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Most Common Harmful "Non-Self"

What your body makes doesn't harm you. But what about what you eat? Plants produce toxins to protect themselves, and these compounds often affect human health.

9/6/20266 min read

Click on the image above to gain access to the full PDF document that covers this topic.

Plants defend themselves through toxin production. These toxins can cause both immediate and long-term health issues. Discover what they are, the potential dangers they pose, and steps you can take to safeguard your health.

In a previous blog, I discussed the concept of "Self" - what you are made of - vs. "Non-Self" - things that get into your body that are not part of you - not part of your DNA and all your physiology. It is mostly the "Non-Self" that causes or triggers disease - particularly chronic conditions. The usual suspects are heavy metals, chemicals, pesticides, microplastics, and infectious agents of all ilk. Historically, we died young from exposure to infectious agents like TB. We have robust immune systems, and their job is to find and protect us from these pathogens. We have organs that can detoxify substances such as heavy metals and chemicals. The Liver and Kidneys are very accomplished at these tasks.

What is underappreciated is "non-self" constituents in foods, particularly vegetables. The scientific definition of some of these substances is "anti-nutrients." You may be familiar with some of these: oxalates, phytates, lectins, nightshades, and histamine producers, to name just the more well-understood of these compounds.

Many factors have contributed to a decline in our gut health - here in America, particularly due to processed and low-value foods, excessive use of pharmaceuticals, and pesticides. Of course, there are many more reasons. However, one very important side effect of gut dysbiosis is greater susceptibility to natural plant toxins.

Click on the image above to download the article. The main points discussed are:

  • Plant toxins and how they act

  • Their rankings within a class of toxins and compared across toxins

  • What cooking does and doesn’t do

  • What fermentation does and doesn’t do

Now, here is a history lesson on how we evolved to protect ourselves from plant toxins.

History Lesson: Raw vs Cooked

How plants protect themselves

Plants cannot flee, so they defend themselves in place using a combination of physical and chemical strategies aimed at insects, fungi, grazing animals, and humans.

Physical (mechanical) defenses

  • Thorns, spines, and prickles that deter large herbivores.

  • Tough or waxy cuticles, bark, and lignified tissue that are hard to chew and digest.

  • Trichomes (surface hairs), silica crystals (phytoliths), and raphides (needle-like calcium oxalate crystals) that irritate or injure the mouths and guts of feeders.

Chemical defenses
Plants synthesize "secondary metabolites" — compounds not needed for basic growth but highly effective at poisoning, repelling, or sickening would-be eaters. Major classes include:

  • Alkaloids (e.g., caffeine, nicotine, solanine in nightshades, quinine) — often bitter and neurotoxic.

  • Glycosides — including cyanogenic glycosides (in cassava, bitter almonds, lima beans) that release cyanide when tissue is damaged, and cardiac glycosides (foxglove).

  • Glucosinolates in cruciferous vegetables (mustard, cabbage), producing pungent, irritating breakdown products.

  • Tannins and other polyphenols that bind proteins, taste astringent, and reduce digestibility.

  • Protease inhibitors and lectins (e.g., in raw legumes) that block digestive enzymes or damage the gut lining.

  • Oxalates and saponins that impair nutrient absorption or disrupt cell membranes.

Many of these compounds are concentrated in seeds, roots, and unripe fruit — the parts most costly for the plant to lose. Bitterness, in particular, is an evolutionary warning signal, and human bitter-taste receptors likely evolved partly to detect these toxins.

How capturing fire helped humans overcome plant toxins

The control of fire gave humans a form of "external, pre-digestion" that chemically transformed food before it was eaten. Cooking helps overcome plant defenses in several ways:

Detoxification: Heat degrades or volatilizes many toxins. Boiling and roasting break down cyanogenic glycosides (making cassava and certain beans safe), inactivate protease inhibitors and lectins in legumes, and reduce some alkaloids and oxalates. Processing methods paired with fire — soaking, grinding, leaching, fermenting — further strip toxins.

Increased digestibility and energy yield: Heat gelatinizes starch and denatures protein, so cooked food releases substantially more usable calories than the same food raw, and requires less chewing and gut work to process.

Expanded diet: By neutralizing chemical defenses, fire converted many otherwise inedible or dangerous roots, tubers, seeds, and greens into staple foods, widening the range of environments humans could exploit.

Richard Wrangham and "cooking made us human"

In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009), Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that the control of fire and the habit of cooking were pivotal drivers of human evolution — not merely a cultural refinement. His central claims:

Cooking increased the net energy available from food, which could support the metabolic cost of a larger brain while allowing a smaller gut and smaller teeth and jaws compared with other apes.

The extra energy and time saved from reduced chewing and easier digestion freed hominins for other activities and may have shaped social behavior, including the division of labor around the hearth and shared meals.

Wrangham places the origin of cooking early — with Homo erectus, roughly 1.8-1.9 million years ago — linking it to the marked anatomical changes seen in that species.

The hypothesis remains debated, particularly regarding the exact date at which fire was habitually controlled, but it reframes cooking as a biological, evolutionary force rather than just a culinary one.

Hidden Hunger - a “first world disease" that makes our guts more vulnerable to toxins - like those found in plants.

The concept of hidden hunger—specifically framed as a "first world disease" driven by soil depletion and heavy industrial food processing—was extensively developed and popularized by Dr. Hans Konrad Biesalski.

Dr. Biesalski, a German physician, nutritionist, and professor at the University of Hohenheim, explicitly detailed this phenomenon in his landmark books, including Hidden Hunger (2013) and Hidden Hunger in the Developed World (2013).

Core Principles of His Framework

While international health organizations (like UNICEF and the WHO) historically associated hidden hunger primarily with caloric sufficiency alongside vitamin/mineral deficiencies in developing countries, Dr. Biesalski revolutionized the concept by showing how it directly applies to high-income, industrialized nations:

The Paradox of Abundance: People in wealthy nations can be overweight or consume excess calories (macronutrients) while simultaneously starving at the cellular level due to a lack of essential micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).

Soil Depletion & The Green Revolution: Intensive agricultural practices focus on maximizing crop yields and calorie density (e.g., carbohydrates in corn, wheat, and rice) rather than on nutritional quality. Overfarming and synthetic fertilizers degrade soil organic matter, meaning plants can no longer extract critical trace minerals (such as zinc, iron, and manganese) from the soil.

Industrial Processing: Ultra-processed foods further strip away any remaining natural micronutrients from the raw crops. This leaves modern diets dominated by "empty calories".

Delayed Consequences: Because the symptoms are not immediately visible in the stomach, this "hidden hunger" quietly fuels chronic, non-communicable first-world diseases like cardiovascular disorders, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, and metabolic syndrome over a lifespan.

Cooking Helps Reduce Some Aspects of Hidden Hunger

How Cooking Increases Nutrients

While some cooking methods destroy heat-sensitive vitamins (like Vitamin C), cooking increases the bioavailability (how easily your body absorbs and uses a nutrient) of many other compounds.

  • Breaking Down Cell Walls: Plant cells are locked inside tough walls made of cellulose. Heat softens these walls, making it easier for your digestive tract to access trapped vitamins and minerals.

  • Enhancing Antioxidants: Cooking certain vegetables increases specific antioxidants. For example, heat breaks down the cellular bonds in tomatoes, making lycopene significantly easier for your body to absorb than in raw tomatoes.

  • Improving Protein Digestibility: Cooking denatures proteins in meats, eggs, and legumes, making them far easier to digest and allowing your body to extract amino acids and bound minerals more efficiently.

The Evolutionary Reality: Pre-Cooking - More Necessary Now Compared to History Due to Rampant Gut Dysbiosis

Millions of years of raw plants: Long before our ancestors mastered cooking (which evidence places roughly 780,000 years ago or earlier), early hominins survived on raw leaves, roots, tubers, and fruits.

Anatomical shifts: Cooking made food softer and easier to digest, leading to smaller teeth and weaker jaws over evolutionary time, but the human body remains fully capable of processing various raw plant fibers and nutrients.

Historical Perspective: Eating Raw Through the Ages

Intermittent raw eating: Throughout history, people regularly snacked on raw fruits, fresh garden greens, and roots when traveling or harvesting.

Cultural fears of raw produce: In many historical eras—such as medieval Europe—eating raw vegetables and unwashed greens was heavily discouraged because people noticed it often carried illnesses or parasites from contaminated soil and water. Cooked vegetables were much more common as a safe daily standard.

The Modern Fad: The Strict "Raw Diet"

19th-century origins: The organized, dogmatic lifestyle of eating exclusively uncooked food (known as raw foodism or rawism) did not start in the Stone Age; it began in the mid-1800s with health reformers like Sylvester Graham and grew in the 20th century through alternative medicine movements.

Recent explosion: The modern mainstream obsession with 100% raw vegan or raw paleo diets is a 21st-century faux-wellness trend rather than a recreation of actual ancient human habits, which combined raw foraging with widespread cooking.

Modern Context

A primarily raw diet has severe chronic negative consequences that are not offset by benefits.

  • Insufficiency in micronutrient absorption in many, including those with gut dysbiosis of any type.

  • Insufficient breakdown of the myriad harmful substances in the plant protection arsenal.

  • A positive is providing organisms indigenous to the plant that help build a microbiome to facilitate digestion. However, fermenting these foods is superior to eating them raw in this capacity, as it improves the bioavailability of their micronutrients.

Here I present a historical summary of how our ancient ancestors were protected from plant toxins. Modern fads, like "raw," and general poor health from other causes are exacerbating the impact of plant toxins.

Dr. Ewald, the author of "Plaque Time," introduced me to the concept of "crypticity." Crypticity is the state or quality of being cryptic—hidden, obscure, or difficult to understand. The term is used across several specialized fields to describe traits or processes that are concealed or hard to detect.

This may be one of the MOST IMPORTANT concepts in health and disease because most diseases spring up later in life, yet the trigger event(s) may have occurred far in our past. Thus, the connection between the ailment and its cause is undetermined, and the treatment does NOT address the ROOT CAUSE.