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PDF Summary:The Plant Paradox, by

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1-Page PDF Summary of The Plant Paradox

From the low-carb, high-fat keto diet to whole-foods-based paleo diet, there are countless eating programs promising to help you lose weight and be healthier. The Plant Paradox Program (PPP) is an eating and lifestyle program based on the way foods and products affect your body and immune system; it involves eating lots of the right plants, while avoiding others, in order to reach and maintain a healthy weight and live free of chronic and autoimmune diseases. The program is based on the premise that small things can cause big problems and the key to your health is less about what you add to your diet and more about what you remove.

In this summary, learn why whole grains and mouthwash are making you sick and fat, and why almost everything you think you know about healthy food is wrong.

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Protect Your Gut Bugs

You have about five pounds’ worth of microbes—bacteria, protozoa, fungi, molds, viruses, and worms—in your intestines, on your skin, and in the air around you, collectively making up your holobiome. Microbes live and feed on you, but your well-being also depends on them.

The microbes in your gut have several functions:

  • Break down and digest food
  • Help you absorb food’s energy and nutrients
  • Alert your immune system to invaders
  • Prevent objects (like lectins) from breaching your intestinal wall to get into your bloodstream, organs, and other areas of your body
  • Communicate with your brain and body to control your hormones, appetite, cravings, and other functions

There are good and bad microbes: Good microbes want to keep you healthy because not only do you need them for your well-being, but they also need you. On the other hand, bad microbes hijack the communication between your gut and your brain and drive you to crave sugars, fats, and unhealthy foods that nourish them but harm your health. Good microbes help to break down lectins, but when they’re weakened or wiped out, bad microbes can take over and let lectins run rampant.

Avoid Disruptors

There are seven major disruptors that alter your holobiome, throw off your body’s internal clock, and make you more susceptible to lectins:

  1. Broad-spectrum antibiotics, such as Augmentin, Cipro, and Amoxil
  2. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), including Advil, Motrin, ibuprofen, Aleve, Naprosyn, Mobic, Celebrex, and aspirin
  3. Stomach-acid blockers, such as Pepcid AC and Zantac
  4. Artificial sweeteners, such as Splenda, Sweet’n Low, and Equal
  5. Endocrine disruptors (chemicals in a range of products from processed foods to cosmetics to mouthwash)
  6. Roundup weedkiller
  7. Blue light in electronics

Why Not Being On The PPP Is Making You Fat And Sick

Lectins break through your gut wall and into other areas of your body. Your immune system recognizes the lectins as foreign invaders and attacks. In order to fight the war on lectins, your body needs its soldiers—white blood cells—to be well fed, so it diverts calories from your muscles and brain and stores them as fat (fuel) for your white blood cells.

Additionally, your body makes you hungrier so you’ll ingest more calories to fuel the battle. Your body stores the fat near the battlefront to make it easily accessible to the white blood cells (in other words, belly fat is a sign of a battle happening in your gut). So being overweight is a sign that a battle is going on inside your body.

Lectins also masquerade as certain hormones, in some cases instructing your cells to continually store fat.

Lectins’ fattening effects were beneficial to our ancestors because gaining weight gave them a better chance of surviving winter, when food was scarce. But in today’s context, lectins and their fattening effects are no longer helpful but harmful.

Additionally, human genes are designed to help you live long enough to have offspring to propagate the species, and then die off so that the next generation has enough food and resources to do the same (again, this adaptation is less relevant for humans today). The grain-and-dairy diet does just that, fattening you up and then bringing on diseases that prevent a long, healthy life.

There are countless diets out there—including low carb, ketogenic, and low-fat/whole-grain diets—but most don’t address the root issue, which is that the food that you eat and products you use trigger biological responses in your body that make you fat or unhealthy. Additionally, many diets focus on major short-term efforts that produce quick results but don’t change long-term habits, so you gain the weight right back.

The Plant Paradox Program

The PPP is based on four rules:

  1. What you don’t eat makes a bigger impact than what you do eat.
  2. Take care of your gut microbes and they’ll take care of you.
  3. Your body processes fruit like candy.
  4. You are what you eat—and what the thing you’re eating ate.

Unlike other diets, the PPP doesn’t ask you to count calories. Instead, you can eat much more food—as long as it’s the right foods—and lose weight.

Here’s an overview of the PPP’s three phases.

Phase 1: Three-Day Cleanse

Phase 1 is an optional three-day cleanse designed to starve the bad bacteria and put your gut in the best condition for Phase 2. Think of it as weeding and preparing the soil before you plant new crops; a damaged gut doesn’t reap all the benefits possible from good foods.

The cleanse has three components:

  1. Foods to eat and avoid: Lectin-heavy foods like corn and grain are off-limits, as well as sugar, fruits, and dairy. You can eat organic vegetables such as asparagus, any from the cabbage family, and greens. You can have 8 ounces of protein a day—either pastured chicken, wild-caught fish, hemp tofu, or grain-free tempeh. Certain oils are approved (e.g. extra-virgin olive oil and coconut oil), and drinks are limited to water, coffee, and tea.
  2. Laxative: You have the option of taking a laxative called Swiss Kriss, or something comparable, the night before the cleanse to clear things out and start with a clean slate to kick-start your results.
  3. Supplements: You can take optional supplements such as grapefruit seed extract, mushroom extracts, and berberine to help kill harmful gut bacteria, fungi, and molds more quickly.

Phase 2: Six-Week Gut Repair

Phase 2 will be at least six weeks, which is how long it’ll take to cement your new eating habits and start to make significant progress on repairing your gut. After the six weeks, you can reintroduce certain lectin-containing food, or you can choose to continue in Phase 2 indefinitely.

Expect the first two weeks to be tough as you change your habits and potentially even experience some withdrawal symptoms from the foods you’ve eliminated; you may have low energy, muscle cramps, headaches, and irritability. But by the end of two weeks, you’ll start to see results.

You’ll eliminate:

  • Whole grains
  • Beans and legumes
  • Peanuts and cashews
  • Dairy products from cows unless they’re from Southern Europe
  • Commercially raised meats
  • Many fruits and seeded vegetables
  • Oils made from lectin-containing foods, such as vegetable, corn, and peanut oil
  • Artificial sweeteners

You’ll eat:

  • Leafy greens, cruciferous, and other vegetables
  • Resistant starches (e.g. plantains and parsnips)
  • Nuts
  • Non-cow dairy (e.g. goat, sheep, buffalo)
  • Wild fish and grass-fed meat
  • Limited fruits, including berries, cherries, and plums
  • Certain oils, including perilla and walnut oil

You’ll also avoid disruptors like antibiotics and NSAIDs, and enhance your results with certain microbe-nourishing supplements.

Phase 3: Making The PPP Your Lifestyle

Once you’ve restored a healthy holobiome, you can reintroduce some lectin-containing foods in Phase 3—but if you’re particularly sensitive to lectins, you may not want to reintroduce them at all. Phase 3 is meant to implement a lifestyle that you can maintain for the rest of your life.

In Phase 3, you’ll:

  • Continue to eat all PPP-approved foods
  • Continue to avoid most off-limits foods
  • Reintroduce peeled and deseeded nightshade and squash vegetables, immature vegetables, pressure-cooked legumes, and Indian white basmati rice
  • Increase your ketogenic fats, which are in MCT oil and coconut oil
  • Eat less frequently and less food overall
  • Reduce your animal protein intake to 2 ounces (or fewer) per day
  • Try five days of a calorie-restricted vegan fast per month, regular intermittent fasting, or stretching the time between your meals
  • Maintain your body’s internal clock by aiming to get an hour of daylight each day
  • Avoid blue light in the evenings

The Ketogenic Plant Paradox Program

If you have cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or other forms of dementia, you’ll benefit from the keto version of the PPP. These diseases are the result of your body’s inability to handle all the energy (food) you consume, so shifting the kind of food you eat helps your body rebalance.

The keto program cuts sugar intake (including sugar from animal protein) in order to reduce your insulin production while raising your fat intake to help your body begin burning ketones—a special kind of fat—for energy instead of sugar. The fat intake will be from ketone-heavy sources like MCT oil, coconut oil, palm fruit oil, and ghee.

You’ll also

  • Limit animal protein to 2-4 ounces per day
  • Eliminate all fruits except avocados, unripe mangoes, unripe papayas, green bananas, and plantains
  • Eliminate all seeded vegetables except okra
  • Have a tablespoon of MCT oil or coconut oil every few hours when doing intermittent fasting or stretching the time between meals

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PDF Summary Introduction

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The author developed this theory and program through his career as a heart surgeon, cardiologist, and immunologist, as well as his own dramatic weight loss. He learned how certain foods affect the immune system and how that can lead to weight gain and disease. He went on to establish the International Heart and Lung Institute and eventually write this book.

The Plant Paradox Program (PPP) calls for eliminating so-called “disruptors”—including certain foods, chemicals, and medicines. Instead, followers eat certain vegetables, pastured meats, wild-caught seafood, few fruits, tree nuts, and specific oils and dairy products.

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PDF Summary Part One | Chapter 1: The Plant Paradox

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Plants Evolved to Spread Their Seeds

Plants produce two types of seeds: Those that the plant wants predators to eat, and those it doesn’t want predators to eat.

(Shortform note: When we talk about plants wanting a certain result, we’re not suggesting they have conscious thought, as people do. However, plants have evolved to encourage the survival and propagation of their species—just like all living things—and react to their environments, as we’ll explore in a later section.)

Seeds for Eating are Low in Lectins

Fruit trees want their seeds to be eaten, so the seeds have a hard shell or coating to keep them intact throughout the animal’s digestion process; when the seed comes out in the animal’s excrement—essentially a nutrient-rich compost—it’s ready to grow. When predators eat these seeds (and later distribute them) they’re helping to spread them far and wide, which helps the plant’s chance of survival. If the fruit were to simply drop on the ground below the mother plant, those seeds would have to compete for sun, moisture, and nutrients.

However, plants don’t want predators to eat these seeds until the seeds have fully developed the hard coating to...

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PDF Summary Chapter 2: The Rise of Lectins and Their Effects

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Unfortunately, A-1 cows are the most common breed for producing milk. The good news is, A-2 dairy products are becoming increasingly available.

Factor #3: Foreign Food from the New World

About 500 years ago, when Europeans landed in the Americas, they brought foreign food from the New World back with them to Europe. People in Europe, Asia, and Africa had never before been exposed to these New World foods, and 500 years isn’t enough for gut bacteria to adapt to them.

These foods included:

  • The nightshade family, including tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers
  • The bean family, including peanuts and cashews
  • Grains
  • Pseudo-grains, including quinoa
  • The squash family, including pumpkins, acorn, squash, and zucchini
  • Chia and some other seeds

Factor #4: Processed Food and Chemicals

In the past 50 years, the rise of processed food and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has introduced a whole new array of lectins that our bodies haven’t adapted to tolerate. Compared to the three factors we just discussed,** processed food has had the most dramatic impact on people’s health, because diets have changed so drastically at such a rapid...

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PDF Summary Chapter 3: Protect Your Holobiome and It Will Protect You

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Although microbes help you survive and thrive when they’re in the intestine and doing their jobs, if microbes escape through your breached intestinal wall into your body, they become another invader for your immune system to attack, wreaking havoc on your health.

Good and Bad Microbes

You and your microbes have a symbiotic relationship: You rely on them (whether or not you know it) and they rely on you. As such, it’s in your microbes’ best interest to keep you in good health; they’re in constant communication with your brain and body to control your hormones, appetite, cravings, and other functions.

But this balance can be disrupted.

If you kill your good microbes with certain foods and products—or starve them by not eating certain foods—bad microbes can take over and harm your health. Bad microbes have no interest in keeping you healthy. They only want what benefits them; bad microbes hijack the communication between your gut and your brain and drive you to crave sugars, fats, and unhealthy foods that nourish them but harm your health. When we get into the details of the PPP later, you’ll see that the first step to recovery is getting rid of your bad...

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PDF Summary Chapter 4: The Seven Disruptors

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  1. Broad-spectrum antibiotics make livestock fatter, and have the same effect on your body; the antibiotics change your microbiome, which communicates with your immune system, making your body go into attack mode. Your body then increases fat storage, assuming your cells will need the energy to fight off the invaders.

Disruptor 2: Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs)

As we talked about in the last chapter, NSAIDs—including Advil, Motrin, ibuprofen, Aleve, Naprosyn, Mobic, Celebrex, and aspirin—damage the protective barrier along your intestinal walls, allowing lectins, LPSs, and other objects to pass through to your body.

This creates a vicious cycle: Your body attacks the invaders, causing inflammation. You feel the inflammation as pain, so you take an NSAID to ease the pain. The NSAID exacerbates the problem in your gut, and the cycle continues.

Instead of NSAIDs, try boswellia or white willow bark.

Disruptor 3: Stomach-Acid Blockers

Stomach-acid blockers prevent your stomach acid from performing several critical functions. First, stomach acid is so strong that it kills most of the bad bacteria you ingest before they can get any further into your...

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PDF Summary Chapter 5: How Foods Affect Your Body

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However, until modern times, survival was contingent upon eating and storing sufficient calories for winter, so the real reason that people switched to a grain-and-dairy diet could likely be because they realized that it promoted weight gain.

Human genes are wired to help you survive long enough to produce offspring, and then to put your offspring in the best position to make more offspring; your body wants to help you store fat to survive long enough to have some kids, but also prevent you from living too long so that your kids (and their kids) don’t have to skimp on food to share with you. The grain-and-dairy diet does just that, fattening you up and then bringing on diseases that prevent a long, healthy life.

Lectins were fine for our ancient ancestors, but in today’s context, they’re no longer helpful but harmful.

Whole Grains Signal Your Body to Store Fat

As we talked about, the lectin WGA—which is found in whole grains—has a barcode that fools your body into thinking it’s insulin. To understand how this affects you, let’s look at what jobs insulin does, and what WGA does in its place.

When you eat sugar and the glucose enters your bloodstream, your...

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PDF Summary Part Two | Chapter 6: The Plant Paradox Program

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The PPP: An Overview

The PPP consists of three phases, which we’ll explore more in-depth in the next few chapters. Here’s an overview:

Phase 1: A three-day cleanse wipes the slate clean by nourishing your good microbes and getting rid of your bad ones. This helps you to start healing your gut, but you must follow up immediately with Phase 2 to avoid backsliding.

Phase 2: Eliminate or cut down on certain foods and eat more of others.

Here are the foods you’ll cut down on or cut out entirely:

  • Eliminate major lectins, including grains, legumes, corn, and soybeans
  • Eliminate most saturated fats, including whole-grain foods
  • Eliminate sugars (including fruit) and artificial sweeteners
  • Eliminate industrial farm-raised and free-range poultry and livestock, as well as farm-raised fish
  • Eliminate crops sprayed with Roundup
  • Eliminate GMO foods
  • Avoid all endocrine-disrupting products
  • Reduce omega-6 fats

Here’s what you’ll eat:

  • All leafy greens
  • Certain vegetables
  • Tubers and other resistant starches
  • Omega-3 fats, including fish oil, perilla oil, flaxseed oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, olive oil, and macadamia nut oil
  • ...
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PDF Summary Chapter 7: PPP Phase 1, The Cleanse

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  • Onions (including leeks and chives)
  • Radishes

(Shortform note: Some vegetables approved for the cleanse—such as onions, garlic, and artichokes—are considered root vegetables, despite the fact that roots are on the off-limits list.)

You can eat no more than 8 ounces of protein a day in two 4-ounce portions.

  • Hemp tofu
  • Pastured chicken
  • Tempeh without grains
  • Wild-caught fish (e.g. salmon, shellfish, mollusks)

Fats and oils:

  • Avocado oil
  • Coconut oil
  • Extra-virgin olive oil (cook at low heat, never high heat)
  • Flaxseed oil (not heated)
  • Hemp seed oil (not heated)
  • MCT oil (also called liquid coconut oil)
  • One whole Hass avocado per day
  • Perilla oil
  • Sesame seed oil
  • Walnut oil

You can have one or two snacks a day. They may be lettuce boats filled with guacamole, half an avocado seasoned with lemon juice, or one-quarter cup of approved nuts, including walnuts, pistachios, and macadamia nuts.

For condiments and seasonings, avoid any pre-packaged salad dressings and sauces. Instead, opt for:

  • Fresh lemon juice
  • Herbs
  • Mustard
  • Spices
  • Vinegar

You should start each day with a green smoothie; this...

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PDF Summary Chapter 8: Phase 2, Yes and No Foods

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Peanuts and Cashews: Despite their names, peanuts and cashews aren’t nuts; they’re legumes. As such, they contain harmful lectins.

Seeds: Lectins are contained in the seeds and skins of fruits and vegetables, so avoid pumpkin, sunflower, and chia seeds.

Cow’s Milk: As a reminder from chapter 2, almost all products from cow’s milk contain a lectin-like protein called casein A-1, so avoid ice cream, yogurt (even Greek yogurt), and cheese. Goat’s and sheep’s milks are approved on the PPP because they don’t have this protein; however, they do contain the Neu5Gc sugar molecule that’s linked to heart disease and cancer.

Meats: Avoid all meat that’s not pasture-raised, farmed seafood, and fish that’s high on the food chain (e.g. swordfish, tilefish, grouper, and tuna) because they tend to have more mercury. Additionally, cut down on beef, pork and lamb (even grass-fed) because they carry Neu5Gc.

Fruit: Fruits contain sugar that signal to your body that it’s summer time (aka fat-storing season), so you can only have them in limited servings. In addition to familiar fruits, this includes several that are commonly called vegetables, such as nightshades (e.g....

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PDF Summary Chapter 9: Phase 3, Making the PPP Your Lifestyle

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Here are a few more reasons to cut the meat.

IGF-1: Meat Ages You

Your levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) are a key indicator of longevity—the lower your levels, the longer and healthier your life will be. Studies show that low IGF-1 levels correlate with low-sugar diets that include little animal protein.

When you have lots of food or your body thinks it’s summer (e.g. because of exposure to blue light), a receptor in your body called mammalian target of rapamycin (TOR) senses that energy is available and activates IGF-1 to prompt cellular growth; eating a lot of animal protein correlates with high IGF-1 levels. But if your TOR senses that there isn’t much energy—during winter, or when you’re eating little food—it reduces cellular activity, slowing the rate of aging in the process. In other words, your food choices control how quickly your body ages.

Fasting

Our ancestors fasted regularly, not by choice but because food wasn’t always available. Our bodies are designed to adapt to varying food availability; when glucose from carbs and protein isn’t available, your body can get energy by burning ketones, a special kind of fat.

If you choose,...

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PDF Summary Chapter 10: The Keto Version of PPP

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To reduce your insulin levels, you have to start by cutting your sugar and protein consumption. However, most people on the standard American diet still have enough insulin in their systems to block lipase from working, so you’ll need some extra help: Plants create ketones that are present in certain foods, and eating ketone-containing foods will kickstart your body into ketosis, so it starts to break down your fats into ketones and burning those for energy.

Some sources of ketones include

  • MCT (medium-chain triglycerides) oil, which is 100% ketones
  • Solid coconut oil (solid below 70 degrees), which is 65% ketones
  • Red palm oil—or palm fruit oil—which is 50% ketones
  • Butyrate (found in butter, ghee, and goat butter), which

Let’s look at how ketones can help your body ward off diseases.

Cancer

Unlike normal cells, cancer cells can’t generate energy from ketones; they get energy from fermenting sugar, just as yeast and bacteria do. Furthermore, they prefer fructose (the sugar in fruit) to glucose.

This is an inefficient way to get energy, meaning that cancer cells need way more sugar to grow than normal cells. In other words, **if you cut down on...

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PDF Summary Chapter 11: Supplements

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  • GundryMD Primal Plants (created by the author)
  • Modified citrus pectin (powder or capsules)
  • Spinach extract

Polyphenols: Polyphenols nourish your good microbes, dilate your blood vessels, and prevent an artery-clogging molecule from forming from certain animal proteins. You can get polyphenols from:

  • Berberine
  • Cinnamon
  • Cocoa powder
  • Grape seed extract
  • Green tea extract
  • Mulberry
  • Pine tree bark extract
  • Pomegranate
  • Resveratrol (the polyphenol found in red wine)
  • Vital Reds (created by the author)

Prebiotics: Prebiotics feed the probiotics—or microbes—in your holobiome, while starving the bad microbes. Recommended prebiotics include:

  • Fructooligosaccharides (FOS)
  • Galactooligosaccharides (GOS)
  • GundryMD PrebioThrive (created by the author)
  • Inulin powder, a type of FOS
  • Psyllium husks

Sugar blockers: Even when you cut out sugar and fruits, you’ll still be consuming sugar in the form of carbs and other foods—there’s no avoiding sugar entirely. To help your body handle the sugar, take a combination of these supplements:

  • Berberine
  • Chromium
  • Cinnamon bark extract
  • Selenium
  • ...
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PDF Summary Part Three: Meal Plans

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You can also do a modified vegan fast five days each month; that meal plan is simply an extended vegan version of the three-day cleanse from Phase 1.

Keto Plant Paradox Intensive Care Program

There are a few adjustments to adapt the regular Phase 2 meal plan to the keto version.

  • Reduce your animal protein intake to no more than 4 ounces a day.
  • Use keto vinaigrette (olive or perilla oil, MCT oil, and vinegar) for all salads.
  • The second snack of the day is 1 tablespoon of coconut or MCT oil.
  • A tablespoon of MCT is added to most meals.

The Right Ingredients and Tools

Many of the ingredients you’ll need to follow the PPP can be found in a grocery store or farmers market, but for some—like millet or cassava flour—you may need to go to a natural food store or order them online.

Don’t overlook the details when you’re buying these ingredients; even some of the common products are available in some varieties you’ll want to avoid. Here are some of the details you’ll want to watch out for with certain foods.

  • Almond butter should be unsweetened and made from raw, organic, ideally non-GMO almonds. Be sure it contains no partially hydrogenated...
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