A healthy, robust gut can manage a certain number of foods containing so-called “antinutrients.” Depending on your cultural background, ethnicity and the foods you’ve become used to, you may not experience any adverse effects at all. But if you have a sensitive gut, autoimmune disease in your family history, or other health or fatigue issues, try to avoid overloading your body with the following antinutrients.
Saponins
Vegetables and grains that cause a foam on the water as you cook them (onions, rice, potatoes, soy beans, legumes) contain saponins, which can take out whole sections of your epithelial layer.3
Rinsing rice and soaking legumes (pulses and beans) overnight before cooking them rids them of most of the saponins—cooking legumes for over six hours can destroy the lectins, too, and you can speed this up if you have a pressure cooker. The reason why we have historically cooked onions on a low heat until they become transparent (before adding the other ingredients) is to ensure that the saponins are destroyed.
Gluten
The tight junctions in the lining of your gut mucosa have doorways acting as regulators between the internal environment in the gut and the body. Vital food nutrients pass across the intestinal wall, toxins are kept out, but the doorways are only flung open when the gut’s defense system meets a pathogen that’s too fierce for it to cope with alone. By opening the tight junctions, and therefore making the gut They can be loosely divided into two classes of protein: gliadin that helps bread to rise when it’s baked, and glutenin that gives bread its much-loved elasticity. In a nutshell, gluten mimics the action of zonulin and flings open the doorways of the gut mucosa, thereby creating a leaky ‘teabag’ gut. Apart from the gut contents flowing out into the body, so too do our intestinal microbes—whether they be good guys or bad guys—in search of new homes in our organs or worse, our brain. Both actions have consequences that cause the big guns of the body’s immune system to crack down hard, causing inflammation, which underlies all major chronic diseases, from most forms of cancer to heart disease, from arthritis to type 2 diabetes or obesity. Even worse, the immune system can become confused and start attacking some of our own cellular proteins thinking that they’re enemies. Do this for a prolonged period of time and you have the ‘perfect storm’ that triggers autoimmune diseases, which are rising fast with over 100 now described in the medical literature.
