CONTENTS
1. Nightshade food hacks are quick health gains for busy foodies
2. Lectin toxins are how plants protect themselves when they can’t move
3. Nightshade lectins cannot be disarmed by the human body
4. Modern food production breaks many golden nutrition rules
5. Three reasons nightshades became popular
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. We are all inflamed to some degree by modern living which can be easily improved so you can think, feel and look better.
This is the reason this second article is not about the Top Ten likely allergens like wheat or dairy that are so attached to Western tastes. I have reviewed dozens of doctor, dietician and nutritionist eating plans and I’ve adapted their tips for sick people to meet my needs; someone who is healthy but my performance was slipping. This anti-inflammatory food series is how I have the best of both worlds: improved cellular function and delicious meals. Along the way I will explain ‘the why’ found in medical research to motivate you too.
Potatoes, tomatoes, capsicum, chillies and eggplant are the nightshade vegetables and fruits introduced to Western cuisine from the Americas.
New World fruits and vegetables arrived within the past 500 years and the human body has not evolved to neutralise their toxic lectins. That also goes for native Americans who arrived from Asia 15,000 years ago.
“Fun fact: Americans and Europeans actively shunned tomatoes up until the mid-1800s” - Dr Steven R. Gundry, author of The Plant Paradox.
Nightshades are in almost every popular Western dish and some Eastern too. Tomatoes and potatoes particularly. Luckily, it is how you prepare most of them that can stop (or lower) inflammatory lectins and you don’t have to stop eating them completely.
2) Lectin toxins are how plants protect themselves when they can’t move
Nightshades are nutritious but because plants can’t flee from being eaten, they fight using chemicals hoping to deter biters. It’s a two-sided coin. Often the plants with the most valuable nutrition put up the strongest defences, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten this far.
The lectin quantity that can paralyse a tiny fruit-eating insect does not deter larger animals like us and those we eat. Meat contains lectins as well because we are what we eat. Our cells are replaced by building blocks from our food. Over time larger animals that eat lectins have weakened digestion, immunity and other vital cell functions so the plants also gained some protection by making larger predators weaker and slower.
However, some plants want help spreading their seeds (or babies), the reason fruit is so tempting, but they don’t want to be eaten into extinction. It is a balancing act of nutrition and toxicity. By the way, vegetables with seeds like nightshades are technically fruits. There are two lectin strategies by annuals like grasses and vines, and ‘multi-annuals’ like trees and other shrubs.
Annuals like grasses and vines (also some shrubs), don’t need their seeds carried far because the parent plants die off annually. The seeds have several toxins to stop predators, so instead fall to the ground near the parent because they won’t compete. The nightshades we eat today are from vines or biannual shrubs (capsicum). Lectins increase when a potato is sprouting into a plant which is why we’ve always been told to cut out greening potato skins.
“The lectins in the nightshade family include solanine, a neurotoxin.” (toxic to your nervous system including your nerves, spinal cord and brain) – Dr Steven R. Gundry, author of The Plant Paradox.
For non-annual plants that grow for longer than a year, like deciduous trees, unripe fruit has higher lectins. Ripe fruit has lower lectins and more enticing colours, to tell ‘seed disperser’ people and animals it’s time to eat and carry away the fully developed seed ‘babies’ from the parent plants. Nightshades are not trees so this food group is for another blog.
3) Nightshade lectins cannot be disarmed by the human body
As I mentioned, why many of us have a nightshade intolerance, neither 500 years nor 15,000 years are enough time for the human body to change its complex biochemistry to detoxify newer lectins. Basically, it’s easier to change which single-celled bacteria live in your gut than to evolve a complex human with 37 trillion cells of at least 200 types; blood cells, brain cells and so on. We have a critical relationship with even more evolutionally-ancient ‘bugs’ in our gut (approximately three kilograms of microbes). Our gut microbes help us digest foods into building blocks as well as make critical chemicals that we can’t.
While we may be very slowly evolving, if our taste nor smell didn’t notice a toxic food and it’s in our stomach, the next line of defence is digestive discomfort like indigestion, cramps or worse to quickly remove and/or give clear signs to avoid eating next time. Some people push through this discomfort when exposed to food sensitivities and tummy discomfort may go away the more you eat the same food irritant, but cellular inflammation would still be occurring, in the case of lectins. If you regularly take antacids you are likely eating foods your body isn’t coping with, and masking painful symptoms fans the fire of inflammation when avoiding or swapping the food would lower inflammation.
There are thousands of types of lectin plant proteins. Some of us are born with antibodies to some lectins. For other newer foods, we don’t have built-in immunity and our immune systems work to protect us. Inflammation is a response by the immune system. E.g. if you get a cut, it becomes inflamed to assist healing and then stops being inflamed once healed. Unfortunately, when it comes to nightshade lectins, constant consumption all-year-round means inflammation is constant.
Ongoing inflammation is debilitating for some people (based on genetics and environmental exposures), and they express a disease. For the rest of us, ongoing fatigue, regular irritability or indigestion, and other mild symptoms show inflammation but not a disease diagnosis. In these cases, we are not sick, neither are we optimally healthy, not performing at our best day to day.
“For some genetically susceptible people lectins will cause excessive inflammation…which may lead to overactivity of the immune systems, increasing the risk of autoimmunity. Others won’t have a problem…Autoimmunity is a condition in which the immune cells become confused and begin attacking cellular structures of the person’s own body… study after study has shown that diet, toxin exposure, and activity level account for 70 to 95 percent of the risk for autoimmune disease, mental health issues, cancer, and, in fact, most chronic diseases.” – Dr Terry Wahls, author of The Wahls Protocol.
It astounds me there are eighty known autoimmune diseases. Common autoimmune diseases include psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis. Life-threatening auto-immune diseases include diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
4) Modern food production breaks a lot of golden nutrition rules
Unfortunately, today we pick firmer, unripe fruit that is higher in lectins to ship far distances undamaged. The modern gassing of unripe fruits to give ripeness does not give lower lectins. Plus, we now eat seasonal fruits all year around, effectively micro-dosing lectins constantly.
Modern food production has broken many golden food rules of pre-industrial peoples, and for nightshades, we stopped removing skins and seeds and stopped pressure cooking. Mechanised mass production has cut corners for cost efficiencies. Toxins that cause immediate sickness (allergies or food poisoning) is more important to remedy by the system than toxins that make people sick after years of mild inflammation.
The industrialisation of food has also introduced thousands of new, man-made chemicals in processed foods so they last longer and taste and look enticing. People have lost their ability to taste or smell foods and detect what is nutritious.
Our senses, especially taste and smell, once told us which foods are good for us or toxic (and before the age of additional synthetic chemicals, these nutritious foods or dishes were also more delicious). Once many of us could smell a bruised berry or crushed leaf and know if it is worth digesting for energy or sustenance or medicine. Western food choices also became more limited with the age of farming and less foraging that began 10,000 years ago.
Today most of us can smell raw seafood or meat and it smells fresh or rotten, good or bad for us. Take soured milk or fermented milk yoghurt, the smell difference is the bacteria within each (plus spoiled fats in the former). Bad microbes in soured milk cause harm (as well as the oxidised, rancid fat), good microbes in yoghurted milk cause goodness. Your sense of taste and smell will tell you before it goes inside your body to cause harm. We used to have that ability for many more foods than meats and dairy.
“Animals possess five appetites – for protein, carbohydrate, fat, salt and calcium. In natural food environments these appetites cooperate to help animals choose a balanced diet. Humans have this ability too, but the modern food environment is so altered that our five appetites can no longer work together. Rather, they compete, each vying for its own nutrient.” - Professor Stephen Simpson and Professor David Raubenheimer, authors of Eat Like the Animals.
Even a spinach leaf is made up of protein, fat, carbs, salts and calcium but in differing quantities to avocado or peas. Now I look differently at meat-flavoured carbs like honey-soy chicken kettle potato chips, chemically engineered to confuse our instinctual five appetites.
5) Three reasons nightshades became popular
Why did Europeans eat inflammatory nightshades from the New World if they are so bad for us? Firstly, Kings wanted novelty and rarity brought across distant seas, and then the masses wanted to live like kings. New World foods became trendy.
Secondly, nightshades grew abundantly on foreign shores with fewer native predators and stronger chemical defences. If you’ve grown nightshades in your garden, like tomatoes you will know they can grow rapidly and take over just like weeds.
Thirdly, in the past many Peoples were peasant labourers enslaved to masters and little of their toil went into their bellies. They ate what they could to survive. Before rapid transport, if there was a famine you couldn’t ship food from elsewhere. It took years for potatoes to be widely adopted. Another tipping point was potatoes could be rotated between biannual wheat crops to rest soil without losing harvest time because different plants use different soil elements.
“There are more than 50,000 edible plant species around the world—plants that provide a bevy of unique and beneficial nutrients that we consumed as foragers. And yet today, our diets are dominated by three crops: wheat, rice, and corn, which together account for 60% of the world’s calorie intake. These grains provide a source of cheap energy, but are relatively low in nutrition.”– Max Lugavere, author of Genius Foods (Genius Living).
Nightshades like tomatoes and potatoes fed the masses, prevented deaths from famine. You would choose inflammatory food over starvation, especially if the food was quite nutritious with learned preparation.
“The Italians and French learned two centuries ago to peel and seed tomatoes before eating them.” - Dr Steven R. Gundry, author of The Plant Paradox.
Finally, the average life expectancy of a Renaissance person was 30-40 years old. Today we live longer but the gift of old age comes instead with a chronic disease or several. People today work for twice as many years as Renaissance people, so I stand by my goal that improved daily performance comes with eating ‘cleaner’ anti-inflammatory foods. Especially, now often every household member is working and spending much less time preparing food compared to a generation or two ago.
We’ve left food prep. to large-scale mechanised factories where efficiencies keep costs down but toxins up. In the past 150 years of industrialisation, and even less time since mass production, people have forgotten that great-grandmothers and their ancestors used methods like skinning and pressure cooking to make certain foods more digestible and nutritious.
Nutritious foods naturally taste better to us. Taste bone broth versus stock from powdered stock cubes and your body will instinctively know and tell you via your nose, mouth, and eye stimuli. The same goes for fruit ripened on the plant as long as possible. If you buy the best quality food you can afford then you can combine foodie tastes with anti-inflammatory eating.
In summary,
The good news is a pressure cooker and/or skinning and seeding nightshades will make nightshades 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 nightshade nutrition. For example, you have likely seen in a recipe the scoring and blanching of fresh tomatoes for a minute or seen charred capsicums with skins off in jars.
The bad news is goji berries are also nightshades despite a superfood trend, native to China instead The Americas.
In my next blog I will share with you my food hacks for every nightshade fruit and vegetable. Then you’ll be less likely to break your anti-inflammatory food habits. You can have improved cellular function as well as have delicious meals.
Featured Doctor Bios
Dr Terry Wahls has three versions of a modified paleo diet depending how sick her patients are with autoimmune diseases. Her focus is consuming as much fresh, colourful foods as possible for their holistic and bioavailable nutrition, as well as removing food sensitivities. She is hospital doctor that got multiple sclerosis and she took several years to figure out how to reverse her paralysis when conventional treatment did not help. After being a vegetarian for most of her adult life Dr Terry Wahls also went back to eating meat. The past decade she has treated hundreds with The Wahls Protocol and continues medical studies in the field of functional medicine.
Dr Steven R. Gundry popularised a lectin-free diet with The Plant Paradox eating plan and removes more potentially harmful foods than Dr Wahls. For 15 years, Dr Gundry was a professor and heart surgeon, also specialising in immune systems for organ transplants. Then Dr Gundry reversed his own obesity and developed The Plant Paradox program 15 years ago.
“I could reverse heart disease with diet instead of surgery. To this end, I established the International Heart and Lung Institute—and within it the Center for Restorative Medicine—in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, California.” – Dr Steven R. Gundry.
REFERENCES
Department of Health & Human Services. “Autoimmune Disorders.” Better Health Victoria Australia, August 20, 2001. https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/autoimmune-disorders .
Gardner, Jameson. “How Many Types of Cells Are in the Human Body?” Human Cell Types | Ask A Biologist, May 17, 2017. https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/human-cell-types.
Gundry, Dr. Steven R.. The Plant Paradox: 1. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Gundry, Dr. Steven R . The Plant Paradox Cookbook: 2. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Kramer, Daniel. “Discovering New Cell Types One at a Time.” Nature news. Nature Publishing Group, June 2, 2015. https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bio2.0/discovering_new_cell_types_one/.
Lugavere, Max; Grewal, Paul. Genius Foods (Genius Living). Harper Wave. Kindle Edition.
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