The Lectin Paradox (Part 2/3) - Should You Eliminate Lectins From Your Diet?

Last week, we learned that despite what we may have read or heard, not all lectins are bad for us. And yet, many of us still experience extremely unforgettable symptoms — like bloating, gas, headaches, and even vomiting — after eating them. What gives?

 

Answering this question forces me to challenge yet another extremely common lectin myth, which is that everyone has a lectin issue. Does everyone REALLY have a lectin issue? And if so, why has this become a problem recently when it seemingly hasn’t been in the past?

The simple fact that not everyone experiences side effects from lectins should be the first big hint that ‘No, we don’t all have a lectin issue.’

I’ve long suspected there’s another unseen factor working behind the scenes and causing some to develop an intolerance to lectins, whereas others do not.

 

But what is this factor?

This week, we’re diving into what I believe is the true root cause of so-called lectin issues. And surprise! It has more to do with the underlying health of your gut than lectins at all.

I’ll also be sharing my ultimate solution to going from lectin intolerant to lectin tolerant: My HAPPY GUT® Digest & Protect Bundle. I’ve seen dozens of patients heal their gut and start loving tomatoes, peppers, and beans — some of the popular lectin-containing foods! – using this protocol.

But first, let’s dive into the connection between lectins and your gut.

Understanding the Gut-Lectin Connection

I’ve observed firsthand what a huge role your gut plays in how damaging lectins can be. You see, your gut harbors about a hundred trillion microbes, which include up to a thousand different species of bacteria, a few dozen types of yeasts and fungi, an unknown number of viruses, and an occasional worm. Collectively, these are called the “gut microbiome.”

 

Our understanding of the human gut microbiome is still in its infancy, but newer research shows that it can impact human health and illness in many different ways, including affects our mood, immune systems, energy levels, and our ability to tolerate various foods, including lectins.

In a healthy gut, everything functions optimally and there is a healthy balance between beneficial bacteria. On a day-to-day level, this means the gut houses a world of friendly, diverse good bacteria that help us digest our food, produce vitamins, and keep unfriendly gut organisms in check.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t have a healthy gut. If your gut is unhealthy, you will inevitably suffer from dysbiosis—an imbalance between good and bad bugs in the gut. You may not even know you have dysbiosis, but what you do know is you feel bloated, icky, tired, mentally foggy, and achy all over.

 

But what causes an unhealthy gut in the first place? There are certain lifestyle factors that can impact the health status of our guts. For example, how often you have bowel movements and the medications you take can impact the growth of gut bugs. In fact, antibiotics are probably the number one worldwide culprit for dysbiosis, because while they do the important job of killing harmful bacteria in the body, it can also wipe out the beneficial ones. As you might already guess, what you eat also has a massive influence on your microbiome (1) ; some foods — like healthy fats and fiber — are great for your microbiome health and other foods, like processed sugars, raw cruciferous vegetables and lectins can irritate the gut and either cause or exacerbate an existing gut issue. I talk about gut-friendly and gut-harming foods extensively in my book, Happy Gut .

Leaky gut and lectin intolerance

If your lifestyle doesn’t support your gut health, you will develop dysbiosis, which will create the ideal environment for another common gut condition, called leaky gut.

Think about it like this: Your gut lining acts like a security guard that determines who can come in and who stays out of your bloodstream. When you have a leaky gut, it’s like that security guard has nodded off and anyone can come and go as they please, including lectins. And while that doesn’t sound like the end of the world at first glance, when lectins and other toxins and molecules from food enter the bloodstream, the immune system does not recognize them so it attacks — and that is what causes the terrible symptoms like gut pain, nausea, and bloating.

 

The trickiest part is that you may not even be aware of these sensitivities. Food sensitivities don’t always manifest as digestive distress; in fact, they can cause seemingly unrelated body symptoms, such as hives, allergies, chronic sinus inflammation, and migraines without any abdominal pain, bloating, or bowel movement problems, and only eventually become the triggers for irritable bowel syndrome and autoimmune disease.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. It’s my belief that lectins often get the blame for problems that really should be blamed on leaky gut. A healthy gut, which includes a healthy balance of gut flora and a strong gut wall, can handle lectin-containing foods better and prevent this immune system attack.

Revealing the true problem with lectins

As a doctor who specializes in gut health, I’ve observed that if you have a healthy gut with balanced gut flora, the amount of lectins that could create issues is far higher than what most people would eat. That’s because a healthy gut lining produces digestive enzymes that break down lectins and lectins are not allowed to slip through into the bloodstream. (2)

In other words, while lectins get associated with autoimmune disease and gut imbalances. It’s the other way around!
I’ve found that gut imbalances are often the problem, not just lectins.

As we learned last week, some lectins damage the gut more than others. Kidney bean lectins, for instance, can especially damage the cells within your gut wall, cause bacterial overgrowth, and create nutritional deficiencies. (3)  Meanwhile, in people with a healthy gut, some lectin-containing foods such as tomatoes and other fruits are healthy. (4) Clearly, classifying all lectins as “harmful” oversimplifies this broad group of foods.

To be fair, lectins do create problems for patients who have dysbiosis. For these people, lectins can:

 

• Further damage the gut wall
• Interfere with nutrient digestion and absorption
• Adversely impact the immune system within your digestive tract (5)
• Affect the health of cells in the gut and its ability to heal itself

These issues should not be ignored or underestimated. Let’s say you eat legumes, for example. The lectins in those legumes will resist being broken down in your gut, because they can withstand the acidic environment of your stomach. ( 6 ) They end up binding to cells within the gut wall lining. ( 7 ) If you eat large amounts of them, they can irritate the gut wall, creating symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting, and exacerbating leaky gut, which allows them to slip through the gut wall and enter the bloodstream. This sets off the inflammatory response that has a domino effect, resulting in a host of problems. Basically, when you are internally inflamed, more of the calories that you eat are stored as fat and weight gain happens right before your eyes. In addition, an irritated and inflamed gut lining may also interfere with the absorption of other important nutrients. ( 8 ) 

 

 

Over time, as lectins get through the gut wall, they can bind to all sorts of tissues in your body, including brain, thyroid, liver, and pancreas, even possibly leading to autoimmune disease. This is the fuel to the fires of inflammation and autoimmunity . 

Inflammation leads to a wide range of conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes. ( 9 ) I call this phenomenon the lectin-autoimmune connection . But as you can see, this is a complex and multifaceted issue. Blaming lectins and lectins alone for all these problems dramatically oversimplifies the issue at hand.

In my practice I find that my patients with lectin intolerance typically start out with a damaged gut.

And while eating lectins may have worsened their condition once the gut became damaged, those lectins alone didn’t actually create the damage in the first place.

Healing lectin intolerance by healing the gut

When lectins attach to the gut lining, they can contribute to leaky gut. (10) That’s the bad news. The good news is that once you fix your leaky gut and rebalance your gut microbiome, you can better tolerate lectin-containing foods (especially when prepared the right way), many of which can be considered a healthy part of a balanced diet.

 

So how do you fix leaky gut and rebalance the gut microbiome? You’ll be surprised, the remedy is not all about what you eat, but also about how you live. You can start by following the:

7 Steps To Heal Your Leaky Gut

…So You Can Enjoy Lectin-Containing Foods Again

As you can see, there are a ton of steps you can take to heal the gut and reverse a lectin intolerance before you think you have been sentenced to a lectin-free diet for the rest of your life. I mean, in all honesty can anyone do that?

 

The truth is to simply cut lectins out of your diet for good is missing a big part of the whole picture. They say you can’t see the frame if you’re in the picture. Well, in this case, gut health is the framework for enjoying the bounty of delicious, lectin-rich foods in the ideal picture of the fall season. At the end of the day, if you don’t turn your attention toward healing the gut, you are missing the root cause of many health problems, including lectin intolerance. And that’s why I call this series: The Lectin Paradox .