Do you have a citation for this? I've never heard anything like it before.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319593.php
My feeling is that it's similar to how allergies/cancer/etc often have 2 or more triggers that must coincide to set off the condition.
So for example, maybe people who wouldn't typically have gluten sensitivity (a lectin), ended up with it because they distrupted their gut flora by eating, say, the glyphosate in oats (especially processed oats like Cheerios). It could also happen if they eat compounds not typically encountered in nature, like those present in GMO foods.
Western medicine has a blind spot when it comes to these holistic effects because it tends to mainly study single root causes and cures. We also don't yet have enough long term studies, because GMOs only went mainstream around the late 90s and we're only just today able to start tackling big data with machine learning. But many people were wary of herbacides, pesticides and GMOs because there were no long term studies yet. Unfortunately a lot of unscientific practices got rammed to market during the George W Bush years, and during the dot com boom years before that under Clinton where money trumped public health concerns. Ok and really all through the 80s as well...
For anyone who reads this, and especially vegetarians dealing with IBS, what really helped me was the glutamine powder you buy at any workout supplement shop. Then I laid off legumes and nightshades (especially peanuts and peppers) for 6 months to let my gut rebuild. Use a pressure cooker to break down the lectins in beans, and also try de-husked grains like white rice instead of brown rice, or say sourdough bread over whole wheat bread. Then be aware that the gut is always breaking down and rebuilding, so treat it maybe like red meat or alcohol and try limiting yourself to a day or two of beans/salsa in a row instead of eating them every day. Also the Gundry ProPlant protein powder (hemp, flax, spirulina) helped me. If you're under 40 and don't yet have IBS, you might be seeing other symptoms like puffyiness, weight gain and lethargy that feels kind of like chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. For me, that coincided with discovering I had sleep apnea. I had been chronically tired for as long as a decade.
This sounds wrong. Glyphosate targets an enzyme in plants. The residual levels in human food are extremely low, so why do you think those levels would affect our gut biome?
I found a relevant paper: "administered at up to fifty times the established European Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI = 0.5 mg/kg body weight) had very limited effects on bacterial community composition in Sprague Dawley rats" from paper titled "Glyphosate has limited short-term effects on commensal bacterial community composition in the gut environment due to sufficient aromatic amino acid levels": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974911...
Can you refer to any papers that contradicts that?
Edit: I just read your first link on lectins: maybe Gundry has a point, but the crass commercialisation ("Dr. Gundry developed that are sold under the GundryMD brand", affiliate links to Amazon) of that article really detracts from it. It seems obvious to me problems with lectins could only affect a small percentage of people, given that the foods Gundry says to avoid are eaten commonly or staples in some populations for a long time. Note I very strongly agree that we should try a variety of different solutions to health issues (kinda scientific but not!), and I admire that you have found something that is helping you. I do dislike prosyletising of information without balance, and some of what you say is veering towards misinformation IMHO.
Edit 2: For completeness: some bacteria do have the enzyme affected by Glyphosate, which has been investigated to see if it affects bees via their gut biome. And the paper showed an effect on gut bacteria with 50x legal dosage if there were insufficient aromatic amino acid levels. The question is: does the maximum legal dosage affect the gut biome enough to be a problem? Given the crap our gut biome handles, and the fact it is a breeding ecology, I am sceptical.
Microbiome variance is a relatively new area of research but studies have already highlighted links to IBS/IBD, autoimmune conditions, and psychological conditions.
A lot of specialty vegan and dairy-free products are filled with them to turn plant-based ingredients creamy or milky. They're also very common in non-specialty processed foods that many vegetarians eat more of than omnivores.
News article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-emulsifiers/study...
The study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14232
Coincidentally, I also had sleep apnea at one point, though exercise exercise (very minor weight loss) made it go away.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/62914-what-are-lectins-plant-par...
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-weight-loss-on-the-pl...
To my knowledge, pesticides and glyphosate in the levels present in most food don't really have any effect on our internal microbiome, which is mainly non-plant based and the few plant based single-cellers in that biome aren't that harmed by glyphosate and should quickly develop immunity.
Umm...did you cook the plants before eating them? Cooking destroys like 99% of lectins.
>Something about animal protein heals this lining, probably because humans evolved as scavengers eating leftover kills and carrion from top predators.
This sounds like total pseudo-science new age woo. No organism EVER directly incorporates foreign protein into itself. Its always broken down completely first, so the structure or origin of these "animal proteins" doesn't matter.
Signaling of disdain and contempt not required.
> Cooking destroys like 99% of lectins.
Citation required.
> Its always broken down completely first
It's
Ummm
We are talking here about the lining of the digestive system. You know, the system that takes in whole foods and breaks them down. You bet the digestive system's walls are exposed to the proteins.
Sadly, as most of us probably know already, that would require the buddies of Big Agriculture to do work that directly attacks Big Agriculture. Won't happen, not now, not ever. There's simply too much money in it.
I think the only thing that might shuttle this process along is that Big Agri starts coming out with their own plant-based alternatives, like Tyson is doing. Once the big money gets into the political environment, that's when things will really change. I look forward to the prices taking a dive when that happens.
I really doubt that.
Plus the meat I did consume had some mixture of tendon/cartilage in it. Once I figured out what was missing it has been only smooth sailing for my stomach.
Regarding meat and bodybuilding, I would like to comment that there is simply no comparison for the amount of vitamins and mineral in meat, plus the absorbability of not having lectins and oxalates to leech them. There is a reason why both my grandmother's insisted on cooking their children liver once a week and they all grew up very healthy individuals.
* Nearly all of the rangeland and high desert in the western US was destroyed by cattle and sheep grazing over the past 150 years. This is a billion dollar industry with the emotional buy-in of millions of people so I'm skeptical that it will be reformed in our lifetimes.
* My digestive system got wrecked trying to be on a mostly vegetarian diet over several years after the housing bubble popped. The gist of it is that the lectins (and other defense mechanisms in the husks) of legumes and nightshades disrupt the mucus lining of the intestines, which leads to leaky gut and stool getting into the body cavity and blood (leaky gut), which may lead to autoimmune diseases like colitis and arthritis. Something about animal protein heals this lining, probably because humans evolved as scavengers eating leftover kills and carrion from top predators.
* I have not yet seen studies comparing the healing and regenerative properties of meat compared to plant protein, especially concerning bodybuilding. In my own experience, there is simply no comparison between the two. Beef, eggs, salmon, tuna, turkey and chicken simply dwarf any gains obtained from bean burritos (I wish this wasn't the case). I don't know a solution to this, although I'm guessing that a portion of the gains are hormonal. Maybe someone can isolate the animal compounds and make supplements similar to creatine, BCAAs, glutamine, taurine, etc.
Not to knock current meat alternatives, but I view them sort of like compact fluorescent light bulbs, as a 10 or 20 year stopgap until we have true test tube meat (LED bulbs).
In order for meat alternatives to compete with meat, someone will need to reform the federal food subsidies that keep meat an order of magnitude cheaper than it should be. An impossible burger should cost LESS than beef, not more.