OK folks sit down for a few minutes as this one is going to take a while to explain. I propose we adopt the Caveman Diet Plan, aka Paleo Diet Plan. A big part of the paleo diet is to cut the grains out of your diet, even for breakfast. That means no Captain Crunch and cartoons kiddo! The paleo diet breakfast as with all meals replaces grains with proteins, fats, vegetables, and fruit.
I know you’re saying what the what? Cut grains? But I LOVE Captain Crunch! Hold tight, you’ll need little more background info before you give the Captain the boot.
First I need to introduce you to our friend (or foe?) the lectin. These are very robust proteins that play recognition roles in our bodies. For the purposes of our discussion here you can think of them as being like the UPC sticker on that box of Captain Crunch you’re crying about. They allow the rest of the body to decipher what to do with a particular molecule all be it protein molecule or that Carbohydrate molecule from the Captain of Crunch himself!
Ewwwww Who Tracked Poo in the Party?
Lectins in plants such as grains play a slightly different role when consumed. Their very sticky robust nature keeps them from being broken down in our digestion process. Instead grain lectins latch onto and rip through the intestinal wall gaining unrestricted VIP access to the rest of the body along with other unwanted contaminates (poo otherwise poised for removal). These invaders promptly disperse throughout our bodies functioning much like an insecticide whose sole purpose is to crash the party. Most every animal stays clear of plants with high lectin concentrations as a result. Except for us pesky humans!
Lucky for us we have big buff body guards aka antibodies standing poised in our body’s immune system. These antibodies jump all over the invaders. Although it’s a tricky fight as the lectins attach to everything! In the process our antibodies cannot tell who’s who and start picking fights with our body itself. Being that the antibodies are big buff body guards with lots of bronze but little brains they keep going back to beat up our body thinking it was the one that started the fight.
Hey Look Man it wasn’t Me!
See where things are going with this? Overwhelming evidence points to these grain lectins as the one who started the fight and also set the stage for countless diseases including but not limited to Autoimmune Disease. In case you don’t know what autoimmune disease is, it’s where our own body’s immune system attacks our own body! Scary stuff huh?
Still with all this talk about lectins you wonder what the heck these things are and cannot quite put a face on the villain. Well my friend, ever heard of Gluten? It contains one of the best known lectins, Wheat Germ Agglutinin, which literally wrecks havoc on countless people many who cannot hold up to the constant bullying and are diagnosed with Celiac Disease.
Perhaps now you can see the picture coming together. I’ve been a huge fan of beans over the past several years. Unfortunately, the magical fruit not only makes you toot but brings along tons of insecticide like lectins to the party! I know I know I feel like a hypocrite. I’ve long praised the addition of beans to your diet and apologize for that.
I understand and empathize with you if you’re struggling to kill your long lasting love hate relationship with grains. Many people experience similar difficulties cutting them loose as they are harder to drop then a heroin addiction. No seriously, they are. Grains stimulate the same pleasure receptors as heroin in our brains! It’s vital you heed the following advice to neutralize as many of the lectins as possible if you cannot kick the habit so easily.
- Soak beans overnight in an alkaline solution. A tablespoon of baking soda works well for this.
- Stick to fermented versions of baked goods such as sourdough bread.
- Sorry buster that’s all the tricks I have up my sleeve!
Me Jane You Fonda! Cave Girl Dig Caveman Diet Plan!
The best policy when it comes to lectins is not to invite them to the party in the first place! They are a damn good time I know but they like to pick fights so it’s best to avoid them as much as humanly possible. Instead party like a caveman! Drop grains, drop beans, drop the lectins, go Paleo baby, I mean common cavemen got chicks! And they ate well too! Making them bigger, buffer, and overall healthier than we are today. But truth is they partied with protein and not with insecticide like lectins. And aside from getting ate by the Sabre Tooth Tiger it wasn’t all that bad being a caveman.
So I recommend you check out the Paleo Diet. It’s really quite nutritionally fulfilling and based off the Caveman’s Diet Plan instead of our grain based diet. I’ve been on it for over a month now and having phenomenal results. Robb Wolf writes an excellent book entitled, The Paleo Solution. It’s a really good read worth checking out.
It’s a VERY interesting topic. The human GI system is best adapted to a “foraging diet” (diversity in nutrients), yet the agrarian “high-grain diet” has only been around for about 10,000 years or so (definitely not enough time to adapt to the novel diet). I’ve pondered this “human dietary evolution” model quite a bit as it is amazingly useful for explaining the distribution of metabolic disorders in modern civilization (eg. the fantastically high incidence of diabetes and lactose intolerance in native American populations, as they have only recently come to use the European diet). Now this shouldn’t be taken to mean that the European diet is all ‘bad’ (it is the reason humans are able to live in large civilizations; foraging societies have a minuscule carrying capacity), but it does mean that there will be complications of such diets.
The main dietary implication I have been able to glean from this “human metabolism evolution” model is that the healthy diet, is the most diverse/forager-like diet. I’ll give a quick overview of my thinking.
Really there are two all-inclusive classes of nutritional requirements for viability of life, the macro-nutrients and the micro-nutrients. In biochemical terms, macro-nutrients are used exclusively to harvest chemical energy (they are fats, carbohydrates, and amino acids) whereas micro-nutrients are chemicals which assist proteins in doing complex chemistry (stuff that wouldn’t be possible with just protein-chemistry alone). The macro-nutrients are synonymous with “energy source” and energy will always be required – without them, all that fancy biochemistry required for life stops. The micro-nutrients can for simplicity’s sake be stratified into two classes to facilitate our thinking about them; a class which is only ever harvested from the environment (things like iron, manganese, chlorine, sodium, zinc, etc.) and a class that must be synthesized by some biotic organism (eg. biotin, thiamine, pantothenic acid, ascorbic acid, etc.). The first micro-nutrient class (iron, manganese, etc.) will be a required nutrient for all life (more specifically, the life needing to do said chemistry). The interesting note is that the second class of micro-nutrients (biotin, thiamine, etc.) are actually made by living organisms, so one might ask the question, why don’t humans just make these?
Well, as you likely guessed, the answer comes from the “human dietary evolution” model I was talking about earlier. Different dietary environments between two organisms favor the retention of certain genes. My second class of micro-nutrients were simply products of genes which were lost because the nutrient was ubiquitous in the diet of ancestral humans. A convenient and interesting example of this is that of ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Remnants of the actual ascorbic acid synthesis gene (L-gulonolactone oxidase) can be found in the human genome, it lost its function in primates on the order of 60 million years ago (the random accumulation of mutations behaves like a clock giving an rough age when the gene was last used). In this same time period we see early (transitional) primate species (such as Plesiadapis) which have many rodent-like characteristics however distinguish themselves from rodents by having the jaw of an omnivore (containing molars for grinding and incisors for tearing) and forward-facing orbits (which allowed them to see in stereo – 3D). These observations together paint a picture where a cousin order of early rodents began evolving to live in trees (requiring stereo vision) which would likely have been rich in fruits (requiring omnivorous teeth), which in tern are rich in ascorbic acid. Thus, the ascorbic acid synthetic genes were not needed and thus were lost to genetic drift.
So, I ascribe this “human dietary evolution” model a lot of power. Unfortunately from my perspective, our best understandings of what specific micro-nutrients are required by humans leaves a bit to be desired. All those vitamins listed on the nutrient requirement labels were identified either one of two ways: 1) there was an isolated group of individuals who lacked the necessary dietary amounts of said vitamin and thus displayed a clinically evident pathology which through studying was determined to be a dietary deficiency (scurvy – ascorbic acid, beriberi – thiamine, rickets – vitamin D), or 2) an enzyme necessary for viability requires said micro-nutrient and it is not autonomously synthesized (I’m not aware of any found this way, but this is how most of modern genetics tends to work, so it is very possible). These two methods leave a lot to be desired as there are almost assuredly many micro-nutrients missed because dietary insufficiency is not clinically apparent, takes a forever to manifest, or both – each case would mean those micro-nutrient requirements never get identified. The second method has major limitations, as we hardly have a clue what most of the ~28,000 genes of our genome do and so would be hard pressed to be able to tell “vital” from “non-essential,” not to mention if some genes require micro-nutrient co-factors to be functional (progress here is slow, but being made). And so, this is why I fall back to my original statement that the best diet is likely the diverse, balanced diet. We have really little way of knowing all the essential micro-nutrients, and so cover our bases by thinking in terms of our dietary evolution.
The lectins definitely fit with this “human dietary evolution” model, yet are a bit different because of the immune involvement. The immune system is almost assuredly not used to (over evolutionary time) such high dietary intake of lectins, however the immune system evolves MUCH faster than the generic metabolic biochemistry I discussed above. To put this into perspective (noting that diversity is a surrogate for “high evolutionary rate”) one would find much more extensive diversity in immune phenotypes (simply, how and why the immune system turns on) in the human population than the total diversity in heart size between ALL mammals. With this said it would be very interesting to track the relative incidence of celiacs disease across different ethnicities (which currently have high lectin diets) which have different dietary ancestries. One thing I did notice on short review was that celiac incidence is actually extremely low in the Chinese population even though rice has a high lectin content. This might be an interesting area to follow up on.
Oh, and if the high pH is what you need for soaking beans in, you might be able to get to a higher pH than Bicarbonate alone by making sodium acetate (this guy shows how to do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEZWdPIg9o) which is basically just vinegar mixed with bicarb until no gas comes off (essentially it is the same as being able to dissolve more bicarb into the water). Usually, if you are trying to break up the carbohydrate part of the lectin, you want low pH so acetic acid would be better than bicarbonate. I just found an old article that shows a hydrolytic efficiency (breaking up the carbohydrate part of the lectin) of about 75% for 2 hours at 37C for a pH of 3 which, unfortunately, is lower than you will get with pickling vinegar (but that’s still a good place to start and I’m not sure if you want to use strong acids to tenderize your beans). Another thing you might try is using Meat Tenderizing Enzymes (http://www.enzymedevelopment.com/html/applications/protein.html), they would break down the protein portion of the lectin. If you do use such tenderizers, they tend to have pH- specific activity, so you have to be careful tampering with pH when you use them.
Of course, I have no quick or economical way to ensure that these are busting up the lectins in beans, but I have used both methods in lab and I have seen them work very well (in some cases a little too well…). You might be able to jury rig some sort of chromatography-paper based (these guys used chromatography – “Active soybean lectin in foods: Isolation and quantitation” A. M. Calderón de la Barca, L. Vázquez-Moreno and M. R. Robles-Burgueño) test but you would need a control sample which has only bean-lectin so you can follow the correct chromatography band (and optimally its disappearance). It might be a fun project, but would require hunting this control down or simply figuring out how to isolate some from beans (which might be easier, but runs into the problem of confirming that what you have is lectin and not something else).
Hopefully this provides some useful material.
Jonathan
Where does rice stack up against wheat?
I found this to have a ton of useful information–thanks for poting! A little skeptical about the idea of submitting to the diet itself, yes, of course. A great article, nontheless…
Hey thanks for the comments! As for rice, I know it’s a grain and on the no no list. It’s an interesting discussion though about occurrence of auto immune related disease in Asian populations with high rice intake. My guess damage is still occurring at some level in the population and or they are preparing the food in such a way it’s reducing the anti-nutrient content of the grain.
As for my diet I’ve omitted all grains for going on about 2 months now. My skin has cleared up, and I feel like a freak. Amazing energy and strength. I am of course doing Cross Fit as well which I believe this amplifies my results from the diet.
As for the naysayers. I recommend keeping an open mind. Give it a try for one month, cut out grains. Then re-evaluate. You’ve got nothing to loose.
This is a very informational article. I have heard of people trying this same approach to bust the immune system but they had a difficult time eliminating breads. We all know from experience these grain foods are “comfort foods” but now we can understand why. I also think that the processing our foods go through removes so much of the nutritional values and put in things that are really not good for the growth and maintainence of bodily systems. Good article. Looking forward to looking at the book.
I have read the article for a second time and have thought about the issue for the past several weeks. I’m skeptical on completely going away from grains but have caught myself questioning if I should be eating them when I get the chance. Thought provoking to say the least. Here is my unscientific thoughts from the past couple of weeks.
Regarding the comment toward the end. “Making them bigger, buffer, and overall healthier than we are today.” I disagree…..modern athletes would out lift, out jump, and out live a caveman. I can’t defend the average person because a lot of them are on the McDonald’s diet. They probably would still out live a caveman though with the aid of modern medicine.
Also grains such as rice weren’t suddenly invented when we stopped being hunter/gatherers. We most likely started cultivating them in larger quantities. I can pretty much guarantee these foods were scattered around and eaten when found. Also food such as rice have proteins in them. It isn’t only meat that has protein.
Thanks for your comments!!! Brian you have some very insightful things to say. And agree that our ancestors may have had exposure to grains as well even before the agricultural revolution. However, they most likely had a greatly varied diet, eating what and when they could. These varied diets are a necessary part of survival.
I attest it’s also easy to find fault in most any food. Perhaps some more than others. But what I’m arriving at is our diets are less and less varied these days. Go to any grocery store. Nearly everything is grain based in one way shape or form. This dramatically skews our diet to grains. When most likely we evolved not simply on a grain based diet but a diet high in animal based proteins, fats, and many other seasonal foods.
So in the end I could see a debate on how long and how much we’ve eaten grains as well as their true implications but what is undeniable is our diet’s are becoming less and less varied. Which further illustrates why a shift away from grains (or limiting thereof) and diet more varied in fruits, vegetables, and animal based proteins / fats would be prudent.
I hope that answers your question.
Ok, tell me about healthy plant based proteins then…
I’ve been researching this topic for the past few days. From what I understand fulfilling protein sources are the single biggest challenges for people on vegan diets. Especially if you’re interested in pursuing a less anti-nutrient dense food source. I’ve managed to find a few potential sources for you:
Legumes / Lentils – If prepared by yourself you can break down the anti-nutrients before it enters your body. You must soak the beans overnight in a water solution containing vinegar or baking soda. Then thoroughly rinse them prior to cooking.
Nuts – Not the best source of protein but will suffice. Take note though, peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes.
Chlorella – Algae that is high in protein. I just learned about this and have not had a chance to try it yet. But it sounds like a healthy source of protein.
Hemp Powder – You can buy hemp in the form of a powder for making protein shakes. Not sure of it’s anti-nutrient profile but worth checking out.
I recommend these boarder line vegan proteins as well:
Wild caught seafood – Best sources of fat period as well as healthy proteins.
Morally Raised Cage Free Chicken Eggs – Eggs are probably one of the best sources of protein out there.
If you’re pursuing vegan diet for moral reasons I encourage you to look into meets raised more morally / ethically. Morally raised, happy animals make for healthy animals which in turn make for a healthier you. Range free beef, pastured pork, bison, and cage free chicken are your best bets and whenever possible go to a local butcher for your meet. They will be best able to answer questions concerning how the animals are raised.
One last thing, thanks for the great question! I hope to write more about alternative plant based options in the future as they too provide many health benefits as well as tend to be much more affordable than the hardcore Paleo meats.
I already do hemp, so glad to see that on the list. It’s a great protein source along with the ALA profile and the nutritionally optimal 1:3 ratio of Omega 3 and 6.
A lot on the list corresponds to what people on a Raw Diet do, although they mostly stay away from peanuts since it’s such a processed “food.’
Chia seeds might also be be a good protein source, they’re soaked as well and big for raw foodist.
I’ll look at your other link, but I do take Omega-3 and DHA in capsule form and occasionally eat fish for the health benefits.