Lectins: chaos creators in your food / Part 1

Recently lectins have become the new enemy to avoid. Doctor Peter J. D’Adamo has been talking about them for nearly 30 years. Now others are jumping on the band wagon with their own vision… Some even recommend avoiding all foods containing lectins ! Wow there won’t be much left to eat.

What is the true story about the lectins that make their way into your body and can create chaos ? Must you avoid all lectins ? How do they affect you?

The discovery of lectins

Doctor Landsteiner discovered blood groups. He also discovered that some plant extracts can agglutinate the red blood cells of certain animals including humans.

Agglutination is the reason why certain blood groups are incompatible : the blood of a blood Type B person injected into a blood type A person creates agglutination of the blood cells that can be fatal.

Some years later the Harvard immunochemist, serologist and geneticist William Boyd PhD, after being interested for a long time in blood groups, discovered that certain substances (he later named them lectins) in plants could agglutinate the red blood cells of certain people but not of others. He had just found that lectins are blood type specific :

« The lima beans were ground and extracted with salt solution. The resulting extract agglutinated erythrocytes of some human individuals, but those of others only weakly, if at all. It was immediately evident that the differences were correlated with blood groups. » William Boyd

That’s when he called them lectins from the latin legere, I choose. From then on lectins became widely researched.

Already in the days of Landsteiner and Boyd, blood groups and lectins were intimately linked. Doctor Peter J. D’Adamo used these discoveries and took them further. He integrated them in his studies on blood groups and how they interact with our physiology and health and their role in our food choices.

The information in this article is taken from Doctor Peter J. D’Adamo’s writings and research.

Lectins: their effect on our health

Lectins are in many foods that we eat every day, even in chicken ! They are proteins that have the ability to bind to certain sugars on the surface of our cells and to attach themselves to them. That is what defines them.

But there is no need to avoid all lectins. Certain lectins like those in soy, peanuts, amaranth, lentils and snails have known beneficial effects on health, specifically in relation to cancer. Some lectins are good for one person and are best avoided by another. A few are best avoided by all.

Let’s get back to the lectins that have undesirable effects.

What creates chaos is their ability to attach themselves to certain sugars, a bit like the burrs of the burdock plant that stick to your clothes, and your dog’s hair. This attachment creates agglutination between your cells that can have physiological effects such as :

Inflammation
Digestive problems
Joint pain
Decreased immunity
Leaky gut (gut permeability)
Allergic and auto-immune reactions
Compromised nutrient absorption
Weight gain

Etc.

But and it’s a big but, all lectins don’t have to be avoided. Some are beneficial and many lectins (40-50%) are specific to each blood group.

The structures on the surface of your red blood cells, that define your blood group, are sugars. Nearly half of all lectins prefer to attach themselves to the sugars of one blood group rather than another.

It would be unnecessarily restrictive to follow a diet where you avoid all lectins. That’s just not how they work.

Can you deactivate lectins?

Yes, partially, for certain plant foods, by soaking or sprouting them, like making sourdough bread , or through cooking. Certain lectins are activated by cooking (as is the case for bananas).

One characteristic of lectins is that you only need very little to make a big mess. If you have a leaky and inflamed gut they will pass this barrier (that no longer acts as one) and can trigger your immune system. This can create an allergic type reaction.

Click here to read Part 2