Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long happy life.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Popcorn, it’s often hailed as a tasty and healthy snack perfect for movie nights, but I’m here to burst that bubble. What you think is a harmless treat could be doing more harm than good. As a former popcorn super fan, sorry to break it to you, but popcorn is one of the worst choices you can make for your health. In this episode, I’ll explain why from inflammatory proteins to glyphosate, but don’t worry if you love popcorn or other lectin rich foods, I’ll share simple strategies to reduce their negative effects. You don’t have to give up your favorite snacks to protect your health. There are smarter choices to be made, so let’s dive in. At some point, you’ve probably been told like I was, that popcorn is a healthy light snack and that it can even help with weight loss. There’s even an entire section in Sprouts with healthy popcorn options. Let’s take a look at what’s really in a bowl of popcorn. First of all, it’s made from corn of course. Now, corn is sadly one of the highest lectin containing foods there are.
In fact, in my patients, 70% of my patients who have leaky gut have antibodies to the various proteins in corn, 70%, and no the lectins in corn can’t be pressure cooked, they’re actually resistant to heat. Now, I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, which at the time I was living there, had the claim to fame as having the world’s largest stockyards. Yes, I know it’s a great claim to fame. Why did we have stockyards? Because Nebraska not only is the corn husker state, but we’re also the beef state. We fattened cows with corn. The stockyards were where we put the cows and fed them corn to fatten them up so that they could reach market weight faster. Take a tip from this Nebraska kid. You use corn to fatten animals and we use corn to fatten you. Don’t do it. Well, if you want to gain weight, then eat your corn and your popcorn. Now, here’s probably the worst part of corn.
95% of all corn grown in the United States is genetically modified, and there’s a genetically modified protein in corn called the cry protein that you and I and our immune system have never ever seen before 20 years ago. It did not exist. It is a foreign compound and since 95% of corn in the United States contains this rogue protein, you are exposed to a splinter that you have no understanding of. Here’s the bad news. Why is 95% of corn GMO? Well, it’s for that because you can spray corn with Roundup. The active ingredient is glyphosate and the corn will tolerate it, but the weeds will be killed off. But bad news, plants are really smart. Just like we know bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics, plants can develop resistance to herbicides, and so we actually have an ongoing war. Most weeds that were initially killed by Roundup have mutated and are now resistant to Roundup, so what’s the treatment for that? If you guessed spray more Roundup, you’re absolutely correct. We keep spraying all of our corn with more and more Roundup.
So what? The FDA says that Roundup is safe because it doesn’t hurt humans. Not so fast. Roundup works by killing plants because it interrupts their system of making proteins called the shikimate pathway. You and I don’t have the shikimate pathway, but bacteria do. In fact, glyphosate was actually first patented as an antibiotic. Sadly, Roundup is on the corn you eat, it’s not washed off. It’s fed to the animals that you eat and it’s incorporated into their flesh like chickens or cows or pigs. It’s in the corn products you eat and corn products are ubiquitous. Sadly, if you actually look, we can actually… Corn has a specific signature, genetic signature, and we can look at the amount of corn in you and me. And the average American is anywhere from 70 to 90% corn proteins. That’s really scary. But back to Roundup. Roundup kills off friendly bacteria in our gut. It kills off the tryptophan pathway bacteria that makes serotonins the feel-good hormones.
In one of my books, I show that glyphosate interferes with mitochondrial function. Of course it does because mitochondria are actually engulfed bacteria. I recently posted an entire episode on the dangers of glyphosate, so please go educate yourself. Now, what about non-GMO corn and popcorn? Well, it really doesn’t mean anything since corn by itself has these dangerous lectins and it’s really good for fattening animals including you. Now, what about movie popcorn or pop your own popcorn or the ones that you buy in the stores? The liquid butter at movie theaters, run this stuff is incredibly toxic oil. It’s not butter. Most popcorn kernels are coated in incredibly toxic oils including sunflower seed oil, peanut oil and corn oil. Great, more corn. Now, these vegetable oils are unlike anything our ancestors ever consumed, and they require extensive processing to make them actually edible. Now, these are called polyunsaturated fatty acids, and these are mostly omega-6 fatty acids.
And they really have no business being in our diet. They really interfere with mitochondrial function. How bad are these oils? Well, Cate Shanahan, an expert on the subject, says that a five ounce servings of french fries cooked in these vegetable oils has toxins equivalent to smoking 20 to 25 cigarettes. In fact, I actually have a whole episode right here on this channel, so please go watch it. Now, one last thing that’s worth mentioning is recently I’ve started writing about the aquaporins in corn. Aquaporins are another class of lectins that I didn’t want to warn you about before because I didn’t want to have even more widespread panic. But aquaporins, are we can develop antibodies to aquaporins, corn contains an aquaporin, and sadly I can measure anti-aquaporin antibodies in the brains of many of my patients who have leaky gut and leaky brain and who have issues with memory and brain fog, so aquaporins are in corn. Please stay away from corn.
All right, you got to have your popcorn, I get it. There’s an alternative to popcorn corn and that’s popped sorghum. Sorghum has no lectins, it has no hulls. Now you can make it at home or you can buy some from Nature Nates. It’s a brand I actually really like. Now, just a heads-up, the kernels are much smaller than popcorn, but it looks like popcorn. It smells like popcorn, it tastes like popcorn. It’s just baby little popcorn. Now, here’s the problem. It’s not a complete health food replacement. There are seven grams of carbohydrates in a half a cup of popped sorghum. That’s about two teaspoons of sugar. Plus, every time you pop a grain, no matter what it is, you expose it to rapid digestion and it turns into sugar very quickly, so it can be a problem. I’ve tested myself with popped sorghum.
I ate a cup of popped sorghum as my snack before dinner for a couple of weeks, and then I check my triglyceride level. Triglycerides are the first form of fat that we make from sugar and starches, and lo and behold, my triglycerides jumped up just from the fact that I was eating this healthy popped sorghum. What do you do? First of all, don’t overdo it. Number two, pour olive oil over your half cup of popped sorghum and eat it with a spoon. Use the popped sorghum as a delivery device to get olive oil into your mouth. It’s delicious. Finally, next time you go to the movie or even think about heading to the theater, take that snack, popped sorghum along. You won’t miss your popcorn anymore. Well, I’ve gotten a ton of recent subscribers to this channel over the last few months, so today I want to welcome you who are new, but I want to get back to some basics. And one of the biggest questions, particularly for you newbies are, what the heck are lectins? And why should I be worried about them?
Now, welcome. I am of course known for lectins, but if you’ve never heard of them or why you ought to be interested in them, this is for you. And if you know all about them, stick around, you might learn some more fun facts. All right, so what the heck are lectins? Lectins are proteins that are used by plants and actually also animals as a defense system. Plants were here first. They had it great before animals arrived because quite frankly, no one wanted to eat them. Now, when animals arrived and insects were the first animals, plant predators, plants couldn’t run, they couldn’t hide, they couldn’t fight. But their chemists of incredible ability, so they use chemical biological warfare to convince an animal that it might not be a good idea to eat them or their babies, their seeds, and they have multiple defense mechanisms. They make lectins as one of those. But there are others. Many of you’re familiar with oxalates, which is another plant defense mechanism. There are tannins, there are glycosides. We could go on and on, but I became fascinated with lectins because lectins are proteins that are sugar molecule seeking proteins.
They are specifically looking for classes of sugar molecules, which are called sialic acids. Now, don’t let the word acid fool you. These are sugar molecules. They’re sometimes called glycans. We have these sugar molecules in the lining of our gut wall. We have these sugar molecules in the lining of our blood vessels. We have them lining our blood brain barrier. We have them lining our joint surfaces, and we even have them in our myelin sheath, the insulation around nerves. And we have them in the space where one nerve talks to the next nerve and that space is full of the sugar molecules. Okay, so what? Well, the evidence is, and the evidence is actually very impressive, that lectins are designed by the plant to try to attach to the sugar molecules. And in beautiful work done by the pediatric gastroenterologist, Dr. Alessio Fisano, who’s now at Harvard, he’s shown that the lectin gluten, yes, gluten is a lectin, wants to attach to the wall of your gut and make a compound called zonulin.
Zonulin then attaches to another receptor and it breaks the tight junctions that hold the wall of our gut together. And when those tight junctions are broken, we now have a gap in the wall of your gut separating everything that you swallowed in all your microbiome from you. And through that gap lectins can get through which are foreign proteins. And lectins can bind to sugar molecules in the wall of your blood vessel, in your joints, in your blood brain barrier, in your myelin sheath, and literally act like a splinter. And if anyone’s ever gotten a splinter under their finger or their skin, they know it gets all red. That red is inflammation. That’s your white blood cells attacking that foreign body. And that same process takes place. And that’s why lectins are so mischievous. Why would a plant do this? Well, from a plant logic, if that animal that’s eating plants or plant babies that have lectins and that animal feels bad, if that animal hurts, if that animal can’t move, then that animal learns very rapidly not to eat those plants or that plant baby.
In fact, we think that lectins were originally designed to paralyze the insect by binding to the nerve junctions and the insect couldn’t move. We know that plants, when an insect is eating on one part of a tree, produce lots and lots of lectins very rapidly within a few minutes on the other side of the tree just to get ready for that insect, so this is a plant system protecting against predation. Now, the reason I got so interested in it is my research as an undergraduate at Yale was on the foods that our ancient ancestors ate. And one of the things that was startling was that no human being actually ate grains or beans until about 12,000 years ago during the agricultural revolution. And what’s interesting is grains and beans are two of the largest sources of lectins in our diet. And human beings were actually about six feet tall up until agriculture started, and we actually shrunk about a foot in 2000 years after agriculture started just once again shows you the devastating effect of lectins in our diet.
Now, we’ve been eating these things for a long time. Another class of lectins came from the new world. Now believe it or not, all of us were originally from Asia, Africa or Europe, even Native Americans were actually from Asia. And so none of us were exposed to new world plants until about 500 years ago when Columbus started Colombian trade. And it just so happens there are multiple new world plants like corn, like quinoa, like the nightshade family, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, potatoes, which we had never encountered as a species until 500 years ago. And getting to know those new plants, those new lectins in 500 years is like speed dating and evolution. And so many of our common foods have these lectins in them, and that’s why the more we can avoid these or more importantly learn how to detoxify them by fermentation, by pressure-cooking, the better off we’re going to be.
Now, many people say, well now hold on. There are cultures that eat beans, that eat grains and whole beans and grains are great for you. And they don’t seem to have any problem. What gives? Well, if you look at those cultures, one of the things that’s remarkable is things that I call the deadly disruptors happened to us beginning about 50 years ago. The biggest deadly disruptor were broad-spectrum antibiotics. There were no broad-spectrum antibiotics until the 1970s. They were introduced when I was in medical school. Broad-spectrum antibiotics are miraculous, but we had no idea they actually killed off our gut microbiome. So what? We have a major defense system against plant lectins, and that is our gut microbiome actually enjoys eating plant lectins. They were designed to eat them. There are actually gluten-eating bacteria. There are actually oxalate-eating bacteria and it makes sense. A plant has a system of defense and an animal has a system of defense, and you’ve basically got balance of powers.
We’ve unfortunately knocked out that system of defense. We used to have a lot of acid in our stomach and acid breaks down proteins. Now the most widely purchased product in pharmacies are acid-reducing drugs, so we’ve lost that protection. Third, biggest selling pharmaceutical are NSAIDs, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents. These are literally like swallowing hand grenades. They produce holes in the wall of your gut that these compounds can then go through starting inflammation. And study after study shows that the more NSAIDs you take, the more pain you will have that will make you take more NSAIDs, that will cause more damage to the wall of your gut and it’s a perpetual cycle, so these are part of the deadly disruptors. Finally, I can’t miss telling you about Roundup whose active ingredient is glyphosate. It’s only been around 50 years. We had no idea that glyphosate kills off bacteria in your gut and glyphosate in and of itself can cause leaky gut.
We have had unfortunately our entire defense against lectins destroyed by our modern lifestyle. And when I see patients in my office, one of the fascinating things is we can actually measure people’s antibodies to lectins like gluten, like wheat, germagluten, and multiple other lectins. And it’s amazing that all of my patients have these antibodies, so it’s a real thing. It’s not conjecture on my part. It’s been proven by Dr. Fasano over and over again. That’s why lectins are so mischievous and that’s why I spend so much time teaching you either how to avoid them, where they’re hiding or how to detoxify them. And that’s it for today.
Now it’s time for the review of the week. Happy Nun gives a review on Apple Podcasts, “I’ve been trying to follow your food program for four years. Reading your informative books and listening to your intriguing podcasts have helped me keep me on track. Though I fall off the wagon occasionally, the consequences push me back up. In the first three months of following the yes-no list, I lost 30 pounds. In six months, the constant arthritis pain in my hands disappeared. I’ve not had a sinus infection in those four years. Whenever I stray from this diet, the arthritis pain returns as does bloating and weight gain. I’ve shared this good news with family and friends. I have a few questions. First question. I put a tablespoon of non-alkalized cocoa powder in my morning coffee, but nothing else. Does the cocoa break my fast?” No, it doesn’t. In fact, I do the exact same thing.
“My last question is about spirulina. Does it deplete the body of B vitamins?” No. Good question though. “Thank you Dr. G for restoring good health to so many people. Well, thank you very much from Happy Nun.” This is why I do this. This is why I keep seeing patients six days a week, even on the weekends. And this is why I do the Dr. Gundry podcast and write my books to give you the information I’ve acquired from my patients for the last 25 years. And I’m going to keep doing it. Now it’s time for the question of the week. The question of the week comes from @constanzaocampo5910 on my popcorn YouTube video. They said about nixtamalized corn, “Could you talk about its benefits and or potential health risks of eating it on a regular basis, tortillas, tostadas?” Well, great question. Traditionally, corn was always treated with lye or lime juice to break down the hall and bind niacin.
And in that way it was a much safer form to eat because much of the mischief of corn, like other grains is in the hall. And the other big mischief-maker in corn is that it will deplete your body storage of niacin if you don’t treat it with lye. Having said that, there is nixtamalized corn available. It’s usually called masa harina, and you can also use pasole, which is the same thing, but before it’s ground up. Finally, I have a number of my patients who are metabolically inflexible, who are pre-diabetic or diabetic who have high insulin levels. And unfortunately corn, even in its better form, is still basically pure sugar, so eater beware.
Speaker 1:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.
