Lectin Lesson 3 How Lectins Make you Fat
February 12, 2018Reference: Gundry's The Plant Paradox, Am Jr Physiology,
Did you know that humans lost height and braincase size in the 1000 year transition from hunter-gatherer to wheat-grower? Gundry quotes this in his book as what has been discovered at archeological sites from those time periods. Civilization had its costs? All so that we could have kings and cities and armies and compete with your neighbors more effectively. Hmm. And we started domesticating pigs and cows, sheep and goats....so we didn't have to go hunting.
Here is Grundry's conjecture. Wheat and lentils are amazing grains. When you eat them, you gain weight faster and more efficiently so you can make it through winter more efficiently. Civilization liked wheat, because by putting calories into storage, those who ate it lasted longer. Now, extend that to today and see if it's any different.
What do we feed cows before we slaughter them for market - corn and beans? Why? Because their meat gets marbeled and full of fat, tasting much better. They weight more and generally sell by their weight. More weight, more income. Wild pigs are lean animals. Domesticated pigs have lots of fat (we call if bacon) when fed corn and beans. Same story. Those foods make animals fat too. So Gundry's hypothesis is that humans didn't choose wheat and lentils to grow because they could be stored, but because you put weight on the most effectively with them.
That's his Plant Paradox. The very plants (wheat and beans) that allowed our ancestors to develop civilization and store calories for the winter were the same plants that hastened our demise from metabolic diseases. Now, that was hidden for the last 9,000 years because we died of measles and tuberculosis and cholera by age 30 anyways, and didn't see the degenerative effect of inflammation caused by these grains. Grains became the means to civilization not because they could be stored, but because they were the most efficient means to put on weight and make it through winter.
They promote more calories into fat deposits than any other food. And then, isn't it curious that milk from black cows, so called A-1 milk, has lectin qualities in its BMC-7 fragment, and promotes weight gain. Ok, I get the historical conjecture but is there a coherent biological explanation for how this works? Yes, indeed. It goes as follows. Two key processes are going on.
First, the disruptive effect of the lectin in wheat called WGA. Wheat germ agglutinin. It looks a lot like insulin. Acts like insulin. That's what lectins are, proteins that mimic mammalian proteins and cause damage by disruption. WGA mimics insulin, badly. Insulin attaches to a cell for a tiny amount of time, then lets go. WGA doesn't let go. On a fat cell, the message is to take up glucose, forever and ever. That fat cell gets fatter. On a muscle cell, however, the message is to block insulin effect so muscle are starved. Again, WGA doesn't let go so the real hormone that should be on the receptor can't dock on its receptor and tell the muscle cell to take up glucose and run with it. Same effect on nerve cells: WGA clamps on and doesn't let go.
Nerve cells are starving. But they send out the message to the organism: "Eat more." Even more disturbing isrecent evidence has emerged that lectins can climb up the vagus nerve from the gut to the brain, damaging the substantia nigra, the seat of Parkinson's disease. Indeed, cut the vagus nerve and the risk of PD drops 40%.
The final argument to support Gundry's hypothesis might be called the Common Soil Hypothesis - that the mechanisms of metabolism and inflammation are curiously linked. You got fat because your body is at war with itself. And it goes as follows. The lectins set off your "Tiny Little Radars", your Toll Like Proteins, that reside in your blood vessels and fat cells. They set off cytokines (your body's fire alarms) calling for white cells to respond to clean up the invading bacteria. Except there are no bacteria. It's just lectins. But the white cells show up. And your body shifts into war mode. Energy goes to the troops, the white cells. The stay-at-home folks, (Gundry calls them civilians but you think of them as muscle and brain cells) go on war rations and get less. Hence, you become insulin and leptin resistant not because you are overweight, but because your body is inflamed from all the fake lectin signals setting off fire alarms about invading bacteria. Your body is at war, thinking you have been invaded by bacteria, and you are all pumped up and ready to defend. Except that there is nothing to defect. The home folks starve. Fat cells get bigger.
Get it? Stop the war, send the troops home. Weight loss follows automatically. Stop eating lectins. That includes A-1 milk and cheese, nightshade plants, wheat and beans and most of all, genetically modified foods with their genetically inserted extra lectins.
www.What will work for me. This is a paradigm shift type of thinking, but it makes perfect sense. I get it. I just have to figure out how to implement it. And wheat is lurking behind every food in America. And every meat product was raised on lectin foods: corn and soybeans so the lectins in those foods are still there for me to absorb. I have to live with this a while. But I can shift a little. Less beans, less wheat. One step at a time.
Pop Quiz
- You are leptin resistant and fat because you eat like a pig? T or F Answer: That's backwards, unless you take eating like a pig to mean you are eating corn and beans, lectin foods. The proper answer is that leptin resistance and fatness comes from the natural shifts your body makes to counter the fake messages caused by eating lectin containing foods. You eat secondarily because your brain cells and muscles are starving, ironically.
- Lectins set off inflammation because they activate TLRs? What are TLRs? Answer: Toll Like Receptors or "Tiny Little Radars" in Gundry's clever nomenclature - your natural bar code readers watching what's in your blood to sort our friend from foe.
- You can make great bacon with wild boar? T or F Answer: Patently false. To make bacon on pigs, you have to feed them corn and beans.
- To make bacon on you, the best foods to do that with are? Answer: Same as with pigs. Corn, wheat and beans
- Ipso facto, to lose weight you need to ? Answer: create the environment whereby you "stop the war", turn off inflammation, rid yourself of lectins, eat what nature intended you to eat.