I was answering a new inquiry and thought I would share what I said with you:
Dear Andrea,
Well, it sounds like you are on the right track for healing your gut! Information I’ve gotten recently really supports the diet you are on, avoiding grains, and eating only grass-fed meats, dairy and fats, due to food factors called lectins. The data really supports eating foods we as humans have eaten prior to our “civilization,” ten or twenty thousands of years ago. Perhaps longer. Fermenting foods seems to reduce the lectins significantly, and is probably the reason we started cooking things. Cooking reduces them too, especially pressure cooking for things like beans. Lectins cause “holes” in the gut, and cause inflammation. They are fine for bodies that have eaten them forever. We haven’t. Only in the last 10-30,000 years. Not nearly enough time for the bodies to change.
I personally avoid all grains and beans. White rice and flours are better (go figure) since the lectins are mostly in the hull and germ, and fermented (like sourdough) helps break down the lectins and glutens, to make them less harmful. We need a bit of lectins on a regular basis so that we do not have a severe reaction if we get a few unexpectedly, or at holidays. But that is best done after the gut has healed.
Apparently cassava flour and sorghum flour are okay (can get from Amazon) as they don’t have the lectin content. So, if one wants to make something for family for the holidays, and feel better about it, one could make cooked sweet potato (instead of pumpkin) pie with cassava and sorghum flour crust to avoid the lectins. Tastes great! For a raw version use a nut crust, held together with dates ground in there, and make the filling raw with eggs and papaya, some honey, dates, or stevia and spices (you may need to freeze this to have it be stiff enough; probably need to experiment a bit!)
You are best off, of course, eating food the way we ate it for hundreds of thousands of years: raw. Interesting that the foods that are not so good for us are hardly digestible raw. For us. WE don’t have the bacteria or enzymes to digest them or deactivate the chemical defense mechanisms that they have.
Grass-fed meats and dairy, raw honey, tender green leaves and various green things that we can eat easily, as well as fruit in season, particularly berries and citrus seem to be okay. Books like the Plant Paradox are helpful in identifying what plant are good and why. There is a lot to learn and research in this area.
The Primal Diet book is interestingly accurate on what is good for us, and emphasizes why things are better for you raw. There is a lot of data there. It’s what saved my life!
Sign in with us (no cost) and you can peruse the website for prices and what we have.
Our prices are competitive, but our quality is superior. I find I eat less quantity, as the food is far more usable.
Sincerely,
Marilyn Brown
RA
