If you still want to eat nightshades but would like to lower their alkaloid content, you can accomplish this by peeling your potatoes, limiting green tomatoes, and fully cooking these vegetables. Eliminating nightshades means missing out on some important nutrients.
Best foods to replace nightshade plants
Replace cayenne and red pepper with cumin, white, and black pepper. Replace goji berries with blueberries. Replace tomato sauces with alternative sauces such as pesto, olive, and alfredo.
There is no cure or known remedy.
Pressure cooking also helps with removing lectins in nightshades and cucurbits. Whenever you use these vegetables in cooking, use a pressure cooker, especially if you didn't peel and deseed them. And even if you do, the extra step of pressure cooking will reduce lectins further.
Summary. A nightshade allergy is an immune response to the compound in nightshade plants called alkaloids. Types of nightshade plants include potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, red pepper flakes, eggplant, and paprika. Symptoms of a nightshade allergy include congestion, skin rash, itching, redness, and digestive problems.
Blueberries are not technically a nightshade plant. But, like nightshades, they contain some solanine. Blueberries have been called a “superfood” because they contain antioxidant compounds.
Adding a tiny splash of apple cider vinegar to the soaking water may help neutralize the lectins further. Fermenting- Fermentation allows beneficial bacteria to digest and convert many of the harmful substances.
Cooking, especially with wet high-heat methods like boiling or stewing, or soaking in water for several hours, can inactivate most lectins. [6] Lectins are water-soluble and typically found on the outer surface of a food, so exposure to water removes them.
Studies show that boiling legumes, soybeans, and even kidney beans (which have extremely high lectin levels when raw), greatly reduces and often completely eliminates lectin activity.
CONSTITUTION: Solanin is removed from potatoes by dipping the potatoes in vinegar of 30-60 deg. C, containing 0.3-1.0 vol% of acetic acid, for 2-5 minutes.
Tomatoes and Avocados are fruits and not vegetables. Tomatoes belong to the Nightshade fruit family while Avocados belong to the Laurels family.
Some diets claim that nightshades are inflammatory and should be avoided. This idea is rooted in the fact that nightshades are a large family of plants that contain a chemical compound called alkaloids. In extremely high doses, some alkaloids can make inflammation worse or be poisonous.
Nightshades are nutritious foods, and the idea that they cause inflammation does not have support from scientific evidence. Nightshade foods contain solanine, a chemical that some people believe may aggravate arthritis pain or inflammation. However, the Arthritis Foundation (AF) says that this is untrue.
Eggs Eggs too are included in the lectin-free way of life, but must be pasture-raised.
Lectin is a carbohydrate-binding protein that can be found in varying amounts in most plants, including beans, pulses, grains, fruits and vegetables (eg, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, zucchini, carrots, berries, watermelon), nuts, coffee, chocolate, and some herbs and spices (eg, peppermint, marjoram, nutmeg).
If you are on a lectin friendly diet, you are also allowed to enjoy green bananas, but not ripe bananas as they contain lectins in addition to the high amount of sugar.
The lowest lectin content options are asparagus, garlic, celery, mushrooms and onions. Cooked root vegetables like sweet potatoes, yucca and taro, along with leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, avocados, olives and olive oil are all examples of healthy foods that do contain some lectins.
However, eating large amounts of certain types of lectins can damage the gut wall. This causes irritation that can result in symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting. It can also prevent the gut from absorbing nutrients properly.
And everyone's favorite cruciferous veggie, broccoli, is also not on the nightshade vegetable list. Colorful fruits and vegetables like blueberries and broccoli are often mistaken for nightshades. But these fruits and veggies are actually full of antioxidants.
Solanine is concentrated in the leafy greens bugs try to eat, one major reason why we only eat the tomato or pepper fruit, not the rest of the plant. It can also be found in foods that aren't part of the nightshade family, including blueberries, apples, cherries, and artichokes.
Zucchini is not a nightshade. Cucumbers are not nightshades. Coffee is not a nightshade. Squash is not a nightshade.