Pre-cooked lentils typically are canned, and the canning process ostensibly includes enough heat + pressure to denature dangerous lectins. So, consumers aren't used to thinking of pre-cooked lentils as dangerous.
Consumer cooking equipment makes it hard to cook lentils without reaching a boiling temperature that denatures lectins. Think an instant pot, or even a stovetop cooking method. But, browse slow cooking subreddits and you'll see many warnings that beans shouldn't be cooked in a slow cooker without achieving a full boil for some period of time due to lectins.
It seems to me like these dangerous lentils were prepared in a slow-cooking method that never reached a boil. And, any food facility that routinely works with beans or lentils should already know the dangers of lectins. So, it seems that the food production facility wasn't used to cooking with these ingredients.
FYI, the green sprouts in raw potatoes are toxic too.
According to healthline.com:
"Sprouted potatoes contain higher levels of glycoalkaloids, which can have toxic effects in humans when consumed in excess. Eating sprouted potatoes during pregnancy may also increase the risk of birth defects."
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sprouted-potato#dangers
Anyway, I found this for chickling peas (aka grass peas and cicerchia ):
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-69083-9_...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/07/why-do-po...
We used to eat raw sprouted lentils fairly regularly in the 70s/80s with no ill effects, so unless sprouting reduces the lectins, I doubt that's what the problem was. EDIT: I just googled for "does sprouting lentils remove lectins" and got all sorts of conflicting information. Some sites say yes, other say no.
Lectins are in practically everything that we eat. If it were just lectins, it would be a lot more people than this.
This is likely contamination of some form.
Is an interesting way to describe cooking lentils, too. I can imagine sautéing ones that are already cooked. Or you can put them in a pan with water for awhile, but that's gonna be 20-40 minutes, is pan-boiling a term? Not really sautéing.
Confused. What else would you boil them in? (Brit here so maybe there's a language difference at play)
Rough disambiguation: Frying pan - shallow with single long handle Sauce pan - deeper with single handle Pot - deeper with two loop handles
A pan has short, usually curved sides, and is suitable for simmering small amounts of liquid, searing or frying. It will almost always have a single long handle.
Woks are the exception- the look halfway in-between a pot and a pan, though the design is more geared towards the same uses you would use a pan for. Although there are two small handled varieties, the thinness of the metal makes it much less effective at stews and soups because it doesn't hold heat well.
"Saucepans are round, vertical-walled vessels used for simmering or boiling. Saucepans generally have one long handle. Larger pans of similar shape with two ear handles are sometimes called "sauce-pots" or "soup pots" (3–12 litres)." [1]
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gallstones/sy...
My understanding was that initially most vets assumed it was the “grain free” thing causing a problem but then it was discovered that the heart issues have only been associated with certain grain free brands. I can’t help but wonder if it’s something to do with both the volume of lentils in the brand recipes and also how the brands are preparing their lentils.
Other ingredients could be eaten raw but they’re either difficult to eat (asparagus) or can cause gastrointestinal upset/gas (broccoli).
I do feed a lot of raw or already prepared foods as well: yogurt, cottage cheese, pumpkin, carrots, applesauce, bananas, peanut butter, blueberries, watermelon, etc. The ingredients all need to balance out for the day to make sure they get the right nutrients and to make sure the fats/protein/carbs are with appropriate ranges so how much dog food cooking I do varies each week. Sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less. I’m always cooking at least a meat and pasta/rice though.
I (and family members) have eaten copious amounts of sprouted moong and moth beans my whole life without cooking them. Just soak them in water for a night, then leave them alone to sprout for another day or two, and then eat them.
1: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/anti-nutrients/...
> “They [company] were kind of implicating the customer in not cooking them correctly, but I definitely did because I cook a lot of vegetarian stuff,” says Aarts, who is a vegetarian and allergic to gluten. She says she sautéed the lentils until they started to crisp and even blacken a bit because she knows they need to be cooked thoroughly.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/daily-...
It turns out lentils contain lectins, a class of molecules with some alarming chemical characteristics:
> Lectins are carbohydrate binding (glyco)proteins which are ubiquitous in nature. In plants, they are distributed in various families and hence ingested daily in appreciable amounts by both humans and animals. One of the most nutritionally important features of plant lectins is their ability to survive digestion by the gastrointestinal tract of consumers. This allows the lectins to bind to membrane glycosyl groups of the cells lining the digestive tract. As a result of this interaction a series of harmful local and systemic reactions are triggered placing this class of molecules as antinutritive and/or toxic substances. Locally, they can affect the turnover and loss of gut epithelial cells, damage the luminal membranes of the epithelium, interfere with nutrient digestion and absorption, stimulate shifts in the bacterial flora and modulate the immune state of the digestive tract. Systemically, they can disrupt lipid, carbohydrate and protein metabolism, promote enlargement and/or atrophy of key internal organs and tissues and alter the hormonal and immunological status. At high intakes, lectins can seriously threaten the growth and health of consuming animals. They are also detrimental to numerous insect pests of crop plants although less is presently known about their insecticidal mechanisms of action. This current review surveys the recent knowledge on the antinutritional/toxic effects of plant lectins on higher animals and insects.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15302522/
It appears that lectins are degraded by heat, thus the importance of proper cooking.