Nightshade vegetables include tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and eggplant. They contain alkaloids that can have both desirable and toxic effects on human physiology.
Deadly nightshade, also known as belladonna, contains alkaloids that can cause symptoms like dilated pupils, increased heart rate, confusion, and hallucinations. These symptoms are called anti-cholinergic and have led to the development of drugs like atropine.
Consuming normal nightshade foods in normal amounts is not toxic. Concerns about gut damage from nightshade chemicals are based on rodent studies and may not apply to humans in the same way.
Animal-based studies are good for building theories or hypotheses, but they are not proof in and of themselves. It's important to verify them in human-based studies to ensure that the way it works in humans is the same as what we see in animal models.
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In many cases, food intolerance may be causing the problem instead of the assumption that it's the specific type of food like nightshades.
One of the alkaloids is capsaicin, which is the part of a pepper that makes it have heat or spice. There's actually a significant amount of research in my space as a gastroenterologist, Jonathan, with irritable bowel syndrome, where people with irritable bowel syndrome who took a capsaicin supplement actually saw significant improvements in their abdominal pain and bloating when compared to a placebo.
You can actually get more resistant starch by heating and then cooling your potatoes, Jonathan. And so each time that we heat and cool a potato, Jonathan, we're actually producing more of this resistant starch, which provides benefits to our gut biome.
There's really no credible evidence that would implicate nightshade vegetables and autoimmune diseases, to be honest with you, Jonathan. If anything, if we take a step back and look at the bigger picture here, we see a lower incidence of autoimmune disease in people who are consuming a nightshade heavy Mediterranean diet.