Anti-Nutrients Are Context Not Toxins: Cooking Handles Most, a Few Real Cases Matter

Summary

"Anti-nutrients" (phytate, lectins, oxalates, tannins, goitrogens, protease inhibitors) are sold by the carnivore/paleo camp as plant defence toxins you must avoid, and that framing is mostly wrong — cooking, soaking, sprouting and fermenting sharply reduce most of them, several are net-beneficial at normal intakes, and a varied omnivorous or well-planned plant-based diet handles them without deficiency — yet the opposite dismissal ("totally irrelevant") is also wrong: phytate and tannins measurably cut non-heme iron and zinc absorption in people heavily reliant on unrefined grains and legumes