MSM and things like that, or is that something Something?

Yeah, yeah, it's N acetylglucosamine. It's actually chitin from ground up shellfish. Believe it or not, when I eat shrimp, I eat the whole shrimp because it's one of the best binding lectin binding agents there is that we have okra in it turns out okra binds lectins dramatically because that slime in okra is a sugar molecule that is really, really good at binding lectins. I actually eat all. I even got a recipe in the book for baked okra fries that people will love. In fact, ever gets to the dinner table, it just comes out of the oven.

Your book recipes are actually. They're pretty good. The only thing I would disagree with you on in the book recipes is I'm not a fan of microwaving food. And some of the recipes, like the microwave muffins, aren't something I would personally do. And I'm saying that now because I know people will ask me about it.

Me neither.

But yeah, I mean, you have plenty of really good recipes in there.

The reason those microwave things came in there. If you get a second, I'll tell you a fun story. Years ago, a gentleman told me I saved his life from horrible coronary artery disease that he reversed by following my diet. And he's not the first. But the interesting thing is we were talking this, this gentleman makes. Makes sodas that have stevia in them. And I was saying, well, you know, you really shouldn't have, you know, even sweetened sodas with stevia, blah, blah, blah. And he says, look, people are going to drink soda, so, you know, I'm going to give them something that probably won't kill them as fast as a regular soda. And I said, you know, that's an interesting point. I said, I've got these recipes for people to have a muffin in, you know, a minute and a half, and it's really good for them, but I have to use a pressure cooker to get them to do it in a minute and a half. And he says, get over it. Use a pressure cooker if this will get people to do these things. And so I immediately. Did I hear you? Do I think a pressure cooker is a good idea? No, but if it'll, you know, get people on the right track, go ahead. How's that?

It's about making it accessible for the, for the general population. I get a big part of that now there. I mean, we could talk for hours about this, but obviously my, my time is. Is limited. And I know your time is valuable, Dr. Gundry. And so what I'm going to do for those of you listening in is if you go to Ben Greenfield, I will put a link to everything that Steven and I talked about from his book and all the other books that he's written to the pressure cooker and the Lectin shield stuff and everything else that you need to learn more. And you can also ask your questions and leave a comment over there for me or for Dr. Gundry and I'll read through all of those. So that's going to be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Gundry and in the meantime, Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this stuff with us, and for writing this fantastic book, Plant Paradox.

Well, I appreciate you having me. It's been great talking to you and a big fan of yours and hopeful meet in person one of these days.

I'm sure that we will very soon. So in the meantime, folks, Again, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comGendry for the show notes. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Steven Gundry, the author of Plant Paradox. Signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

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