The surprising truth about lectins | Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

[Music] hello and welcome to Zoe shorts the bite-size podcast where we discuss one topic around science and nutrition I'm Jonathan wolf and today I'm joined by Dr will bwitch and today's subject is lectins recently Jonathan lectin came under attack a popular book made many people fearful and as a result some people believe that lectin are toxic and inflammatory causing weight gain and leaky gut syndrome so that sounds terrifying well so what are lectins and are they dangerous or is this another food myth well this is what we're going to find out Jonathan okay well let's get to [Music] it to start lectin are a type of anti-nutrient these are compounds that make it hard for your body to use other nutrients properly but some anti-nutrients actually have beneficial effects okay that's pretty confusing will uh an anti- Neutron doesn't sound like anything that I would like to have and I'm excited to take a closer look at the world of lecton now just before we begin I have a favor to ask 63% of people that watch this podcast haven't hit the Subscribe button and 11% of you haven't hit the Bell to turn notifications on 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 you ever enjoyed this podcast please hit the Subscribe button and turn notifications on doing us a small favor will really help thank [Music] you so will you said lectins are a type of anti-nutrient now anti- nutren that sounds a little bit scary to me that's completely understandable Jonathan but there's nothing to fear my friend we're here to explain all of this anti-nutrients are compounds that can interfere with your body ability to use the nutrients that you consume in your diet and they can come in many forms um they could be drugs proteins chemicals in your food amazingly some nutrients can actually act as anti-nutrients so well I'm just getting more confused is this yet another one of these scientific words designed to baffle me and everybody else listening to this I think the answer is in the Nuance Jonathan um because although anti-nutrients can interfere with your body's processing of Nutri an first of all you're likely to destroy most of them when you cook your food and um when they are present they're usually present in such small quantities that they actually help your body to maintain a nutritional balance it's like having Brakes in your car you don't want to be all gas all the time you want the ability to slow things down sometimes so so don't be put off by the scary name an anti-nutrient they're actually highly unlikely to harm your health when they're eaten as a part of a normal diet well I'm glad that we've cleared that up so you were just explaining that lectins are a type of antinutrient can you tell me more about these things yeah let's dig into lectin a little bit so the lectins these scary things that we've heard about these are proteins um that are known to bind carbohydrates and you'll you'll find them everywhere in nature so both animals and plants have lectin and those lectin play a role in their physiology the way their Body Works um you'll find them in bacteria fungi unicellular organisms I mean basically your microbi iome you know the bottom line Jonathan is this I have lectin you have lectin we all have lectin well now I feel glad to be invited to the lectin party I'm feeling a lot less scared than now I know I'm full of them where else do we find them well we wouldn't be discussing them if they if if they weren't also in our food of course uh you'll find them disproportionately represented in certain specific food groups for example whole grains legumes um many fruits certain nuts and seeds uh some dairy products and then the night shade vegetables and those are we've we've discussed these in a prior podcast episode for those who are interested but those are tomatoes potatoes eggplant bell peppers and Chili Peppers so hang on a minute will because we started off saying like our lectin is really bad for you and now you've listed like this long list of food that sound like basically the list of really healthy foods everyone's been told they should eat so why are people suddenly kicking up this big fuss and saying actually lectins might be terrible for us this is exactly the point Jonathan which is that these healthy foods like beans and whole grains that I mean frankly these have been the staple of the healthiest diets around the world for hundreds of years and then Here Comes This popular claim out of nowhere that these lectin are causing inflammation and waking and weaky gut syndrome so is there much truth to these claims is I guess the obvious question okay let's get this out of the way um because we do need to unpack this it is true that if lectins are consumed in excessive amounts like not smly excessive like massively excessive amounts they can cause food poisoning and there are actually several reports of this happening I'm glad you mentioned this because actually our our team here at Zoe led by yel have done uh some great research and have managed to pull up a couple of bizarre cases that I have to share so for example they Unearthed a very unusual event at a British Hospital back in the 1980s involved red kidney beans can you tell us a bit more will this was not a great moment for the NHS Jonathan in 1988 a uh a British hospital um was having healthy eating day and someone brought to this potlock a special lunch that included undercooked red kidney beans and so one medical journal this was actually written up um they noted that by 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 over the next several hours the hospital staff were struck by an EP epidemic of vomiting and diarrhea basically ripping through the the hospital staff everyone who attended this potluck launch anyway um in case anyone's having their dinner I guess I'll just leave it there so now this doesn't sound great and I think our team found another case in Japan P involving white kidney beans is that right yes indeed uh this is the infamous white kidney bean incident um as it's popularly referred in academic circles so this was actually much more recently this was in 2006 and um the J it was brought on by a Japanese television station and they did something that I I don't really know how else to say this um it was dumb what they did was very dumb they they um encouraged their viewers to consume powdered white kidney beans okay so uncooked powdered white kidney beans like like grinding them up in a spice grinder or a coffee grinder anyway um the viewers many of them got sick and more than a thousand people ended up causing the television station angry and with an upset tummy so like nausea vomiting and diarrhea so you know forgive me will because you were saying I don't really think it's is such a big deal but that sounds pretty bad both these examples PS and I thought you were really trying to defend lectin we will get to that Jonathan and I understand this does sound slightly scary that's that's understandable but um in both of these cases there's some things that we need to observe so first of all the beans were not cooked in either case right this is inappropriate cooking of the beans and I don't know about you Jonathan but like for me I I tend to prefer my beans cooked um if if you've ever tried to chew an uncooked Bean it's not a good time and there's a high probability of of chipping your teeth or losing a tooth um so you know that's just me but anyway it's also really important to acknowledge that this is two case reports from the last 40 years you know and um and nobody became seriously ill so among these two incidents like basically everyone recovered by the next day people were expected to come back to work at the hospital the next day hi I want to take a quick break now back in March last year we created this podcast to uncover the latest science can help us all live longer and healthier lives now if you don't have hundreds of hours to spare not to worry at the request of many of you our team has created an amazing guide summarizing the top 10 most impactful discoveries that you could apply to your life and you can get it for free simply go to zoe.com sfree guu or click the link in the show notes and please let me know what you think of it okay back to the show so so help me to understand what's happening to these lectins as they um you know start with this sort of you know raw like let's take a bean as example and then they become cooked yeah this is a really important and fundamental point which is that simply cooking your beans can dramatically reduce the lectin content of them so basically cooking deactivates lectins which is the reason that routine consumption of cooked beans does not cause people to get sick with lectin poisoning like you really don't have to worry about this so kidney beans are toxic if consume them raw which of course nobody does but proper cooking neutralizes those lectin makes the kidney beans or any other type of beans safe to consume and not only safe but I mean frankly like amazingly beneficial so I just one quick point on this I just want to add that if you buy canned beans you notice that those canned beans are rather soft and that's because they've already been cooked so there's no need to worry about lectin and canned beans either it's really interesting CU I mean I didn't grow up eating a lot of um beans I think in general I didn't grow up with with a very high fiber diet but we certainly had potatoes um and I was definitely you know brought up to understand that you can't eat a raw potato you need to cook it um and so I guess this is just another example of the way in which cooking really changes sort of the chemical structure of the food and it can turn something that's not safe for us into something that's safe for us or in some cases you can cook it for so long that you lose a lot of the nutrients and it may not be unsafe but you're also potentially lose so so the point is um you can't compare raw and cooked always in in the same way yeah that's a really interesting point uh cooking is changing the properties of our food it is a form of food processing it's not ultr processed but it is a form of food processing and um actually Studies have shown there was a study at the University of California San Francisco that by taking literally the exact same food and cooking it that it actually can have a differential effect on the microbiome amazing so the message I'm hearing so far is cook your beans or buy canned beans which are already been cooked so that's pretty simple what other research has been done so far on lectin well Jonathan as with you know so many dietary fads or scary stories um it's hard to uh keep up with the way in which the hype is getting away from us with large scale scientific studies looking at something like a lectin-free diet and I know that again the team here at Zoe was looking into some of the research on lectins and actually most of this has been carried out in test tubes and on rats rather than actually on people is is that right will yeah that's exactly correct and and this is a really important Point um so when these experiments are being carried out you know in essence what they're doing is they're taking some completely unnatural concentration of these lectins and you know this sort of setup uh can give results that would suggest that lectins cause inflammation or leaky got but there's a few problems that we need to acknowledge so first of all these these studies they don't translate well to humans I mean the bottom line is like we are not test tubes or rats um we're much more complicated than these things and you know the second thing is that for every study that says that lectin are dangerous there are at least as many studies that say that they're beneficial for example there's numerous studies suggesting that lectin protect us from cancer or heart disease these are our top killers we want to protect ourselves from these and lectin actually can help so fundamentally these test tube and animal studies are like they're just not showing us what happens when real people eat real food which is what we care about Jonathan at Zoe uh that that we want to understand like 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 lectin in the context of like real food that actual human beings eat I mentioned that you'll find a lot of lectin in foods like legumes um this gives me a great opportunity to talk about one of my favorite foods which are these legumes and the studies that we have to back them up so well what I love about you is that you could have a favorite legume study um and I guess you wouldn't be on the Zoe podcast if you didn't have a favorite legume study so tell us about it I fully acknowledge that I am a nerd this is not a mystery or secret um so we hear from the the lectin phobes that we should avoid legumes because lectins cause things like inflammation on weight gain so here's what I would propose for a study this is a randomized controlled trial of a legume packed diet like a high legume diet versus a diet with no legumes and importantly the researchers held the number of calories completely constant so basically what we're looking at here has nothing to do with whether you're eating more calories or less calories it's purely are you consuming more legumes or no legumes here's what they saw and this is like amazing and kind of shocking so on this High legume diet lots of beans and lentils they found that the C reactive protein which is a marker of inflammation dropped not by 5% or 10% or even 25% it dropped by 40% 40% this is a really big number wow 40% dropped their inflammation marker simultan iously their blood pressure and their cholesterol also dropped but the most fascinating part I haven't even mentioned yet which is that the people on the high legume diet lost more weight and this is despite the fact that they were eating the same number of calories it is not just calories so that's amazing um and actually what you're saying is in this situation the you know the diet with the higher amount of lectins actually led to lower information um so that's pretty good news it sounds like for fans of lectins and fans for you know beans and lenal because I don't think anyone other than scientist talks about legumes I've ever met um what else have scientists leared from uh the legions of legume research that is going on I mean this is just one study you know it may be my favorite study but there's tons of research on the benefits of legumes in particular and so a notable uh discovery that's been found is that people who consume more legumes they they can more effectively lose weight they have better blood sugar control they're therefore less likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes the science also shows a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and col rectal cancer so well you're making a pretty strong case for legumes they're sounding pretty good for us now there's also a whole lot of lectins in other foods like whole grains right yeah and we've been focusing on the legumes quite a bit but this is also uh important and true and so let's take a look at whole grains in one study they showed that by increasing your daily consumption of whole grains by just two pieces of whole grain bread they actually rewarded those participants with a lower risk of coronary heart disease low likelihood of death from cardiovascular disease low likelihood of diagnosis of cancer even a lower likelihood of death from all causes death from respiratory diseases death from infectious diseases ler likelihood of type 2 diabetes and ler likelihood of death from all non-cardiovascular non-cancer causes which is a huge category but also quite important so I have a message to all the lectin haters Mike drop there we go and that's from eating more whole grained bread which I would never have put even that high on the list of what you might want to eat so that is definitely you sort of waving the lectin flag ferociously um now the team um here at Zoe also looked into some of these studies and it seems that you know in general people are going into these consuming quite really quite small amounts of grains and legumes so um is it possible that actually everyone listening to this in general they're probably consuming you know a lower amount of lectins than maybe um they would be if they were in in these studies with these health benefits that's right Jonathan you know people uh who are following a Zoe lifestyle they may be higher in eltin consumption but let's take a look at what's really happening out there one study suggested that 98% of Americans are actually deficient in their whole grain consumption meanwhile the average American is consuming only 6 PBS or 2.7 kilos of beans per year so if you get nerdy which as I mentioned earlier I specialize in this this means that you're consuming only 2 ounces of beans per week that's nothing and if we pause for a second you know let's just think about this the anti-lectin club is claiming that this is the cause of all of our problems this is the cause of our inflammation and our weight gain and our gut issues we've already discussed the science doesn't support this now I'm showing you the logic doesn't support this either so that's what the current diet of people in the US is looking like is there any research other than on rats and in testes that suggest that we feel better on low lectin diet we have to understand these are highly exclusionary diets which actually make it difficult for people to consume enough calories on a daily basis so the result of this you know if you're on a super restricted diet then people will in the beginning lose weight that's what they seen but there's no evidence that this has anything to do with lectins and as for people who claim significant improvements by reducing lectins there's a couple things that this could be and I think that are just kind of like very clear to me first this could be a placebo effect um or it could also be the result of excluding something other than lectins such as fod Maps after all our food is not just a big bag of lectins like it's nutritionally complex and there can definitely be something else in our food that's causing our our symptoms and I think there's a study that sort of gives us some insight into this around gluten is that right will 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 it is this is the most famous of the eltin it's something it's a lectin that has a star in the lectin Hall of Fame so consider another randomized control trial in which researchers gave people the the the people that they were studying by the way they had gluten sensitivity okay these are people who report that they are sensitive to gluten and they gave them an oatmeal bar that they would consume every day for a week so just a plain simple oatmeal bar or is there some sort of sciency twist here of course there's some sort of sciency twist here so um concealed within this oatmeal bar they snuck in one of three things gluten fru Tans which I'll explain in a moment or a placebo that was sugar you got to watch out for these sciency researchers slipping you oatmeal bars clearly you don't know what they're like smuggling in underneath the outs I love it they do sound a little bit sketchy but thankfully we have uh institutional review boards to ensure that they do have ethical standards um and you know and the study actually serves a really important purpose which of course all studies should so we're trying to understand like what is the role of gluten in these people that have gluten sensitivity so now I mentioned fru Tans which is one of the things that was um hidden Within These oatmeal bars fructans are short chain carbohydrates that you that you'll actually find in gluten containing foods like wheat barley and Rye so like wheat barley and Rye contain both gluten and also fru Tans so they're actually a type of fod map and so every person was exposed to a different bar after taking a break for a week to let his or her symptoms settle down so basically like everyone is getting a chance with each one of these three bars and during the week that they're consuming These Bars they measured digestive symptoms um to see like how are you feeling bloating gas abdominal pain diarrhea constipation how are you feeling so everybody got these three bars one with just like some sugar in it one with the gluten which is this lectin that you're talking about the super lectin and one with the fructan so what did they find okay I love this this is one of my favorite findings in a study so when you compare to Placebo because of course the placebo is the standard that we're going to compare to the patients who were consuming the gluten containing bar actually had less symptoms let me say that again they had less symptoms with the gluten containing bar and more symptoms with a placebo these are people that have gluten sensitivity and the placebo is causing more symptoms than the gluten now when they ate the fructan containing bar they were triggered and they had a massive increase in their digestive symptoms there was clearly something going on there so in other words these people who have gluten sensitivity in this study it wasn't gluten they're actually sensitive to fructans it's a fructan sensitivity which is a form of a FODMAP intolerance and so your conclusion there is actually the lectins aren't the issue at all for these people and it's something else completely in this food that was causing the the the problem that's exactly right so when you eat these Foods weat barley and Rye you get symptoms you attribute those symptoms the gluten you say I have gluten sensitivity when in fact we are misattributing the symptoms it's not the gluten it is the fructans that also are in the we B in right so will when I wrap all of this up together and you've given us a wonderful tour of some quite fun um scientific experiments you despite the strange events of the white kidney bean Saga in Japan and the healthy eating day in that hospital in 1988 it seems to me like lectin sound pretty safe you know as long as I don't eat my beans uncooked is that the right verdict yeah I think I think that you got it right Jonathan it's actually that simple and um you know I I I get a little bit emotional about this topic uh and a little worked up about it in case people couldn't tell during our conversation and that's because it really bothers me because Along Comes a fad diet that breeds misinformation on the topic of lectins and it leads to scare mongering and we're scaring people away from foods that we're already under consuming and that we need more of and so I just you know I I I feel like this is an opportunity to make a public service announcement to say that we just need to be careful when we hear people making statements like everything you thought you knew is wrong or when we see a person and they may have an MD or a PhD after their name but they are a lone wolf and they are out there claiming that all the other MDS and phds got it wrong and they have discovered the the the solution that millions of scientists across the planet are missing or overlooking the bottom line is this there is no study on lectin-free diet because a lectin-free diet doesn't exist we will always have lectin in our diet that's because they are ubiquitous in nature we all have lectin if you're trying to make an argument that lectin are the cause of our inflammation our weight gain our leaky gut you know sadly what's happened here is we see that studies are being cherry-picked but the entire weight of the evidence when we look at the big picture Jonathan the bottom line is that the evidence does not support this and as I've pointed out neither does the logic this is yet sadly another example of where cherry-picked science is bad science misleading science now we know that these Foods beans whole grains and like other elant containing foods not only are they perfectly safe they're 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 do get symptoms with lectin containing foods and it's likely not to be the lectin there could be another explanation it may be something like fod Maps which we will certainly discuss in another podcast episode well thank you so much I think your your position is clear and clearly very strong you've definitely cleared up a lot of confusion for me and I hope for our listeners thank you very much if you've listened to this and you'd like to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program to find out how you could adjust what you eat maybe have more of those lectin containing foods then you can learn more about it and get 10% off by going to zoe.com podcast I'm Jonathan wolf and I'm will bz join us next week for another Zoe podcast [Music] w

Channel: ZOE

Views: 269,782

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, lectins, will bulsiewicz, fibre, fiber, gut healthy foods

Id: KPKPBudFjsA

Length: 26min 44sec (1604 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2023