The Plant Paradox
The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain
The Plant Paradox. In a nutshell: The plants that nourish us can also hurt us. Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned cardiologist and heart surgeon. He’s a former professor at Loma Linda University and has authored 300+ peer-reviewed articles on using diet and supplements to eliminate a bunch of diseases. And, to put it in perspective: He’s Tony Robbins’s doctor. Big Ideas we explore include Rule #1 of nutrition (and life) (hint: STOP eating/doing stuff that doesn’t work for you), the little edible enemies that are taking you down, the vagus nerve and it’s communication from your gut to your brain, how fruit might as well be candy and 90% new you in 90 days.
Big Ideas
- Rule #1Eliminate the bad stuff.
- Little ThingsCorollary to Rule #1.
- Edible EnemiesMeet your tiny edible enemies.
- Ride the Vagus nerve from the gut to the brainFrom your gut to your brain.
- Fruit Might As Well Be CandyMight as well be candy.
- 90% New You in 90 DaysIn 90 days. (That’s awesome.)
“I titled this book The Plant Paradox because while many plant foods are good for you—and form the bedrock of my eating plan—others that have been regarded as ‘health foods’ are actually to blame for making you sick and overweight. That’s right, most plants actually want to make you ill. Another paradox: small portions of some plants are good for you but large amounts are bad for you. …
As it stands, the Plant Paradox Program consists of a cornucopia of vegetables, limited amounts of high-quality protein sources, as well as certain fruits (but only in season), tree nuts, and certain dairy products and oils. Equally important are the foods I omit, at least initially—namely, grains and the flours made from them, pseudo-grains, lentils and other legumes (including all soy products), fruits that we call vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, and their kin), and refined oils. …
Follow the complete program and I promise you will banish most, if not all, of your health problems, achieve a healthy weight, reboot your energy level, and elevate your mood.”
~ Steven Gundry, MD from The Plant Paradox
The Plant Paradox.
In a nutshell: The plants that nourish us can also hurt us.
Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned cardiologist and heart surgeon. He’s a former professor at Loma Linda University and has authored 300+ peer-reviewed articles on using diet and supplements to eliminate heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and a bunch of other diseases. These days he runs waitlist-only clinics in California.
And, to put it in perspective: He’s Tony Robbins’s doctor.
I got this book on Ben Greenfield’s recommendation after we had one of our coaching sessions checking out my blood work from WellnessFX. I had a super weird spike in inflammation and we had a feeling it was because I was eating too much of a “good thing”—in my case, I was going a little overboard on salads with sunflower sprouts. (Laughing. At myself.)
I immediately started experimenting with Dr. Gundry’s diet (eliminating lectins, including the sunflower sprouts—which we’ll talk about more in a moment—and reducing my fruit and animal protein intake while doing more intermittent fasting). It worked. The next blood tests came back with the lowest inflammation scores I’ve ever had (plus a bunch of other markers optimized).
Now, as we discussed in Nutrition 101, nutrition is a fascinating subject. Many of our Nutrition Notes contradict one another. And, I’m always blown away by how very smart people can hold nearly diametrically-opposed perspectives. For example, I recently had a little debate-scussion with my friend and mentor John Mackey who is a passionate advocate for low-fat (high grains/starch/carbs) veganism and strongly disagrees with other approaches.
My take? I agree with Michael Pollan that the nutritional science field is in its very early days. It’s too early to make absolute statements about much. I like to focus on what seems most apparent: We shouldn’t eat stuff that basically didn’t exist in any significant quantity 150 years ago, including the Big 3: Sugar + Flour + Veggie Oils. And, ultimately, I think we all need to EXPERIMENT and find what works for us.
With that, let’s jump in and chew on (hah!) some Big Ideas as we Optimize this body of ours!
Download MP3
Download PDFThousands of years ago, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, had described the body’s ability to heal itself, which he called ‘veriditas’ (green life force). He believed that the physician’s job was to identify which forces were keeping the patient from healing himself and then remove them. Veriditas would take it from there.
Get the BookRule #1
“RULE NUMBER 1: What You Stop Eating Has Far More Impact on Your Health Than What You Start Eating
As far as I know, Professor John Soothill of Great Ormond Street in London, my old hospital, was the first person to state this rule. If you get no further than this rule, and if you actually follow the Plant Paradox food lists, I can virtually guarantee that you will achieve remarkably good and sustainable health. Now, I’m not suggesting that you simply stop eating, although the ability of a simple water fast to cure any number of diseases is staggering. But this rule does confirm Hippocrates’s dictum that ‘all disease begins in the gut.’ If you stop damaging your gut, you’ll be healthier overall. Your gut holobiome accounts for 90 percent of the cells that make you ‘you’ and contains 99 percent of all the generic material that makes you ‘you’—so what goes on in your gut, unlike Las Vegas, doesn’t stay in your gut.”
Alright. Let’s kick this party off with Rule #1. Let’s put it in bold and increase the font size.
“What You Stop Eating Has Far More Impact on Your Health Than What You Start Eating”
You can eat all of the food you think is good for you BUT if you’re still eating the food that’s NOT good for you? You’re not going to see the gains you’d like to see.
John Durant put this well in The Paleo Manifesto (and, whether or not you agree with the specifics of the Paleo approach, the general wisdom applies): “When you’re lost in the wild, eating a handful of unknown berries or a mysterious mushroom can kill you, but there’s nothing you can eat or drink that will dramatically or permanently improve your health. Poisons are real; the Fountain of Youth isn’t.
The same principle applies in the grocery store: what not to eat can be more important than what to eat. The single most important way for many people to quickly improve their health is to subtract unhealthy foods, not to add healthy foods. Eating broccoli does not ‘cancel out’ devouring three slices of pizza. Top on this list are industrial foods (sugar, vegetable oils) as well as the seed-based crops they’re made out of (cereal grains, legumes). Think of these as slow-acting poisons when consumed in large quantities.”
There are NO Fountains of Youth. But, there ARE poisons.
Dave Asprey echoes this in Head Strong where he says: “The easiest way to perform better is to stop doing the things that slow you down.”
Note: Of course, this rule applies to EVERY (!) facet of our lives.
Eliminate the toxic food you’re eating and your physical health will improve. Eliminate the toxic thoughts you have and your psychological health will improve. Eliminate the toxic habits you have and your overall well-being will improve.
Obviously, check out the book for more on the foods that need to go and why. We’ll get to the approved and not allowed list of foods in a moment. For now: What do you KNOW you’re eating that just doesn’t work for you? Now a good time to give it the boot? And, what’s one other thing you do that needs to go? Let’s kick that stuff to the curb!
P.S. That was Rule #1. There are 3 more Rules. Here they are:
“RULE NUMBER 2: Pay Attention to the Care and Feeding of Your Gut Bugs, and They Will Handle the Care and Feeding of You. After All, You Are Their Home” (See Brain Maker for a longer chat about your microbiome!)
“RULE NUMBER 3: Fruit Might As Well Be Candy” (More on this in a moment.)
“RULE NUMBER 4: You Are What the Thing You Are Eating Ate.” (Key lesson: Eat wild caught, pasture raised animals. Factory farmed animals are a moral and biological nightmare.)
Little Things
“In my thirty years of practicing medicine, I have come to the conclusion that the problems we have with our health are actually caused by very small things. This is particularly true of big health problems. Once more with feeling: Very small things (like lectins) can cause huge health problems.”
In our last Idea, we established Rule #1 of Optimizing our nutrition and lives: Get rid of the stuff that’s harming you!
Here’s the corollary to that Rule: The Stuff You Should REALLY Be Nervous About Is Tiny.
We tend to think that we lose our health because of some “big” thing that just comes out of nowhere and knocks us out.
But…
Alas, that’s FAR from true.
It’s the TINY things that we should be most concerned about.
Back to Dave Asprey and Head Strong to echo this wisdom with the perfect metaphor: Kryptonite Dust. He tells us: “Imagine that you’re Superman (or Superwoman). One day, Lex Luthor pulverizes some kryptonite and sprinkles just a little bit of it around your house. If you eat (or inhale) a small amount of kryptonite dust, it won’t kill you. You’ll still be able to push through the day and save people, you’ll just feel slightly off. In fact, you’ll get used to feeling that way and believe it’s normal. But as you keep ingesting a little bit more kryptonite every day, your ability to help people will slowly, invisibly decline until your body reaches the point where it’s spending all of its energy trying to overcome the effects of the poison.”
So…
Again (Do I repeat myself? Yes. I repeat myself!), what’s a tiny little thing you do that just doesn’t help the cause?
Pro tip: Eliminate it. :)
P.S. Just as it’s the very small negative things that aggregate and compound to create PROBLEMS, it’s the very small positive things that aggregate and compound to create AWESOME.
Think: Jim Rohn’s Two Easies, Darren Hardy’sThe Compound Effect, and Jeff Olson’s The Slight Edge.
Edible Enemies
“So what are lectins anyway? For the most part, with one important exception, they are large proteins found in plants and animals, and they are a crucial weapon in the arsenal of strategies that plants use to defend themselves in their ongoing battle with animals. …
How exactly do lectins help plants defend themselves? Well, lectins in the seeds, grains, skins, rinds, and leaves of most plants bind to carbohydrates (sugars), and particularly to complex sugars called poylsaccarides, in the predator’s body after it consumes the plant. Like smart bombs, lectins target and attach themselves to sugar molecules, primarily on the surface of the cells of other organisms—particularly fungi, insects, and other animals. They also bind to siliac acid, a sugar molecule found in the gut, in the brain, between nerve endings, in joints, and in all bodily fluids, including the blood vessel lining of all creatures. Lectins are sometimes referred to as ‘sticky proteins’ because of this binding process, which means they can interrupt messaging between cells or otherwise cause toxic or inflammatory reactions, as we’ll discuss later. For example, when lectins bind to sialic acid, one nerve is unable to communicate its information to another nerve. If you have ever experienced brain fog, thank lectins. Lectins also facilitate the attachment and binding of viruses and bacteria to their intended targets. Believe it or not, some people—those who are more sensitive to lectins—are therefore more subject to viruses and bacterial infections than others. Think about that if you seem to get sick more often than your friends do.”
The central thesis and unique perspective of the book is the idea that lectins are wreaking havoc on our bodies.
It’s these little lectins that Gundry tells us we need to eliminate to follow Rule #1.
You’ve heard of the most famous lectin. Can you guess what it is?
Gluten.
As Gundry says, “Scientists discovered lectins in 1884 as part of their investigation into different blood types. Until now, you have probably been familiar with only one famous—or, rather, infamous—lectin: gluten. There are many more… and believe me, you’ll want to know about them. (Just as a teaser, 94 percent of humans are born with antibodies to the lectin in peanuts.)”
What foods have lectins in them?
Well, here’s the Plant Paradox list of both the approved, “Yes!” foods and the not approved, “Nope!” foods.
The things that Gundry recommends we eliminate include the normal suspects like rice and pasta and bread and cereal and corn. And, nuts and seeds like cashews, pumpkin and sunflower plus chia and peanuts. Then there are things like squashes and cucumbers and zucchini that we used to eat a fair amount of that got the boot when we did the experiment at Casa Johnson.
Take a gander at the list. And, if you’re not feeling the way you know you could and are open to experimenting, consider getting the book and diving in!
Btw: In addition to eliminating a bunch of things from our diet, we also ADDED some things that we weren’t eating. Chief among them? Thrive Algae Oil and perilla oil.
Perilla oil “has the highest concentration of rosemarinic acid (from rosemary), which improves cognition and memory. You may not have heard of it, but it is the primary cooking oil in Korea, Japan, and China. You can find it at Asian markets, natural food stores, and Whole Foods.” (We get ours by the bunch at Amazon.)
Ride the Vagus nerve from the gut to the brain
“The vagus nerve… is the largest nerve coming from the brain to the gut. It communicates orders to all the various organs in your body. Recently, exciting studies have shown that lectins reach the brain not only through the blood but, shockingly, also by climbing the vagus nerve from the gut to the brain. It turns out that for every fiber leading from your brain to your heart, lungs and your abdominal organs, there are nine times as many fibers leading up to the brain from the gut. There are actually more neurons in your gut than in your entire spinal cord. You truly have a second brain within your gut, and that brain is controlled by your holobiome. Unlike what I and most other doctors were taught in medical school, the vagus nerve exists to get information to the brain from the gut, not the other way around.”
We’ve talked about the vagus nerve in our Notes on Love 2.0 and other places. The Big Idea? High “vagal tone” is a VERY (!) good thing. It’s correlated with all the things we want.
Here’s how Barbara Fredrickson puts it: “That’s because people with higher vagal tone, science has shown, are more flexible across a whole host of domains—physical, mental, and social. They simply adapt better to their ever-shifting circumstances, albeit completely at nonconscious levels. Physically, they regulate their internal bodily processes more efficiently, like their glucose levels and inflammation. Mentally they’re better able to regulate their attention and emotions, even their behavior. Socially, they’re especially skillful in navigating interpersonal interactions and in forging positive connections with others. By definition, then, they experience more micro-moments of love. It’s as though the agility of the conduit between the brains and the hearts—as reflected in their high vagal tone—allows them to be exquisitely agile, attuned, and flexible as they navigate the ups and downs of day-to-day life and social exchanges. High vagal tone, then, can be taken as high loving potential.”
In the other contexts, we talked about how to influence your vagal tone via deep breathing and taming the gremlins. Basically, top down.
I LOVE (!) the perspective that we can influence the health of our vagal tone from gut UP! How? See Rule #1. Eliminate the stuff that isn’t working.
Remember: NINE times more fibers lead up from the gut to the brain than down. Let’s get our guts Optimized and watch everything else get toned up as well!
Fruit Might As Well Be Candy
“Forget any idea that fruit is a health food. As you’ve learned, eating fruit in season allowed our ancestors to fatten up for the winter, but now fruit is ubiquitous 365 days a year. The next time you ask for a fruit salad as a ‘healthy’ breakfast, I suggest that instead you order a bowl of Skittles candy. Go ahead—it’s the same poisonous stuff. The corollary to Rule Number 3 is this: If it has seeds, it’s a fruit! That means that a zucchini, a tomato, a bell pepper, an eggplant, and a pickle are all fruits! And when you eat them, they deliver the same chemical message to your genes and your brain as more obvious fruit, such as an apple does: Store fat for the winter. Moreover (and this will surprise most of you), eating the fructose in fruit causes your kidneys to swell and suffer injury, which can destroy them.
Just to be clear, there are fruits that you can have, so long as you eat them when they are still green: bananas, mangoes, and papayas. Unripe tropical fruit has not yet increased its sugars (fructose) content. Instead, it is made up of resistant starches, the things your good bugs dine on, but we humans don’t have the enzymes to digest.”
First, how’s this hit ya? —> “The next time you ask for a fruit salad as a ‘healthy’ breakfast, I suggest that instead you order a bowl of Skittles candy.”
Reminds me of another line from Dave Asprey: “How many times have you been told to ‘eat more fruits and vegetables’? It’s almost as if ‘fruits and vegetables’ has become a single word. The only problem is that from a nutritional perspective, fruits and vegetables have as much in common as fish and bicycles. People like to tout the health benefits of fruits by calling them ‘nature’s candy,’ but the truth is that fruits actually have more in common with candy than they do with vegetables. Fruits are primarily made of sugar and water with a bit of fiber, while vegetables are low in sugar and extremely high in nutrients.”
This is another one of those Ideas that gets a lot of people who like their fruit all riled up. “What?! You’re telling me fruit is bad for me? COME ON!”
Part of a longer chat but we didn’t evolve to eat fruit all day every day of the year. The ONLY time we used to eat fruit was when it was in season. I found my energy levels and blood sugar levels Optimized as I limited my fruit intake. You?
90% New You in 90 Days
“A lot of the patients I see in my Palm Springs clinic are retirees. I am constantly inspired by the willingness of elderly or extremely ill people to make changes that will better their lives. … It is never too late to improve your health. You replace about 90 percent of your old cells with new ones every three months, regardless of your age. Giving those new cells high-quality building materials to work with via the foods you eat and what you feed your bugs will absolutely make a new you!”
As we recently discussed, we have somewhere between 15 trillion and 70 trillion cells in our body. That’s astonishing.
Perhaps even *more* astonishing is the fact that you will replace 90% (!!!) of those cells with brand new cells over the next 90 days.
I repeat: 90% of you will be NEW over the next 90 days. Isn’t that amazing?!
No matter our current health or age, WE CAN CHANGE. We can Optimize. I’m honored to do so with you and I’m sending tons of lectin-free love to you and your family! :)
Let’s do this!
RULE NUMBER 1: What You Stop Eating Has Far More Impact on Your Health Than What You Start Eating.
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