The Hidden Power of Lectin: Edible, Addictive, Tiny Time Bombs?
There’s a secret ingredient in every grain we eat. And it’s story is one that nobody on the sales or manufacturing sides of the food market equation wants to talk about. It’s about the damage we’re causing to our bodies through our dietary reliance on grain-based carbohydrates. It’s about lectin.
What’s lectin?
Lectin in wheat is a glycoprotein known as a wheat germ agglutinin (WGA). A glycoprotein is a molecule that consists of a carbohydrate and a protein, and they play an important role in our bodies. In our immune systems, for example, almost all of the key molecules involved in immune response are glycoproteins. They’re a defense mechanism used to protect us against external attack from bacteria.
So lectin is found in wheat. And barley, and oats, and rye; in fact lectin is strong in all grains, not just the ones containing gluten. But it’s also found in every other food, both vegetable and animal, so it’s impossible to just avoid it. You can minimize it by choosing foods that have a lower lectin content, and we’ll discuss that in another article. Here though, our focus is the highly modified lectin of the wheat plant.
Lectin defends the wheat seeds against natural enemies like animals, insects and fungi. It’s thought that this defence includes making animals (like humans) feel ill after eating it. And now, thanks to the expertise and professionalism of food scientists over several decades of genetic modification, lectin has now become a super-protein, and is now very much better at it’s job.
What’s changed?
Wheat has been hybridized for generations now to give us greater yields and shorter life-cycles, to improve the productivity of farmers. It’s been developed to grow in less than ideal environments, and to fight off all manner of fungal, bacterial and insect attacks. We’ve made it shorter, so the stalk is better able to withstand wind and storms. It has a relatively enormous seed head, because we want more seed per plant. It’s bred to be drought and temperature tolerant, and to be resistant to attack from pests and diseases. Most importantly, it’s now able to withstand the chemical onslaught of the fertilizers and pesticides necessary to grow it in enough places to feed growing populations.
And it does. Wheat is one of the three top cereals eaten worldwide (the others being rice and maize/corn). But at what price? These modifications have ultimately created the super-lectin WGA, which research is beginning to show as a difficult and potentially dangerous adversary for our immune and digestive systems.
A dislaimer here: Research on lectins is still in it’s infancy, and many of the findings explored in this article are yet to be conclusively proven. Yet enough of what has been uncovered is so disturbing it’s prudent to bring it out of the laboratory shadows and into the public domain so consumers can at least make more informed dietary decisions.
Lectins are hardy proteins that do not break down easily. They are resistant to stomach acid and digestive enzymes. You can’t break them down with ordinary cooking methods. Even grinding the grain down to flour doesn’t help. Which means that after we’ve eaten them they slowly move through our digestive system, undigested. Being sticky little molecules, they then attach themselves to and begin damaging the lining of our intestines. This triggers auto-immune responses, and our bodies go to work trying to defend against what they see as an invader.
For many, the battle is brief and one-sided, and leaves few, if any effects. For some the effects may be mild; bloating, slow digestion, a general feeling of fatigue. Coeliacs however, often experience the full spectrum of cramping, nausea, vomiting, diaorrhea and other typical symptoms.
The understanding of the cause of symptoms, and the diagnosis of the disease, has improved rapidly in recent times, and the science is getting stronger all the time. But it seems that science may be largely responsible. The hybridization that wheat has undergone, both naturally over the thousands of years we’ve been growing it, and through our efforts in the laboratory in the last 50 years or so, has transformed the plant, to the extent that it bears little resemblance to it’s ancestors.
This has caused changes to the amino acids in wheat’s gluten proteins, which ongoing studies are suggesting as a possible cause for the huge (400%) increase in diagnosed Coeliac’s disease over the last 40 years. Similarly, the gliadin protein in wheat has also changed, turning into a potent appetite stimulant, and has also been blamed for contributing to the sharp rise in inflammatory diseases.
It’s even been suggested that gliadin acts in a similar way to opium, meaning the more you eat, the more you want to eat. Consider the feeling you get when you walk past and smell a bakery. Or you walk past an Italian restaurant and have a weird craving for pasta. A sub-conscious need for wheat? Where did that come from? Coffee has a similar effect, and is recognized as addictive. Tobacco does something similar, for more sinister reasons.
Gliadin is also charged with acting as an anti-nutrient, i.e. interfering with the bodies ability to absorb other nutrients.
Can I handle it?
If you can grasp the magnitude of the alterations to the grains properties over such a short space of time, it’s not such a leap to question the ability of the digestive system to deal with the changes. Up until the late 19th century, wheat had been evolving naturally since the Neolithic Revolution, approximately 8-12,000 years ago, when our hunter/gatherer ancestors stopped picking a few grains as they wandered and began developing modern agricultural practices. So for around 10,000 years things had been rolling along relatively gently, with us adapting slowly but progressively to the natural hybridization of wheat.
Then the industrial revolution happened and changed large scale farming practices forever. And with the rapid growth of agri-science, suddenly we made some huge technological and biological leaps forward. We created these super cereals, and unleashed them on the genetically unprepared immune and digestive systems of a population increasingly reliant on a cheap source of food. Little wonder people started getting sick!
Sources:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=873700
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_wheat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution