High & Low Lectin Foods And Inflammation - The Lectin-Free Diet

Hey,

This diet was really helpful for me, for reducing joint pains and inflammation, as well as for improving energy levels. I tried a lot of different approaches, but this by far got me the best results and was the first thing that actually helped me to feel significantly better. It is similar to paleo in a number of ways but also different.

If you’ve ever heard of gluten, then lectins are similar. They’re also anti-nutrients and apparently can set off food sensitivity reactions. So if the person is sensitive to certain lectin foods, then they can experience negative reactions. It’s also not necessarily right after eating the food, so it’s not very easy to tell unless you know to look for it or that it’s even possible. So literally, avoiding certain lectin foods can get rid of certain problems, at least as long as you don’t eat that lectin food. It’s a very good remedy in that sense.

High lectin foods are the ones people tend to avoid most. Some examples of high lectin foods are nightshades, beans, bread, and legumes.

Some examples of lower lectin foods but still can cause some issues would be something like rice. White rice is probably the lowest in lectins, followed by sprouted rice.

When it comes to lectin foods you want to avoid foods that you are sensitive to and/or foods high in lectins. You possibly even want to avoid foods low in lectins if they cause you problems and in this diet, mostly the lower the better.

That brings me to my next point, which is that lectins can actually be lowered in amount in foods. For example, lectins are often already lowered naturally through cooking, like in the case of beans, which are toxic with high lectin content when raw. Processes like sprouting can lower the lectin content further and actually increase the nutritional value.

The foods that would be considered good to eat on a lectin-free diet are typically meats, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Starchy foods are mostly sweet potatoes, yams, and white rice. Interestingly, white bread has fewer lectins than whole wheat bread.

Even the gluten-free breads, cookies, etc. typically have lectins in them. They typically will include potato which is a nightshade or pseudo-grains. Some people are sensitive to lots of lectin foods and so would want to avoid those foods too. It seems that people can be sensitive to lots of foods and even chemicals if they are not in optimal health, so that’s a good place to start.

As far as ease of implementation, the lectin-free diet is fairly easy to follow, especially if you feel way better as a result of eating that way. Perhaps the most difficult part is even knowing that the lectin food sensitivities are there in the first place. Once you start to notice a certain food definitely negatively affects you, then it’s pretty easy to avoid it completely. Once you get into the habit of eating that way, then it’s really quite easy also.

I found it easier to start sort of “from the ground up” where I cut out a lot of high and lower lectin foods first. Then once I did that, I stuck with that for a while, eating what seemed like pretty safe foods that seemed to be really low in lectins or lectin-free. With that, I was able to feel a lot better and it made it easy to recognize how much it was helping. Then, I was able to add foods back in to see if they affected me. If I had tried to remove foods one by one it may have been much harder to tell if it was helping, so I decided to go for a pretty disciplined approach, although again, it was easy to stick with. The hardest part was getting past the habits I had formed of eating certain foods.

Also, I will say that having my lectin diet foods planned out ahead of time, before I started “from the ground up” so to speak, helped with the transition a lot.

The idea of a low lectin diet and the effects that lectins can have on the body is pretty interesting. There are quite a few studies about them. Seems certainly similar to when gluten became a big thing when some people started to benefit greatly from removing it from their diet. Lectins and inflammation seem to be correlated in that they can drive up immune response. Consider that lectin foods could be setting off an immune response, such as in an autoimmune disorder, but the person is unaware they have a sensitivity to it. This was talked about specifically in one study about dietary lectins setting off Rheumatoid Arthritis symptoms, although quite frankly it seems more widely applicable than just that when you look at all the other disorders and food sensitivities that come with them. Either way, leaky gut has been prominently talked about in the past half a dozen years, and food sensitivities seem to be running more and more rampant. Until we can find a way to systematically heal the gut and possibly resolve the problems our increasingly toxic world is causing, a lectin-free diet can prove highly beneficial for some people in the meantime.