Yes/No Food List Transcript

– Let’s talk about my yes and no food list. We’re dedicating a whole episode of my latest yes-no food list, because with each new book, it’s tweaked or fine-tuned, as I like to say, based on my latest scientific findings, both in researching the literature and in the findings with my own patients. As you may remember, I continue to see patients six days a week, even on the weekends. Now, if you’ve ever read my first book, “Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution,” which is closing in on 20 years old, then you know that that list has evolved quite drastically since then. That list included soy and a lot of other things that are now on my no list. But before we look at the new updates in my latest book, “Gut Check,” I wanna step back and explain why and how I chose most of the no foods. First of all, lectins. What the heck are lectins? First of all, lectins are proteins. They are proteins that are used by plants in general as a defense mechanism against either personally being eaten or having their seeds, their babies, being eaten. And when animals arrived on earth, plants had been here a long time. And quite frankly, plants had a garden of Eden. Nobody wanted to eat them. When animals arrived, plants had a problem. They couldn’t run, they couldn’t hide, they couldn’t fight. But they were chemists of incredible ability. So they developed chemical biologic warfare to make animals do their bidding and to make animals think twice about eating them or their seeds. And one of the systems are lectins. So lectins are proteins and lectins are sugar molecule-seeking proteins, and they’re actually after specific sugar molecules. These sugar molecules are in general called sialic acid. These sugar molecules line the surface of our gut, line the surface of our nose, our throat, our lungs. They line the surface of our joints. They line the surface of our blood vessels. They form the blood brain barrier. And they have incorporation in the spaces where nerves talk to each other and they’re incorporated in the myelin sheath, the insulation around nerves. So they’re all over the place. In fact, we think that since insects were the first plant predator, that plants used lectins to paralyze insects. After all, if the insect couldn’t move, it’s not a very good predator. Now, lectins, as proven by Dr. Alessio Fasano, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Harvard, are one of the main ways of producing intestinal permeability, leaky gut. And he’s shown, and I’ve certainly shown in my patients, that lectins are incredibly effective at producing leaky gut, at breaking the tight junctions that form the barrier between you and the things you eat and your microbiome. Now, this is not the purpose of this lecture to tell you any more than that. But lectins have been known about for a long time. They were actually discovered in the late 1800s. And to this day, lectins are used for blood typing and lectins can agglutinate red blood cells, make them stick together. In fact, wheat germ agglutinin, one of the lectins outside of wheat, is actually used to cause agglutination of red blood cells. Also, if you’ve read “Gut Check,” you know that wheat germ agglutinin binds to the lining of your blood vessels and literally acts like a splinter, since it’s a foreign object, and your white blood cells attack it. Think about that the next time you’re having your whole wheat bread. Now, one of the things that really amazed me early on is I had a patient who I refer to as Tony, who had vitiligo, and I’ve written about Tony a lot. In fact, I just talked to Tony today. Tony is a good looking guy, but he had pretty bad vitiligo on his hands and also some on his face. Tony was seeing me for other reasons. But after starting on my program, after several months, Tony’s vitiligo got better and better and better and eventually disappeared. And when he came back and showed me that, he said, “What the heck?” You know, “What’s that all about?” And I’m going, “Well, you know, you’re eating a very anti-inflammatory diet and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I went, “Wait a minute. That’s not a good enough reason.” Well, it turns out that the pigment-containing cells in our skin are called melanocytes, and melanocytes have melanin. And when you get a suntan, that melanin gets activated, and that’s why you get a suntan. Melanin, these melanocytes, are actually nerve cells that migrate out of our spinal cord as an embryo and go to our skin. And I said, wait a minute, they’re nerve cells. And this is what lectins target. So Tony, and many of my other patients, were with vitiligo, were merely targeting their nerve cells as an autoimmune condition. And removing lectins from Tony’s diet and stopping his leaky gut and stopping lectins from getting into his system, he was no longer attacking his nerve cells, the melanocytes in his skin. And I’ve seen many, many patients through the years. And that was one of my real aha moments that said, “Son of a gun. This isn’t just conjecture, this is the real thing.” Now people ask, “Is there a list of the most lectin-rich foods?” No, there isn’t. We know which foods have more lectins. We know which foods have less lectins. And we also know that way long time ago, we used to have a defense system against lectins in our microbiome. There are a lot of our gut buddies that like to eat lectin-containing foods. There’s believe it or not, gluten-eating bacteria. There are oxalate-eating bacteria. Unfortunately, as I’ve written about in all my books, one of the seven deadly disruptors is the use of antibiotics, broad spectrum antibiotics that we take, that we feed our animals, and 70% of all the antibiotics produced in the United States are fed to animals to fatten them up. And those antibiotics are in us, and those kill off our protective gut microbiome. So that’s just one of the factors why we’re far more sensitive to lectins in plants than we were 50 years ago when broad spectrum antibiotics came out. Now let’s move on to why the yes and no food lists change, often with every one of my books. There are a class of lectins that I decided not to write about when I wrote “The Plant Paradox,” because it’s bad enough me telling you where all these lectin-containing foods are and what lectins they contain. But there’s a class of lectins that are called aquaporins, and I finally decided, because it was time, to tell you about aquaporins. Now, many of you who had high school biology may remember that plants breathe through pores in their leaves and they move water vapor in and out through these pores, and they move oxygen out of their pores and carbon dioxide in. They’re carbon dioxide sinks. Those pores are controlled by a protein called an aquaporin. Water pour, get it? Plants also have aquaporins in their stems and their roots to move water, and they’re basically locks in a canal. It turns out that you and I have aquaporins in the wall of our gut. We have them in our blood-brain barrier. We have them in our brain, and we have them in our myelin sheath, that insulation. Now it turns out that some of us can develop antibodies to certain aquaporins in plants. Now where are they? Well, the ones that we test for, that we can measure, are mostly in the nightshades, including tobacco, bell peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, but also in soybeans, corn, and are you ready for this? Spinach. Many of my patients with multiple sclerosis, MS, happen to have antibodies to the spinach aquaporin. And a number of them are big time spinach eaters. A number of my patients with irritable bladder are sensitive to the aquaporins in these foods. So a number of my patients with autoimmune conditions besides MS, like psoriasis, like rheumatoid arthritis, like Sjogren’s Syndrome, like Hashimoto’s, are sensitive to these aquaporins. So my advice to you, like I talk about in “Gut Check,” is that if you have an autoimmune condition, you should ditch these aquaporin-containing foods, and that means spinach as well. Sorry. Now, sadly, I have yet to find a paper that says pressure cooking will destroy aquaporins. So that means that regular lectins are usually in the peel and the seeds of these various products. And for most people, peeling and deseeding a tomato, peeling and deseeding a bell pepper, will make them in general safe. But if you react to the aquaporins in these foods, you can’t even have peeled and deseeded peppers or tomatoes or even tomato sauce. Now, do you, does everybody have to avoid these things? No. But it happens enough in my autoimmune patients that I felt it was well worth telling people about it at this point. That does not mean you have to avoid these foods. It just means that if you have leaky gut and if you have an autoimmune disease, I would advise you to eliminate these foods and see what happens. Okay, there are other new mischievous foods that I put on the list. Now, how did that come about? I have no dog in this fight. I did not come to lectins thinking, “Boy, do I hate lectins. And I am going to tell the world how much I hate lectins.” I ate lectin-containing foods for most of my life, but I’ve now been measuring patients’ autoimmune status, leaky gut status for over 20 years. And I have a mass of autoimmune patients. 80% of my practice is now patients with autoimmune disease. So as part of any workup for any patient of autoimmune disease, part of my procedure is to measure autoimmune markers in any patient who walks through the door, and if they have an autoimmune disease, we do a set of tests looking at leaky gut and looking at people’s sensitivities to not only the various components of wheat, but corn, the major lectin-containing foods that you can see in the list, dairy, eggs, and then we do what’s called a food sensitivity. Now, food sensitivity has nothing to do with food allergies. Early in my practice, we used to do food allergy testing on a lot of my troublemaking patients, and we’d put a hundred different pin pricks on their back and we’d look at what would get read. And quite frankly, I never was impressed that it gave us any useful information about what foods to avoid, what foods were good. When leaky gut testing was developed, then and only then did researchers say, “Wow, we’ve done all this wrong.” Allergy testing uses an immunoglobulin called IgE, and there won’t be a test, folks. If something gets through the wall of our gut and is recognized as foreign by our immune system, we make a different set of antibodies called IgG. And only if our immune system is actually exposed to these antibodies that get through the wall of our gut will we make IgG. For instance, if you’ve ever been tested for COVID, we measure IgG to see if you’ve been infected with COVID, and we look for antibodies against COVID, IgG antibodies. So when we realized that we could measure IgG antibodies to foods, we started doing food sensitivity testing, and lo and behold, we found a number of people, particularly with autoimmune disease and/or leaky gut, that certain foods were far more prevalent than others in sensitivity. And so that list appears in “Gut Check” on page 166, and I’ve taken the liberty of sharing them with you today. This does not mean that you are sensitive to these foods. It just so happens that I’ve kind of got the dirty dozen of the foods that a remarkable number of people react to. Top of the list is almonds and almond flour. Now, I’ve known from day one that almonds, particularly the peel, have a lectin that was particularly troublesome in a number of my autoimmune patients. And for years, almonds were not allowed in my program. When I wrote “The Plant Paradox,” my editor said, “You are a really mean person. And come on, throw us some bones. We need more nuts.” Because I was taking almonds and cashews and peanuts away from people. I said, “Well, the main lectin is in the peel, so okay, I’ll give you blanched almond flour and peeled almonds like Marcona almonds. And that was pretty good. But a number of my autoimmune folks really reacted to almonds and blanched almond flour. And a ton of my patients have sensitivities to almonds and almond flour. Another one that really surprised me was white mushrooms. Now, white mushrooms appear all the time, and I won’t give you the literature for more information on this. Look up an acquaintance of mine, Paul Stamets, who makes Host Defense. I have no relationship, but there is a very interesting compound in white mushrooms that he believes, and now I believe, that we should be aware of. Cooking mushrooms will deactivate this compound. But raw white button mushrooms appear all the time in my patient’s food sensitivity. Now, here’s some ones that are really gonna surprise you. Ginger appears all the time. Pineapple appears all the time. Peaches appear all the time. Now, I apologize to Georgia. I went to the Medical College of Georgia. I love Georgia, and the Peach State is the Peach State for a reason. It’s the fruit of Georgia. But peaches show up all the time in my patient lists. White onions show up all the time. Yellow and red, no. Lemons show up all the time. Easy change, use limes instead. Bananas show up all the time. Nutmeg shows up all the time. Cinnamon shows up all the time. Commercial poultry shows up all the time. And get ready for this, vanilla bean shows up all the time. In fact, so many of my patients who have done well but never quite did perfect, many of them, almond flour and vanilla bean were two of their troublemakers, and they were living on almond flour and vanilla cookies and pancakes, and you know what? And when we took those away from them, that was what finally got them better. Now, how do you know you might be sensitive to these? Try eating these questionable foods. Do you notice your nose running or your eyes start to itch or you’re sneezing? Do you notice that your stomach hurts afterwards? Do you notice that your bowel movements change? Do you have more cramping? Do you have more bloating? Do you notice that after you eat these foods your joints ache and they didn’t before? Do you notice that you have brain fog after eating these foods? Do you notice that you have irritable bladder after eating these foods? So if you see a pattern of dis-ease after eating one of these foods, it’s likely that you’re sensitive to it and you should avoid eating it. Interestingly enough, when a lot of my patients get these tests and we go down the list of the foods they’re sensitive to, they’ll go, “You know, I never felt good after eating such and such a food.” Or, “You know, I’ve always hated that food, but I know it’s good for me, but it doesn’t make me feel good.” And now they have an explanation. Now, are people able to reintroduce these foods? Well, just like in “The Plant Paradox”, many times once we repair leaky gut, we can reintroduce these foods slowly but surely. Okay, now there are things in “Gut Check” that are missing in action from previous meat and dairy groups. You’ll notice that many of the yes meats are now gone, and you probably notice that heavy cream and cream cheese is gone too. Now, sadly, as you know from “The Plant Paradox” that there’s always been a strong association before that beef, lamb, and pork, and dairy have strong associations with heart disease, with arthritis, with gastrointestinal complaints, with dementia and cancer. Now, association does not mean causation. I’m the first to admit that, but there’s new evidence that I do in an entire chapter in “Gut Check,” that there is a sugar molecule in beef, lamb, pork, and dairy called Neu5Gc, and I’ve done whole videos on that. But the new evidence is that Neu5Gc, we make aggressive antibodies to it. We do not like Neu5Gc. We have a different sugar molecule in us called Neu5Ac, which is also present in chicken and fish and shellfish. We aggressively attack Neu5Gc. Human volunteers, we can prove that this happens. We make antibodies to it. We now know, unfortunately, that Neu5Gc can be incorporated into Neu5Ac-containing layers of our body in the wall of our blood vessel, in the wall of our blood-brain barrier, in the wall of our joints. And we now know that cancer cells use Neu5Gc to produce localized inflammation, which allows them to foster. So sadly, Neu5Gc, we now have a causation mechanism behind the association. Now, here’s the good news. The less Neu5Gc foods you eat, and the more Neu5Ac foods you eat, the more you replace Neu5Gc out of the lining of your blood vessels, out of your blood-brain barrier, out of the lining of your joints, and the less cancer cells have to use. That’s the good news. Here’s the other good news, fermentation of beef, lamb, pork, and dairy eliminates Neu5Gc because the bacteria eat it. And the exciting news, as I talked about at “Gut Check”, is that fermented dairy products like yogurt, like kefir, like aged cheeses, are devoid of Neu5Gc. It’s been eaten up and they’re fine for you. Similarly true aged sausages that have been fermented, and you’ll see the words lactic acid culture, the Neu5Gc is gone. Prosciutto, there’s no Neu5Gc. It’s gone because of the aging process. Interestingly, if you age beef, traditional dry aged or wet aged beef, the Neu5Gc is eliminated or dramatically lessened. In fact, I’ve got some exciting news. My friend James Beard Award-winning chef Jimmy Schmidt, on my recommendations, has been experimenting over the last year or so with how long it takes to remove most of this inflammatory meat molecule by fermentation with probiotics. And I’m inviting him on my program to talk about this. But his meats, grounds, links, and steaks have now been USDA approved, and I can tell you, you’ll never taste anything better. Now check out jrranch.com. Now I have no affiliation, but I want to support food producers that are making products that support your wellbeing, much like Farmer Dan of lectinlightchicken.com. And one more thing about the “Gut Check” food list. Many of you asked why this or that food is now on the yes list. Now, please, folks, just because a food item is on a list, check to make sure you’re reading within the yes and no food list. For example, I have a list of the highest polyphenol-containing foods. They’re listed in the book. Am I saying that all of these polyphenol-rich foods are now acceptable foods? No, I’m not. I’m saying you want a list of high polyphenol-rich foods. Here they are. That list was polyphenols. It’s not a yes list for approved foods. And yet we get these questions all the time. It’s not a guide. Finally, a proviso. Everybody’s body is different. Just because a food is on the yes list doesn’t mean it’s for everybody. The no foods are for everyone to avoid however. These are proven inflammatory foods based on 25 years of blood work in my patients, thousands of them and other patients who have been studied by other physicians. Now, a few more questions that I get, which yes and no list should I follow? Well, I update this every time I write a new book. And so the “Gut Check” list is the latest information I have for you, the most recent is what I’ve got. Will that change? I guarantee you. After all, my first book, “Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution,” was extremely well named. Unlike other health nutritionists, if I get new information, I tell you why I changed my mind and why we’re doing it this way. That’s why there’s a new list. I’ll give you an example recently. We’ve noticed that not an unusual number of patients, even pressure-cooked beans and lentils bother them. And the pressure cooking does destroy lectin. But there are other compounds that plants use as defense systems that pressure cooking won’t work on. For instance, pressure cooking does not destroy gluten. So if you notice that even pressure-cooked beans or pressure-cooked tomatoes or pressure-cooked potatoes bother you, or we notice on your blood work that you’re eating a lot of these and your blood work isn’t changing very much, that’s a sign that these particular foods, even though you’re doing your best to detoxify them, are not for you, even though they may be on the list. Most recent example is Worcestershire sauce, in general, appears on the no list because a great number of Worcestershire sauces have gluten in them. There are safe Worcestershire sauces like Lea & Perrins, and we use that in a recipe. So there’s really no, I didn’t wanna put Worcestershire sauce on the yes list, because everybody would then go buy the cheap Worcestershire sauces, but Lea & Perrins doesn’t have any gluten, so it’s perfectly safe, okay? So the list always changes. It always evolves. Why? Because I see patients six days a week. Each time I see them and see their reaction to removing foods, putting foods back in, I learn something and I feel it’s my responsibility to pass this information along to you. I’ve got no dog in the fight. I’m from Omaha, Nebraska, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A steak and a bratwurst is a wonderful thing, but we have to understand the health consequences for it. I want you to live a life of ease, not dis-ease. And this is one of the ways to do it. Because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you. More amazing episodes just like this one. Watch now. Meaning what? You gain weight, you feel low energy, you’re more susceptible to disease and illness, and the list goes on and on.