Paul Saladino· MD
and the lectins can travel through the superhighway of the vagus nerve which goes directly from the gut to the brain and they can be seen in the brains of these animals so this is a wild concept that perhaps this is a big perhaps the hypothesis is now that is our lectins contributing to Parkinson's or neurodegenerative diseases and people who are sensitive there's a very interesting an observational study in Denmark looking at incidents of Parkinson's disease in people who have had vagotomy which is severing the vagus nerve not to prevent Parkinson's but usually for other medical conditions like increased gastric acidity there are you know in the last 30 years there have been surgeries where we would cut the vagus nerve and in the people who have had they got amines there is a 40% less incidence of Parkinson's disease and it's like what is going on there that is a crazy hypothesis you know like is this potentially this is one of the super highways by which plant lectins travel up through the gut into the brain and is it causing neurodegenerative disease could it be contributing to Alzheimer's you know many of these diseases in the brain are actually autoimmune in nature and I think that the whole idea around Parkinson's is autoimmune or inflammatories they're all changing I mean the landscape is changing so this idea that lectins can trigger autoimmunity lectins can trigger inflammation is very intriguing and lectins are in all plant foods they're perhaps most strongly in the seeds that it's the seeds nuts grains and legumes but they're in all the parts of a plant they're in plant stems plant leaves plant roots so the avoidance of lectins could really help people in some situations