CONTENTS
Restaurant dish adaptations
Some like it hot: cooking with capsicums and chilli peppers
Tomato: put more love in ‘fruits of love' - Infographic: tomato swaps
Hot potato, swap potato - Infographic: potato swaps
Aubergen-ie in the bottle grants you wishes: cooking with eggplant
You can start here if you’d rather get eating and skip my previous article about the medical science and history tour of how inflammatory nightshades ended up in most Western dishes.
THE RECAP
Potatoes, tomatoes, capsicum, chillies and eggplant are the nightshade vegetables and fruits introduced to Western cuisine from the Americas. Even Native American people have not evolved to disarm the lectins in nightshades from the New World. Plants make toxins like lectins because they can’t flee predators. Lectins are some of the causes of inflammation in modern lifestyles. Constant inflammation and cellular dysfunction from diet and environment over years can lead to one of 80 auto-immune diseases where the immune system goes rogue in the body. There is also an increased risk of chronic diseases earlier in life. Functional medicine doctors are having success reversing these diseases with diet and lifestyle changes in controlled medical studies. Mild symptoms that indicate inflammation may be fatigue, brain fog, skin irritations, aches and pains, irritability and many more.
As a lifelong foodie who for five years, balanced clean eating with deliciousness, my motto is a path of least resistance in our busy lives. With a little know-how you can still enjoy most nightshade vegetables and fruits. Then you’ll be less likely to break your anti-inflammatory food habits. This anti-inflammatory food series is how I have the best of both worlds: improved cellular function and delicious meals.
The good news is a pressure cooker and/or skinning and seeding nightshades will make them much less inflammatory.
The bad news is modern food production is often skipping these anti-inflammatory cooking methods.
The good news is there are some easy swaps to help you maximise the nutrition of nightshades. For example, you have likely seen in a recipe the scoring and blanching of fresh tomatoes for a minute, or seen charred capsicums in jars with skins off.
Restaurant Adaptations
When it comes to restaurant foods, the two most popular are Italian (full of tomatoes) and British/American pub food also considered ‘comfort food’ (full of potato in all its forms like chips and mash.) Even the lauded chicken parmigiana, seems the best fusion but instead adds inflammatory tomato to what is otherwise a delicious Germanic tradition of a schnitzel. We are fortunate enough today to have delicious food swaps at hand.
CHICKEN PARMIGIANA - You can easily order your parmy without tomato and ask for mustard, pickles or relish on the side to add zing. Any self-respecting pub should also have another good condiment swap: horseradish sauce. Swap your side of potato fries for sweet potato fries or a salad, of course, without fresh tomato. As a foodie, I don’t feel ripped off if the crumbed chicken is delicious and remains the star.
HAMBURGER – Tomato added to hamburgers is a modern garnish to add colour when the other ingredients like meat and bread were more processed and may have blocked the intestine, so fibre in token vegetables helped a situation of already declining nutrition from modern food processing.
I leave off the tomato slice, or swap for cooked beetroot (it’s an Aussie burger tradition). I also swap tomato sauce or barbeque sauce (which is made of tomato sauce!) for Tabasco sauce or mustard which are also lower in refined sugar which messes with your blood sugar. Technically, they are made on tomato paste so not as inflammatory as fresh tomato. Amazingly, it is the heritage fermentation and straining of the Tabasco sauces that removes the lectins.
If I make a burger myself, I swap tomato for roasted red capsicum from a jar to keep the pleasing red colour pop. I can also substitute fresh tomato for the freshness of grated carrot and/or fresh herbs. The roasted capsicum or beetroot slice (or both) also replaces the sweetness of tomato or bbq sauce, high in added sugar. I also swap these for Tabasco or mustard or wasabi. Mayonnaise is also a good sauce condiment swap, if you don’t have an egg allergy, but doesn’t have the vinegar acidity to balance the fatty beef and cheese. I add good quality pickled baby cucumbers to give me vinegar zing again, to balance the fat-rich meat and cheese. I eat much more fat these past five years, with no change to my weight. Modified paleo diets by functional medicine doctors swap the sugars and starchy foods for more approved fats for greater nutritional benefit.
Shopping centre food courts will often have roasteries with sandwich bars or kebab shops right next to burger joints where you can customise your own vegetable toppings with roast beef or lamb instead of a minced patty. Leave off tomato and add grated carrot and/or beetroot instead. I prefer these two take-away options to Subway because its bread, cheeses and meats are highly processed for shareholder profit margins compared to smaller family-operated food joints.
ITALIAN cuisine - today there are a few dishes without tomatoes like carbonara pasta or pizzas with ‘Bianca’ or white sauce bases. Sadly, conventional lasagne and spaghetti bolognaise often have tomato seeds and skins. I rarely eat Italian out anymore, there are better anti-inflammatory options in the restaurant scene also because they are very high in wheat, one of the Top Ten likely allergens.
“Tomato sauce and pizza were invented just a little over 120 years ago, making them very new foods in evolutionary terms.” - Dr Steven R. Gundry, author of The Plant Pradox.
MEXICAN cuisine - today it's also a lectin bomb with seeds and skins from chillies and tomatoes. Chilli flesh is hot so you can still enjoy spicy at home with lower lectins. The other ‘chilli’, the bean casseroles will likely have tomato seeds and skin in the sauce. For any wraps or tacos, you are better off leaving out the pico de gallo (chopped fresh tomato, onion, coriander) and jalapeño peppers. Instead swap for Tabasco, or fresh lemon or vinegar on the side. Guzman and Gomez is a great Mexican chain because not only can add fresh coriander and Tabasco varieties at the sauce bar, you can choose a bowl rather than a bread wrapping if you want too. As mentioned above Tabasco’s fermenting for years neutralises its lectins.
INDIAN cuisine is also full of tomatoes (almost every Westernised style). Butter chicken, rogan josh, tikka marsala or korma may use tomato paste or tinned tomatoes or fresh so best to cook yourself at home with paste. The least inflammatory is the roasted chicken pieces in a tandoor oven that have been marinated in a spice yoghurt paste (normally tomato-free). Add an interesting side like pilaf rice. Palak paneer (spinach and fresh cheese) is another less inflammatory favourite of mine.
I mention in my previous article, three reasons nightshades became popular. Further, spicy cuisines like Indian and Mexican are traditionally used for medicinal qualities anti-parasitic and anti-bacterial because cleaning foods was not as thorough as it is today with modern water sanitation. Also warming the body temperature with spices helped the body focus on other tasks like digestion and immunity rather than keeping warm. Once embedded in food culture it is harder to reverse, even after one generation.
JAPANESE or VIETNAMESE are my preferred dining out cuisines, these have the least dishes with the least nightshade vegetables overall. Sorry to say, the French-Vietnamese Bahn-mi sandwiches have more lectins. Brown rice also has more lectins than white rice. Whole grains as a rule have more lectins. See my previous article about why.
THAI cuisine is my third Asian preference, if ordered without inflammatory peanuts or cashews (I will talk about which nuts are the best to digest in an article soon).
CHINESE dishes don’t often use nightshade vegetables except maybe capsicum for colour, also a great low-lectin choice depending on the dish. Avoid Sichuan regional dishes that have a higher hit rate of nightshades like eggplants.
FISH AND CHIPS - I’ve quit my beloved potato scallops, but these days any self-respecting fry shop has sweet potato chips to swap out for potato chips.
FAST FOOD - Many chains don’t offer a sweet potato chip swap, wah! I don’t buy set meals anymore as I don’t need the sugary soft drink either. I’ll buy meat pieces and coleslaw or take-away fast-food meats and make a side myself.
Quitting Maccas hashbrowns was hard but now I’ve been clean eating long enough, that the oil type used, I found the last time I caved that it tasted chemically burnt and I felt quite nauseous. The deep fry oil (also full of lectins and toxic trans fats is another article to do) probably needed changing although McDonald’s would have a standardised roster for this. After resetting my gut and cellular renewal with cleaner eating over the years, my ‘new’ body was telling me ‘Please don’t eat this again’. My palate and gut had adjusted for the better.
Salt side note - My palate is also more sensitive to salt now, probably because I don’t eat as much processed foods which often has high salt. Today, five years later, a piece of KFC chicken on the bone just tastes of salt not chicken to me. I’m always disappointed as fast food isn’t very convenient if it tastes yucky.
If I must eat fast food, I go for Oporto or Red Rooster because at least they sell chicken with marinated skin and no oversalted wheat crumb. Plus, they sell rice salad or coleslaw respectively as sides to swap out the potato chips.
Some of you more educated readers may be asking, why I’m including dishes with ingredients in the Top Ten Allergens like wheat, seafood, and dairy. Gradual change in your diet makes you less likely to quit. I plan to write about these in this anti-inflammatory food series. Then once you know more, you may also choose not to eat these potential allergens or eat rarely. It’s important to see how you feel after three months. Everyone has individual biology and food tolerances. We already know that inflammation is to the modern person a silent health issue because we often ignore or mask mild symptoms until it manifests into one of many diseases later in life.
Some like it hot: cooking with capsicums and chilli peppers
The good news is you can buy roasted capsicums in jars, their skins charred and scraped, and seeds removed.
The bad news is sweet chilli sauce is full of seeds and skin.
The bad news is chilli flakes in your cooking is more inflammatory.
The good news is adding cayenne pepper or paprika is fine according to Dr Gundry (who has tested hundreds of patients’ biomarkers) because seeds and skin are removed in the making. You can still get a spicy kick from chilli flesh without lectins.
I swap fresh capsicums with peeled preserved capsicums (or bell peppers for Northerners) to keep bright red colour in my dishes. Having lived in Spain in my mid-20s I love dressing homemade Spanish paella rice or other seafood Spanish dishes with these red veggie strips. When I lived in Seville Spain one of my favourite suppers to order at the bar with friends was a large tapa (open sandwich) of pork sirloin steak with a roasted green capsicum on top (the Italian pointed variety).
Stuffing capsicums is common in cuisines along the Mediterranean with both minced meat and seafood with veggies. The recipe deseeds and cores the capsicum container and you can remove the skins upon serving.
A traditional antipasto plate can still have plenty of low-lectin foods and look colourful, jarred artichokes, olives and yellow and red capsicums for example.
What I find funny about some people’s love of spicy chilli peppers is the plant is trying to stop you from eating their precious fruit and seeds. The chemical that creates the chilli burn is an alkaloid. Alkaloids come in many forms, in many plants and are often toxic. Why do people eat spicy chillies that are screaming ‘Don’t eat me’? Chilli adoration is about the brain not about the gut. The endorphin rush from the pain. Certain quantities of chilli irritate the gut right through to the disturbed toilet. The body is ejecting something with plant toxins. Some chilli eating is a game of entertainment or social competition. Chilli-love is not about nutrition. I also noticed cold-climate Westerners love chillies and spicier dishes than hot climate westerners for obvious reasons but again, not about nutrition. As you can tell I can enjoy mild chilli like Tabasco especially with fatty meals, but I can also live without chilli spice.
Tomato: how to put more love in ‘fruits of love’
To use fresh tomatoes, I buy large fresh tomatoes (the more flesh for effort, the better). I slice them into thick rings and push the seed clumps through their holes and the rings of skin are easier to remove after a minute of heat placed on top of whatever dish I am cooking. Avoid cherry tomatoes, although sweeter or more brightly coloured for salads, they are inflammatory lectin bombs, and they are too fiddly to remove lectins.
The tomato hack you need for anti-inflammatory cooking is to use passata jars or paste tins or sachets. The skins and seeds have been removed. Avoid pasta sauces and tinned tomatoes with seeds and skins. You can buy tinned whole tomatoes and deskin and deseed them over a sieve and bowl but buying passata or tomato paste is easier, though the taste and texture are slightly different.
Cooking tip - Pasta sauces are higher in added sugar so you may find the swap too sour or not hitting your sweet palate. To sweeten these single-ingredient swaps I add grated carrot. I find grated beetroot too messy. If feeling luscious, for a recipe for eight people to balance any sour or bitter dominance, one tablespoon of real maple syrup (less processed with more minerals) but any more caramel-coloured sweetener will have more nutrition even golden syrup or raw honey. If you are sugar-conscious and don’t want to burden your liver with fructose, use a glucose source like rice malt syrup. However, carrot would be the healthiest swap as a whole food that is not refined.
“The clever Italians also hybridized the Roma tomato to maximize the ratio of pulp to skin and seeds. Cooks then blanch the tomato in boiling water, pull off the skin, cut the fruit in half, squeeze out the seeds, and presto, pulp minus the skin and seeds.” - Dr Steven R. Gundry, author of The Plant Paradox.
Sun dried tomatoes annoy me! It is impossible to get their thin skins off without breaking repeatedly and they have seeds. I just don’t bother.
I try to avoid tomato sauce and bbq sauce although they are likely made from tomato paste and have had skin and seeds removed. They have 1 to 2 teaspoons of added sugar per tablespoon which does your blood sugar no favours.
Tomato swap poster for less inflammation and therefore more energy:
Hot Potato, Swap Potato
The reason potato has taken over Western cuisine I cover in my last article under ‘three reasons why nightshades became popular’. Overall, despite mildly toxic skin, it is a starchy, filling root vegetable that European peasants used to survive when grain crops may fail. Plus, grain stalks may fall over but tubers often safe to grow large as they liked. Fermentation for alcohol was also an important tradition that used grains or fruits before cheaper potatoes came along.
A recent reason is chefs love that they have no strong taste of their own and so carry other flavours. A restaurant-quality potato mash made in the French style has been peeled, boiled, sieved, whipped, salted, and buttered into a completely different textured miracle.
Potato was a cheaper way to make traditional food containers in the past. By that I mean pastry is one example. The reason ‘shepherd pie’ is topped with potato and not more expensive pastry is showing peasantry poorness. In recent generations, we believe a vegetable is healthier than a grain and so cooking with potato is healthier than with flour and animal products like egg and butter that make pastry. Unfortunately, the lectin toxins have been ignored by modern food standards.
Potato bake is a staple home-cooked celebration dish. Try instead of layers of potato, swap for white root vegetables like sliced parsnip, turnip, swede. Top with chopped cauliflower before the cheesy finish. This ‘white veggie bake’ is more delicious and nutritious. Their water content is higher than potato so you can cook uncovered for longer to thicken the dish before adding the cheese on top. Noting white sweet potato varieties are too sweet for me but please try for yourself. If you use naturally sweeter coconut cream instead of dairy cream then it would taste dessert-like with white sweet potatoes.
Fried potatoes are everywhere, accompanying many restaurant dishes because of their salty crunch. Eating out used to be a treat a generation ago, not a routine feature like today, especially in urban centres. Today, as we work more, cook less, and buy more food out. It’s too easy to eat potato fries every day for lunch and dinner. Rapid meal delivery in cities has also made potato chips infiltrate domestic life where a deep frier filled with oil would rarely be in the home. Restaurants push out fries because they are cheap with excellent profit margins after they work their skill with a hot oil bath.
Deep-fried potato ‘French fry’ batons, recorded as early as the late 1600s, went mainstream in the 1800s. Back then frying was in animal fats that would not burn at high temperatures like tallow. The taste was out of this world and delicious! Since industrialisation of food, oils could be made from cheaper plants and most deep frying is now with seed oils commonly called vegetable oils when they are not like canola, sunflower. McDonald’s stopped frying their iconic potato fries in tallow in the 1990s. R.I.P. good taste in fast food potatoes. Remember what I was saying about chefs loving potato because it carries other flavours. The choice of oil makes a huge difference.
To make matters worse when it comes to inflammatory lectins in nightshades, the most popular savoury snack is the potato chip (or crisp for Northerners) next to wheat crackers. So even if you cut wheat from your life (being one of the Top Ten Allergens) the alternative potato options are also inflammatory, oh this cruel world!
“animals will eat a particular ratio of protein to carbs to fats…today, we eat less like wild animals and more like drug addicts. In its drive to expand markets, the global food industry has worked out how to hack our biological instincts, making processed foods both cheap and irresistibly ‘moreish’. Protein is expensive and carbs are cheap. Overeating creates more sales. In the food technologist’s lab, you can create deliciously ‘umami’ tastes associated with proteins by using concoctions of industrial chemicals.” - Professor Stephen Simpson and Professor David Raubenheimer, authors of Eat Like The Animals.
I certainly now see my tempting moreish honey soy chicken Kettle potato chips more as a legal drug than a foodstuff.
Dr Terry Wahls has the right idea. Remember that deep-fried starches like potato are a treat, not a staple. The middle tier of her modified paleo diets within The Wahls Protocol allows two servings of approved starches per week. She has almost 20 to choose. You don’t have to choose potato. Dr Wahls states it is because potatoes have relatively low nutrition and fill you up with low-value calories compared to other brightly coloured vegetables. Her goal is to get as many bioavailable vitamins, enzymes, ‘good’ microbes, and minerals into your digestive system to create building blocks to heal your body.
As a point of comparing functional medicine doctors’ protocols, Dr Steven Gundry removes potatoes everywhere and swaps for white root vegetables (still high in starch but does not spike blood sugar as quickly and is less toxic and more nutritious). He also reduces the quantities of starchy whole foods for reasons similar to Dr Terry Wahls.
Potato swap poster for less inflammation and more energy:
Aubergen-ie in the bottle grants you wishes: cooking with eggplant
I have rarely seen jarred eggplants (or aubergines for Northerners). When I have seen them, they are twice the cost of jarred capsicums, so I tend to leave them out of recipes. I have roasted fresh eggplants and peeled and seeded them. The layered vegetable bake was inspired by moussaka but swapped potato for white root vegetable (parsnip, turnip, or swede or all three). My made-up recipe for an anti-inflammatory mousakka bake was the most delicious I have ever made but takes time and patience to prep your eggplants. At least when I do put in the effort it freezes well and can create 6 to 12 portions.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a good quality seed-free eggplant dip (baba ganoush). I have not succeeded in Australia. Unfortunately, common brands like Yumi’s has skin and seeds (so does their Mediterranean dip). You could just as easily bake and peel eggplants for homemade dip though I have never tried to bulk cook, freeze and defrost later. Like avocado guacamole, baba ganoush is best served fresh.
That covers most of my regular nightshade food hacks to eat less toxic lectins to reduce body inflammation, improve cell function and be at my best.
To conclude, I found these quotes very motivating,
“disease begins at the cellular level, when cells are starved of the building blocks they need to conduct the chemistry of life properly, and that the root of optimal health begins with taking away the things that harm and confuse our cells while providing the body with the right environment in which to thrive.” - Dr Terry Wahls, author of The Wahls Protocol.
"I’ve been amused and pleased through the years when dyed-in-the-wool 'meat and potatoes' people come back to see me after a couple months on the program and tell me that they now crave salads full of green things. In fact, when they go a couple of days without one, they are ready to kill to get to the salad bar! They are completely shocked by their own behavior, which is now controlled by a new set of microbes, their true gut buddies, giving out new sets of instructions. These good bacteria are saying loud and clear to their hosts, 'Please help take care of our home.'" - Dr Steven R. Gundry, author of The Plant Paradox.
If you resist giving up potatoes and tomatoes now, it’s because your three kilograms of gut microorganisms are telling your brain to, but if you persist in the future your cravings for inflammatory foods will go away. I can attest to that.
REFERENCES
Food, Insider. “How Heinz Tomato Ketchup Is Made: The Making Of.” YouTube, February 7, 2020. https://youtu.be/c1LePreHLY0 .
Gladwell, Malcolm. “McDonald's Broke My Heart: Revisionist History.” Pushkin Industries. Accessed May 3, 2023. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/mcdonalds-broke-my-heart .
Gundry, Dr. Steven R.. The Plant Paradox: 1. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Gundry, Dr. Steven R . The Plant Paradox Cookbook: 2. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Monaco, Emily. “Can Belgium Claim Ownership of the French Fry?” BBC Travel. BBC, February 25, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180730-can-belgium-claim-ownership-of-the-french-fry .
Mann, Charles C. “How the Potato Changed the World.” Smithsonian.com, November 1, 2011. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/ .
Simpson, Professor Stephen J., Raubenheimer, Professor David. Eat Like the Animals: What Nature Teaches Us about the Science of Healthy Eating. Australia: HarperCollins, 2020.
Wahls MD, Terry. The Wahls Protocol. Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Wahls MD, Terry. The Wahls Protocol Cooking For Life. Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Image sources not cited: Unsplash or Creative Commons. Two infographics by Kat McArthur.