Sean: Letʼs get into anti-nutrients because they come up a lot in Paleo talk. In your AHS
presentation, you talked about phytates, saponins, oxalates, lectins, wheat germ
agglutinin (WGA), and some enzyme inhibitors. By now, I hope that our audience is
pretty familiar with most of those.
But before I ask you about them individually, I want to go over a series of questions
regarding these anti-nutrients that people should be asking before making claims about
them. So, go ahead and comment on these questions that you listed. The first one is,
“Does processing, such as hulling, soaking, germination, fermentation, and cooking
eliminate, degrade, or denature the compound or modify the anti-nutrientʼs activity?”
Mat: Actually, if you go online and you just google my name and the AHS talk, itʼll come
up and you can watch it for free. And on there, thereʼs a slide where I think thereʼs about
ten questions that I ask myself when Iʼm trying to determine whether or not an antinutrient
is going to be problematic. And those four questions that you have here are
highlighting stuff like that.
So why is it important to do that? Well, you know, Iʼm going to have to name names
here, and I donʼt like to do that. But, Loren Cordain has a talk on YouTube where heʼs
giving it in Calgary. And I think itʼs for multiple sclerosis, but Iʼm not one hundred percent
sure. And heʼs talking about the Paleo diet and he is going on and on about lectins and
how theyʼre bad. And it turns out that lectins are, in fact, really bad. They are very
difficult to digest. They will get to the gut. They can get into the bloodstream. The peanut
lectin is probably one of the reasons why peanuts are so allergenic.
But it turns out that most of the really problematic lectins - maybe for the exception of a
few lectins in nuts and legumes, like the peanut lectin - most of them are completely decomposed with heat and cooking. And we do not eat raw grains. There might be one
exception there, and thatʼs wheat germ agglutinin. Some people will actually get that
with wheat germ. Theyʼll consume wheat germ because they think itʼs healthy for them,
and then theyʼll get exposed to wheat germ agglutinin because the wheat germ is not
cooked.
But there are experiments and papers out there that I showed in my talk where people
are taking even lectin-enriched pastas, and they cook them just like normal pasta and
itʼs undetectable at the end. And that is true of the lectins of wheat germ agglutinin,
which is really problematic. Many of the lectins that are in legumes like PHA,
phytohemagglutinin, is another one.
So, I think that the risk of that has been overblown. And the risk there is that if you say
that to a plant biologist who is familiar with that stuff, you have just lost all credibility.
That plant biologist would think, “Okay, this person is an extremist.” Theyʼll turn around
and not listen to you, and theyʼll tell anyone that they can that youʼre full of it. And thatʼs
pretty dangerous.
There are some lectins, like I said, that are not decomposed by heating. Some in nuts
as well as the one in peanuts, specifically. So thatʼs not too surprising to me that those
are some of the most allergenic foods. But when you are trying to determine whether or
not this anti-nutrient is problematic, like I said, you have to go through this list of
questions. You have to ask, “What kind of processing did this go through? Was it
hulled? Was it soaked, germinated, fermented, cooked? And what kind of affect does
that have on the anti-nutrient? Does it get degraded in the digestion process? Has it
been studied as part of food or was it just given to a critter in isolation? (Because that
really does not mimic what would happen in real life.) Are we talking about just in vitro
studies or in vivo studies?” All these things are very important to ask.
A couple of other anti-nutrients I should talk about are saponins and some phytates. So
saponins and glycoalkaloids are very similar compounds, but theyʼre not identical. So
donʼt mix the two because a scientist who knows this stuff is probably going to call you
out on it. But those things are defense chemicals that are made by plants. They have a
variety of biological activity and chemists love to study this stuff - very small variations in
molecules that are going to change the biological activity and give you either a
beneficial effect, no effect, or maybe some kind of detrimental effect. We donʼt know.
So I looked at all of that literature and some of these compounds are actually good.
Some of them are known to be anti-carcinogenic. Now, the problem with that is that if
itʼs been tested in a test tube, then you donʼt know what side effects it could have. So
thatʼs a caveat. The only one that I can say thereʼs enough evidence to say that it is bad
is quillaja saponin. This is something that is isolated from the soapbark tree. It is an oral
adjuvant, which means itʼs going to prime your immune system to attack foreign
substances. This is something thatʼs great for putting in a vaccine, not so great for
putting into food. And it turns out that itʼs used as an emulsifying agent in food. Youʼll
find it in a lot of junk food like soda and stuff like that. So, that one I can tell you is very
problematic.
But thereʼs another family thatʼs found in ginseng thatʼs thought to be anti-carcinogenic.
They fed it to people, and they noticed that they have to feed super large quantities to
even detect some of the metabolites in the blood. So for example, it was where one of
the sugars has been cleaved or something like that, so itʼs not the intact compound. And
again, thatʼs one mistake I would say that Loren Cordain makes. He doesnʼt differentiate
any of them. And like I said if the structure is a little bit different, itʼs going to have
different properties. He thinks that all of them are bad and he says, “Look, this food has
a lot of it, and this food has a lot of it.” But really when I look at it, thereʼs just really little
thatʼs known about whether they resist heat. They donʼt appear to resist digestive
enzymes because when theyʼre absorbed, they show up in the blood in a slightly
different form.
(...)
Sean: From a practical point of view, Iʼm sure our audience out there is really confused.
Theyʼre thinking, “Hey, I stopped eating grains and this food and the other food because
of the saponins or because of the lectins. Now youʼre saying that theyʼre not all bad.
So do we choose foods on an individual basis? How do we make this practical for
people?”
Mat: When I have looked at the totality of the evidence, and when it comes to grains
and legumes, I am pretty sure that it is the proteins that are problematic. And thatʼs
going to be the subject of my next HS talk probably. So, gluten is very problematic.
Gluten is part of the family of proteins called prolamines. Prolamins
are prolein-rich proteins that are very difficult to digest because human beings donʼt
have really good prolyl oligopeptidase enzymes to cleve the peptide bonds. And these
peptides can mess with various receptors in the gut. Some of them are excitotoxins.
They have various activities. And with gluten alone there are like 50 different variations
of peptides, depending on where you cut the protein, that can be problematic. This was
a recent paper by Fasano that has stated as much.
So if you look at the other prolamins that are in grains or their equivalent in legumes and
such like that, that are called globulins that are also problematic, theyʼre very allergenic,
actually. I think that this explains what weʼre seeing as opposed to the other antinutrients.
