I'm one of those people that believe Lectins could be causing autoimmune disease and that PD is an autoimmune disease. I got on this trail after watching this video: youtu.be/mjQZCCiV6iA?si=6ZH...
This is the best, most detailed, and yet easy to understand article on Lectins that I have read.
There is a LOT in this article. Some of my takeaways are:
- Dr Gundry is correct that these Lectins are a problem, but he comes off as being all knowing, when in fact, there is a lot of unknown. Gundry does deserve credit for raising the alarm and getting the ball rolling.
- There have been a lot of skeptical articles and videos that have said concerns about lectins do not line up with science, but as science advances it looks like the skeptics are the ones out of step with science.
- Everything has Lectins, and the lectins in different foods are different lectins. So... maybe just some of them are causing problems, but nobody knows which ones are bad for which people.
So... there is something about those lectins, but I don't think there is an authority that can completely guide us. I will use Gundry as a basic template and modify based on what else I can learn.
"It’s particularly alarming because [Gundry's] findings contradict well-established observations about diet and health. For one, populations who have transitioned to rich, Western diets generally adopt a diet lower in lectins. A transition to a Western diet is characterized by more meat, more added fats and sugars, and fewer beans and whole grains[1]. One of the commonalities of the blue zones, areas of long-lived populations, is that they consume legumes[2] (and Americans, by and large, don’t). Consumption of beans has been shown to be beneficial for a wide range of diseases, including diabetes[3], heart disease[4], cancer[5], and weight management[6][7] (Dr. Gundry allows vegetarians and vegans to eat beans, but only those that have gone through a pressure cooker; yet so much of the research demonstrating the benefits of consuming beans does not require pressure cookers). Increased whole grain consumption, compared to low whole grain consumption, has been shown to be beneficial for a wide range of chronic diseases, including early death and death from cardiovascular disease[8]...
His first big claim (pg xv) is that his findings are published in peer-reviewed medical journals. His “peer-reviewed” medical publication cited is an abstract published in the journal supplement for a poster presentation. Making a poster to display at a conference is nice, but this is a world apart from publishing clinical trial results in a peer-reviewed journal. In other words, there is no detailed publication of his methods, his subjects, his results, or his intervention as would be commonly expected in a normal publication. His glowing description of this abstract is misleading, to put it mildly.
It gets worse from there.
Many of his references do not support his statements or are misrepresented."
This has been such a new area very hard to get serious illumination yet, but having watched gundry a fair number of times, the man is never wrong about anything ever, is always hyper confident and overconfident, and some of these things one would have to either have done extensive research or just pull it out of his ass and you never know because some doctors are really crazy, and the ones who have a great need to talk and over talk and over talk so quickly with such a questionable affect (sorry but not everyone is going to be able to tell about such things like affect)... If he's completely honest then he may be a bit manic and if he's a bit manic, responses are a bit too easy or a bit too casual or maybe even sounds a little flip, just what I would call excessively reassuring, then you want to take everything with a good grain of salt, test every hypothesis/assurance that you can with extensive evidence and investigation that is reliable and empirical before you put yourself In harm's way by following the tone and the affect and the emotional sense that he can't be wrong and there's no risk involved or, I don't know, call it a sense of trivialization of questions or objections or remonstrances against his primary point, as if it would always be right in the absence of anything but his own attestations of his professional experience and assurance in the absence of such voluminous needed evidence... you really want to be "carefully-careful," because bipolar and mania and hypomania do exist untreated in doctors... And that is true even in the case that he might be right, mabye because he is that good, or maybe for the the "wrong reasons," (which I'm not going to try to explain here). And big assertions and excessive confidence with little evidence beyond the assertion and the personalization factor factor (*it's okay, it's because of me you can believe in it," given over to you as emotional language, not literal spoken words) and an excessively casual or flip style or amused style and a little too quick to explain mechanisms without actual mechanistic wordings that can be followed up on, is a very risky thing in such situations. Famous last words in many of such cases are "trust me" and their emotional, nonverbal equivalents. And I've never heard him actually say "no of course it's totally reasonable to be skeptical and decide nothing until you have seen a lot of evidence, and I'm sorry that there isn't any yet." Absence of humility is kind of a antenna thing sometimes.
I read recently that lectins act as a natural pesticide for bean plants while growing. Due to this property the ag industry has modified beans to have more lectins. The beans we eat today are not the beans our ancestors ate. Plus, when you cook beans you need to soak them before to help wash out the lectins. I do not know the details about how the food industry does canned beans. Do they soak them? Or do they consider putting beans in a can and adding water is equivalent to soaking? I always rinse canned beans. Now I am getting organic dried beans, no more canned and doing the soaking myself.
Yes! I remember way back in the 80's how they were bragging about developing new crops that would "naturally" resist pests. They were modifying them to have more lectins
I do not know about that. What I do know is that wild castor beans contain the lectin ricin, one of the most potent poisons known to mankind. It has been bred out of the domesticated variety in order to obtain non-toxic castor oil.
“The tragic story recalls the story of Christopher McCandless, the American traveler - whose story was told in the book and film Into The Wild - who, in the film reconstruction, died after eating the fruits of a poisonous plant.”
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Good article addressing anxiety in Parkison's Disease
What if we are approaching this all wrong?
'Reverse Parkinson' by breathing-in Farnesol with a humidifier?
