The surprising truth about lectins | Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

Hello and welcome to Zoe Shorts, the short podcast where we discuss a topic related to science and nutrition. I'm Jonathan Wolf and today I'm joined by Dr. Will Bwitch and today's topic is

lectins

. Recently, Jonathan Lectin was attacked. A popular book created. A lot of people are scared, and as a result, some people believe that

lectins

are toxic and inflammatory, causing weight gain and leaky gut syndrome, so it sounds scary. What are lectins and are they dangerous or is it another food myth? Well, this is what we're going for. To find out, Jonathan, okay, let's start with that.

Lectins are a type of antinutrients. These are compounds that make it difficult for your body to use other nutrients properly, but some antinutrients actually have beneficial effects. Well, that's pretty confusing. an anti-Neutron doesn't sound like something I'd like to have and I'm excited to take a closer look at Lecton's world now, just before we get started. I have a favor to ask of the 63% of the people who watch this podcast. You haven't hit the Subscribe button and 11% of you haven't hit the bell to turn on notifications. We want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions, so if you've ever enjoyed it. this podcast, please hit the Subscribe button and turn on notifications.

Doing us a small favor, it

will

really help us, thank you, you said that lectins are a type of antinutrients, now antinutrients? That sounds a little scary to me, it's completely understandable Jonathan, but there's nothing to fear my friend, we're here to explain all of this to you. Antinutrients are compounds that can interfere with your body's ability to use the nutrients you consume in your diet and can come in many forms, could be drugs, proteins. Surprisingly, some nutrients can act as antinutrients. I'm getting more and more confused. Is this another one of these scientific words designed to baffle me and everyone listening to this?

I think the answer lies in the nuance. Jonathan, um, because although antinutrients can interfere with your body's processing of Nutri, first of all, you're probably destroying most of them when you cook your food and, um, when they're present, they're usually present in such small amounts. which actually helps your body maintain a nutritional balance, it's like having brakes on your car, you don't want to have gas all the time, you want to have the ability to slow down sometimes, so don't be intimidated by the scary name . antinutrients, they are actually very unlikely to harm your health when consumed as part of a normal diet.

Well I'm glad we got that out of the way so you were just explaining that lectins are a type of antinutrient that can tell me more about these things yeah let's dig a little deeper into lectins so lectins these scary things that we We have heard about, they are proteins that are known to bind to carbohydrates and you

will

find them everywhere in nature. Both animals and plants have lectin and those lectins play a role in your physiology, the way your body functions. You will find them in bacteria, fungi, single-celled organisms, I am basically referring to your microbes.

You know, the bottom line, Jonathan, is this. I have lectin, you have. lectin we all have lectin well now I'm glad they invited me to the lectin party I feel a lot less scared now I know I'm full of them where else do we find them? Well, we wouldn't be arguing about them if they weren't also in our food, of course, you'll find them disproportionately represented in certain specific food groups, for example, whole grains, legumes, many fruits, certain nuts and seeds, some produce. dairy and then the night shade vegetables and those. We've discussed this in a previous podcast episode for those who are interested, but those are tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, bell peppers, and chili peppers, so wait a minute because we started off by saying that our lectin is really bad for you and Now that you've listed a long list of foods that basically sounds like the list of really healthy foods that everyone should eat, why are people suddenly making such a fuss and saying that lectins might actually be terrible for us?

This is exactly the point Jonathan is that these healthy foods like beans and whole grains have, frankly, been the staple of healthier diets around the world for hundreds of years and then here comes this popular claim out of nowhere. that these lectins are causing inflammation and Wakefulness and Weak Bowel Syndrome. So is there much

truth

to these claims? I guess the obvious question okay, let's get this out of the way, because we need to unpack this, it's true that if lectins are consumed in excessive amounts, not in excess. As massively excessive amounts, they can cause food poisoning and, in fact, there are several reports of this happening.

I'm glad you mentioned this because actually our team here at Zoe, led by yel, has done a lot of research and managed to come up with a pair. of strange cases that I have to share, for example, they discovered a very unusual event in a British hospital in the 1980s involving kidney beans. Can you tell us a little more? Wasn't this a great moment for the NHS? Jonathan in 1988 uh a British hospital was having a healthy eating day and someone brought to this potlock a special lunch that included undercooked red beans, so in a medical journal this was written, they noticed that at 3:00 in The afternoon after this lunch a surgical assistant vomited in the operating room which of course is not something we want to happen and then for the next few hours the hospital staff were hit by an epidemic of vomiting and diarrhea which basically devastated the hospital staff and everyone who attended this shared launch.

Anyway, in case anyone is having dinner, I guess I'll leave it at that, so now this doesn't sound very good and I think our team found another case in Japan P involving white beans, that's right, yeah, actually, this is the infamous The White Bean Incident, um, as it's popularly known in academic circles, so it was actually much more recent, it was in 2006 and um, the J was featured by a Japanese TV station and they did something which I really don't know how else to say this, um, it was stupid, what they did was very stupid, they encouraged their viewers to consume powdered white beans, okay, so raw powdered white beans like to grind them into a spice grinder or in a coffee grinder anyway, um, the viewers, many of them got sick and over a thousand people ended up making the TV station angry and having an upset stomach like nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, so You know, forgive me because you were saying, I really don't think it's that big of a deal, but that sounds pretty bad in both examples.

PS: I thought you were really trying to defend the lectin. We'll get to that. Jonathan and I understand this sounds a little scary. It's understandable, but in both cases there are some things we need to look at. So, first of all, the beans were not cooked in either case, right, this is an inappropriate cooking of beans and I don't know about you, Jonathan, but in my case, I tend to prefer my beans cooked, if ever have you tried chewing. a raw bean is not a good time and there is a high probability of breaking your teeth or losing a tooth, so you know, it's just me, but anyway it's also very important to recognize that these are two case reports from the last 40 years, you know? and um, and no one got seriously ill, so between these two incidents, basically everyone recovered the next day, people were expected to go back to work at the hospital the next day.

Hi I want to take a quick break now, in March of last year we created this podcast to find out the latest science can help us all live longer, healthier lives now if you don't have hundreds of hours on your hands don't worry on demand from many of you, our team has created an amazing guide that summarizes the top 10 shocking discoveries that you could apply to your life and you can get them for free, just visit zoe.com sfree guu or click the link in the show notes and let me know what you think about it.

Well, it's back to the show, so it helps. I'd like to understand what's happening with these lectins because, you know, they start with these kinds of raw things, like, let's take a bean, and then they're cooked. Yes, this is a really important and fundamental point, which is that simply cooking beans can drastically reduce the lectin content, so basically cooking them deactivates the lectins, which is why routine consumption of cooked beans does not cause people get sick with lectin poisoning, as if you really don't have to worry about this, which is why beans are toxic if consumed. raw, which of course no one does, but proper cooking neutralizes those lectins, makes kidney beans or any other type of beans safe to consume and not only safe, but frankly incredibly beneficial, so just I want to add a quick point about this. that if you buy canned beans you realize that those canned beans are quite soft and that's because they've already been cooked so there's no need to worry about the lectin and canned beans it's really interesting CU I mean I didn't grow up eating a lot of beans, I think overall I didn't grow up on a very high fiber diet, but we certainly had potatoes, and I was definitely raised to understand that you can't eat a raw potato, you need to cook it.

So I guess this is just another example of the way cooking actually changes the chemical structure of food and can turn something that isn't safe for us into something that is safe or, in some cases, can be cooked. for so long that you lose a lot of nutrients and it may not be dangerous, but you can also lose it, so the point is that you can't compare raw and cooked always the same way, yeah, that's really interesting. The point, uh, cooking is changing the properties of our food, it's a form of food processing, it's not ultra-processed, but it is a form of food processing and actually, studies have shown that there was a study at the University of California in San Francisco than by taking it literally. the exact same food and cooking it can have a

surprising

differential effect on the microbiome, so the message I'm hearing so far is to cook the beans or buy canned beans that are already cooked, so that's pretty simple, what other research has made.

What's been done so far with lectins, well, Jonathan, you know, so many diet fads or scare stories, it's hard to keep up with how the hype is getting away from us with large scale scientific studies looking at something like no lectins. diet and I know again the team here at Zoe was looking into some of the research on lectins and actually most of this has been done in test tubes and in rats rather than in people, is that right, yeah, that is exactly right and and this is a really important point, so when these experiments are carried out, you know in essence what they are doing is taking a completely unnatural concentration of these lectins and you know that this type of setup can give results that I suggest that lectins cause inflammation or leakage, but there are some issues we need to recognize, so first of all, these studies don't translate well to humans.

I mean, the bottom line is that we're not test tubes or rats, um. They are much more complicated than these things and the second thing is that for every study that says lectins are dangerous, there are at least as many studies that say they are beneficial, for example, there are numerous studies that suggest that lectins protect us from cancer. or heart disease, these are our biggest killers, we want to protect ourselves from them and lectin can actually help, so fundamentally these test tube and animal studies just don't show us what happens when real people eat real food, which It's what matters to us. about Jonathan at Zoe, uh, we want to understand what happens to me if I eat a high lectin diet or a low lectin diet, that's what we care about, so what do we know about the impact of lectins in the context of food real?

What real human beings eat. I mentioned that you'll find a lot of lectin in foods like legumes. This gives me a great opportunity to talk about one of my favorite foods, which are these legumes and the studies we have to back them up. Well, what I love about you is that you might have a favorite legume study and I guess you wouldn't be on Zoe's podcast if you didn't have a favorite legume study, so tell us. I fully admit that I am a Nerd, this is not a mystery or a secret, so we hear from those who have a lectin phobia that we should avoid legumes because lectins cause things like inflammation in weight gain,so this is what I would propose for a study: this is a randomized controlled trial of a filling legume. a diet like a diet rich in legumes versus a diet without legumes and, more importantly, the researchers kept the number of calories completely constant, so basically what we are seeing here has nothing to do with whether you are eating more or less calories, it's purely If you consume more legumes or you don't consume legumes, this is what they saw and this is

surprising

and somewhat shocking, so in this legume-rich diet, with a lot of beans and lentils, they found that C-reactive protein, which is a marker of inflammation, it didn't go down by 5% or 10% or even 25% went down by 40% 40% this is a really big number wow 40% went down his inflammation marker simultaneously his blood pressure and his cholesterol went down too but The most fascinating part that I haven't even mentioned yet is that people on a diet rich in legumes lost more weight and this despite the fact that they were eating the same amount of calories, it's not just calories, so that's surprising, and actually what you're saying is that in this situation you know that the higher lectin diet actually led to lower information, um, so that's very good news, sounds like it for lectin fans and bean fans. and lenal, because I don't think anyone other than scientists talks about the legumes that I have known.

What else have scientists learned from? There is legions of research being done on legumes. I mean, this is just one study. You know, it may be my favorite study, but there is a ton of research on the benefits of legumes in particular, so one notable discovery that has been found is that people who consume more legumes can lose weight more effectively. better blood sugar control therefore less likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes science also shows a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and rectal cancer so you're doing a good job In the case of legumes, they sound pretty good well for us now there are also a lot of lectins in other foods like whole grains, yes, and we have focused quite a bit on legumes, but this is also important and true, so take a look at whole grains - in a study it was shown that by increasing daily consumption of whole grains with just two pieces of whole grain bread, they actually rewarded participants with a lower risk of coronary heart disease, low probability of death from cardiovascular disease, low probability of cancer diagnosis, even a lower probability of death from all causes death from respiratory diseases death from infectious diseases lower chance of type 2 diabetes and lower chance of death from all non-cardiovascular non-cancerous causes, which is a huge category but also a pretty important one So I have a message for all the haters lectins, Mike, here we go, and that's eating more whole wheat bread, which I would never have put even that high on the list of what you'd want to eat, so it's definitely you saying hello. the lectin flag fiercely um now the team um here at Zoe also looked into some of these studies and it sounds like you know in general people consume very small amounts of grains and legumes so is it possible that actually everyone Hearing this In general, they are probably consuming a lower amount of lectins than perhaps they would be if they were in these studies with these health benefits.

That's right, Jonathan, you know people who follow Zoe's lifestyle. higher in eltin consumption, but let's take a look at what's really happening: One study suggested that 98% of Americans actually have a poor intake of whole grains, while the average American consumes only 6 PBS or 2, 7 kilos of beans per year, so if you get nerdy, which as I mentioned before, I specialize in this, this means that you are only consuming 2 ounces of beans per week, that's nothing and if we pause for a second, you know, let's think about this, the anti-lectin club claims that this. it's the cause of all our problems this is the cause of our inflammation and our weight gain and our gut problems we've already discussed the science doesn't support this now I'm showing you the logic it doesn't support this either so this is what the diet looks like current rate of people in the US.

Is there any research other than rats and testicles that suggests we feel better on a low-lectin diet? We have to understand that these are highly exclusive diets that actually make things difficult for people. consume enough calories on a daily basis, so the upshot of this is knowing that if you go on a super restricted diet, people will initially lose weight, that's what they saw, but there's no evidence that this has anything to do with lectins. and as for the people who claim significant improvements from reducing lectins, there are a couple of things that could be due and I think they are very clear to me in the first place: it could be a placebo effect, or it could also be the result of excluding something more than lectins like fod Maps, after all our food is not just a big bag of lectins like it's a nutritional complex and there definitely may be something else in our food that is causing our symptoms and I think there is a study that gives us an idea This about gluten is true, yes, exactly Jonathan, and this is another one of my favorites, um, so you know, gluten, first of all, most people don't think of gluten as eltin, is the most famous of the eltins, it's something that's a lectin that has a star in the Lectin Hall of Fame, so consider another randomized control trial where researchers gave people they were studying for the way they had gluten sensitivity.

Well, these are people who report that they are sensitive to gluten and they were given an oat bar that they would consume every day for a week, so just a simple oat bar or is there some kind of scientific twist here, of course there is some Kind of a scientific twist here, so, hidden inside this oatmeal bar, they snuck in. one of the three things which are gluten, tanning, which I will explain in a moment, or a placebo, which was sugar. You have to be careful with these scientific researchers who slip you oat bars. Clearly, you don't know what they are like.

I love it, they sound a little sketchy, but luckily we have institutional review boards to make sure that they have ethical standards, and you know, the study actually has a very important purpose that of course all studies should have, so we are trying. to understand what the role of gluten is in these people who have gluten sensitivity, so now I mentioned Fru Tans, which is one of the things that was hidden inside these oat bars. Fructans are short-chain carbohydrates that you will actually find in Foods that contain gluten, such as wheat, barley, and rye, contain gluten and also fruits.

Tans, so they're actually a type of food map, so each person was exposed to a different bar after taking a week-long break from it. your symptoms subside, basically like everyone had a chance with each of these three bars and during the week they were consuming these bars they measured your digestive symptoms to see how you feel bloating gas abdominal pain diarrhea constipation How are you feeling? So everyone took these three bars, one with some sugar, one with gluten, which is this lectin you're talking about, the super lectin, and one with fructan, so what did they find?

Well, I love this. It's one of my favorite findings in a study, so when you compare it to the placebo because of course the placebo is the standard that we're going to compare to the patients who ate the bar that contained gluten actually had fewer symptoms, let me tell you. who again had fewer symptoms with the gluten-containing bar and more symptoms with a placebo. These are people who have gluten sensitivity and the placebo is causing more symptoms than the gluten now, when they ate the bar containing fructan, they became active and had a massive increase in their digestive symptoms, clearly something was going on there, in other words, these people who have gluten sensitivity in this study it was not gluten, they are actually sensitive to fructans, it is a sensitivity to fructans, which is a form of FODMAP intolerance, so your conclusion.

Actually lectins are not the problem at all for these people and it is something completely different in this food that was causing the problem, that is exactly right, so when you eat these foods with barley and rye you have symptoms that you attribute to those symptoms. gluten you say I have gluten sensitivity when in reality we are misattributing the symptoms, it is not the gluten, it is the fructans that are also in us B, this is what it will be like when this is all over together and you have given us a wonderful tour of some scientific experiments Pretty funny, despite the strange events of the white bean saga in Japan and the healthy eating day at that hospital in 1988, it seems to me that lectin sounds pretty safe, you know, as long as it doesn't. eating my beans raw is the correct verdict, yes, I think you got it right, Jonathan, it's really that simple and, you know, I get a little emotional about this topic, and I get a little hyped up in case the people can I don't say it during our conversation and that's because it really bothers me because a fad diet is coming that generates misinformation on the issue of lectins and leads to scaremongering and we are scaring people away from foods that we are already consuming little of and that we need more of and so, you know, I feel like this is an opportunity to do a public service announcement to say that we just need to be careful when we hear people make statements like everything you thought you knew is wrong or when we see a person and they may have an MD or PhD after your name, but you are a lone wolf and go around claiming that all the other MDs and PhDs were wrong and have discovered the solution that millions of scientists around the world planet are missing or overlooking the conclusion is that there is no study on a lectin-free diet because there is no lectin-free diet, we will always have lectins in our diet because they are ubiquitous in nature, we all have lectins yes We are trying to argue that lectins are the cause of our inflammation, our weight gain, our leaky gut.

Unfortunately, what happened here is that we see that the studies are being cherry-picked, but all the weight of the evidence when we look at the big ones. Picture Jonathan, the bottom line is that the evidence does not support this and, as I have pointed out, neither does logic. Unfortunately, this is yet another example of select science being bad, misleading science, now that we know these foods are beans, whole grains. and like other foods that contain elant, not only are they perfectly safe but they are actually good for you, we don't need less, we need more, but at the same time what we have pointed out is that some people get symptoms with foods that contain lectin and it's probably not lectin, there could be another explanation, it may be something like fod Maps, which we will certainly discuss in another episode of the podcast.

Well thank you very much. I think your position is clear and clearly very strong. You've definitely made it clear. a lot of confusion for me and I hope for our listeners. Thank you so much if you've heard this and would like to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program to find out how you can adjust what you eat, maybe have more of those lectins. that contain food, then you can learn more about it and get a 10% discount by visiting the zoe.com podcast. I'm Jonathan Wolf and I'll be joining us next week for another Zoe podcast.