iHealthCast > Physicians<br>& Specialists > Heartbeats Blog - <span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold;">Dietary Lectins from Common Foods can Weaken Your Health</span>

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Posted by: Dr. Chris Meletis, ND	4/29/2010 8:31 AM
What I am going to share with is possibly one of the most important and overlooked dietary considerations for anyone that is serious about their health. I just returned from lecturing in Orlando at the A4M world anti-aging conference, the premier longevity conference for medical health care providers that are sick and tired of seeing patients that prematurely aging and suffering the ravages of being mis-informed and mal-informed. The topic of my lecture was “lectins”, no not “leptin” involved in weight loss, though as I will share with you if you are eating lectins, you will definitely increase the likelihood that you will become fatter, more inflamed and without question, more miserable in your daily existence. Put simply, lectins are specific dietary proteins that can trigger inflammation that will in turn bind onto Leptins, that will increase weight gaining and impede weight loss, immune hyper-reactivity and contribute to autoimmunity aggravation. Common lectins include the nightshade family that includes tomato, potato, egg plant, bell peppers and tobacco. Also wheat, oat, rye, barley, nuts, seeds, peanuts, eggs and dairy are all BIG lectins. So what is the big deal? People eat all these foods all the time and they survive, right? Well there is a HUGE difference between surviving and thriving. Lectins bind to sugar receptors in the body and trigger ill health. The key is to find out what lectins, that is what foods are your enemy, to maintain healthy aging and daily exuberance. Let me share an interesting and compelling story. In Britain, at a hospital back in 1988, the cafeteria decided to offer a healthy lunch option for its workers. The option was a “kidney bean dish” and within a couple of hours, dozens of people got sick with vomiting and/or diarrhea. The food was tested for pathogens and nothing was found. The BIG DISCOVERY was that this particular bean dish was found to be VERY high in lectins. I think most of us know that when cooking beans, we need to soak the beans overnight and rinse them thoroughly and ideally we would repeat this process. The key is that much of the lectin in beans can be lessened with this process. Now an even more deadly example of lectins and their potential impact on the human body, is the lectin found in castor beans, called Ricin. Those of you that follow the news and bioterrorism, know ricin can cause a terrible death even when exposure is topical, inhaled or ingested. So what is a person to do? Well first and foremost, listen to your body and see if eliminating nuts or grains (other than rice) or nightshade foods, for a period of 3 to 4 weeks, allows your body’s level of wellness to rise to a whole new level. In addition to avoidance of foods that you find serve as hurdles to your true wellness, the conclusions that I shared with the room full of doctors is the use of probiotics, betaine HCl and digestive enzymes can help lessen your susceptibility to the full impact of lectins. Yet the most important thing is avoidance when possible. Remember that a healthy Gastrointestinal tract supports a healthy you. There is no greater investment that you can make when it comes to fortifying your body at a foundational level.
Copyright ©2010 Dr. Chris Meletis, ND
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