Book SummaryThe Plant Paradox, by Steven R. Gundry

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Plant Paradox

From keto to paleo, countless people are looking for solutions to their weight and health issues, trying diet after diet with no success, and wondering, “What am I doing wrong?”

Besides dropping a jean size, there are serious health consequences of your eating and exercise habits—including food intolerances, headaches, digestive issues, joint pain, autoimmune diseases, and diabetes. Meanwhile, our culture perpetuates healthy food myths, and, according to the author, many commonly blamed culprits (e.g. fast food, sugary drinks, and general laziness) are not the main problems.

It turns out that the smallest things can cause the biggest problems; lectins, a type of plant protein, are toxins that wreak havoc on your internal health, causing weight gain, inflammation, and other physical issues.

The Plant Paradox Program (PPP) is based on the premise that the key to your health is less about what you add to your diet and more about what you remove—namely, lectins and other so-called “disruptors,” which are in certain foods, chemicals, and medicines. These tiny culprits are at the cause of the biggest health problems we face, from obesity to cancer to Parkinson’s.

The paradox of the Plant Paradox is that certain fruits and vegetables contain lots of health-harming lectins that you must avoid, but much of the diet relies on eating other, lectin-free vegetables. The PPP consists mainly of certain vegetables, pastured meats, wild-caught seafood, few fruits, tree nuts, and specific oils and dairy products.

(Shortform note: Health organizations including the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard School of Public Health acknowledge the harmful effects of active lectins, but they add that people generally don’t eat enough to cause major health issues and that most lectin-containing foods have health benefits that far outweigh the negative effects of the lectins.)

Lectins: Plant’s Defense Mechanism

Lectins are large proteins contained in the seeds, grains, skins, rinds, and leaves of most plants, as well as in the meat, milk, and eggs of grain- and soy-fed chickens, cows, pigs, and seafood.

Just as animals developed defenses against their predators (e.g. skunks spray their attackers and gazelles outrun many predators), plants developed their own methods of protecting their offspring—their seeds—to ensure their species carry on. One method is to produce toxins—including lectins—that poison, paralyze, or disorient predators or make the plant difficult to digest.

While lectins may be powerful enough to knock out bugs, humans have a size advantage—but that doesn’t mean we’re immune. Our massive number of cells simply means that you might not see the damaging effects until lectins have compounded for years.

Lectins contribute to health problems including weight gain, inflammation, joint pain, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases.

How Lectins Affect You

Lectins have several harmful effects in your body.

1. Lectins can create gaps in your intestinal wall barrier.
2. Lectins that breach your intestinal wall trigger an attack from your immune system, causing inflammation.
3. Lectins—sometimes called “sticky proteins”—bind to sugar molecules in your body and interrupt the communication between cells.
4. Lectins mimic certain hormones, fooling the body into taking unnecessary actions like storing fat and attacking certain cells.
5. Lectins help viruses and bacteria attach to their intended targets, so that people who are particularly sensitive to lectins are more susceptible to viral and bacterial infections.

Humans have developed a four-pronged protection from plants’ toxins, including lectins.

1. Your saliva and the mucus in your nose contain sugars, which lectins naturally bind to. Those sugars are meant to trap the lectins before they reach your digestive system.
2. Your stomach acid also digests certain—but not all—lectin proteins.
3. The natural bacteria in your mouth and gut help consume lectins before they can interfere with your cells and create gaps in your intestinal wall barrier.
4. An additional layer of mucus that lines your intestines acts as a final line of defense to trap lectins and prevent them from interfering with your intestinal wall.

Although this system is designed to protect us from the harmful effects of lectins, if we consume too many lectins, they can overwhelm our natural defenses.

The Human Diet Is Overloaded With Lectins

For millennia, humans’ immune systems have adapted to their changing diet, but relatively recently, humans’ diets have changed drastically and exposed our gut bacteria to new compounds that it hasn’t yet evolved to tolerate.

There are four factors that brought about this major change.

1. The Agricultural Revolution not only introduced grain and beans into the human diet for the first time, but it also made them the primary food source; this was a shift from a diet of mainly leaves, tubers (like sweet potatoes), and some animal fat and proteins.
2. A mutation in Northern European cows caused them to produce a different kind of protein in their milk, called casein A-1; during digestion, casein A-1 turns into a protein similar to lectin that causes your immune system to attack your pancreas.
3. When Europeans landed in the Americas, they brought foreign food from the New World back with them that people in Europe, Asia, and Africa had never before been exposed to and, thus, hadn’t adapted to tolerate. These 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
   • ...

The Plant Paradox Summary Introduction

From Atkins to paleo, countless people are looking for solutions to their weight and health issues, trying diet after diet with no success, and wondering, “What am I doing wrong?”

Besides dropping a jean size, there are serious health consequences of your eating and exercise habits—including food intolerances, headaches, digestive issues, joint pain, autoimmune diseases, and diabetes. Meanwhile, our culture perpetuates healthy food myths, and many commonly blamed culprits (e.g. fast food, sugary drinks, and general laziness) are not the main problem.

Since the mid-1960s, Americans’ health has increasingly worsened, with a rise in obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and other...

The Plant Paradox Summary Part One | Chapter 1: The Plant Paradox

The paradox of this program is that it calls for a largely plant-based diet, but hinges on eliminating certain kinds of plants. Fruits—including vegetables with lots of seeds (e.g. cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, and string beans) which are botanically fruits—are mostly off the table. Shellfish and egg yolks, on the other hand, are just fine.

Again, this program contradicts what most people think they know about which foods are good for you and which aren’t.

Lectins Are Plants’ Defense Mechanism

About 450 million years ago, plants began growing and thriving on the planet—until, about 90 million years later, insects and other animals showed up and became plants’ predators.

Just as animals developed defenses against their predators (e.g. skunks spray their attackers and gazelles outrun many predators), plants developed their own methods of protecting their offspring—their seeds—to ensure their species carry on. These methods include:

• Colors that blend into the surroundings
• Unappetizing textures
• Sticky material such as resin or sap to trap insects
• Making the sand or soil around them clump to provide a barrier
• Attracting unappetizing grit
• ...

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 2: The Rise of Lectins and Their Effects

If humans have been eating plants for thousands of years, why are they just causing problems now?

In this chapter, we’ll look at the main factors that put a heavy lectin load in the human diet and how it affects our body’s natural functions to make us sick.

Four Major Changes in the Human Diet

Your gut bacteria tell your immune system which compounds are safe to the body and which pose a threat. The gut bacteria and immune system continually learn what’s safe and what’s not as the human diet changes, and it’s been adapting this way for more than 80 million years.

But relatively recently, humans’ diets have changed drastically and exposed our gut bacteria to new compounds that they don’t know what to do with. That’s why humans are facing illnesses like obesity and type 2 diabetes—we’re simply maladapted to many of the foods we eat.

There are four factors that brought about this major change.

Factor #1: The Agricultural Revolution

About 10,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution ushered in the harvesting of grains and legumes (beans) to store and eat when needed—more convenient than fruit, which had to be eaten during a narrow window of ripeness. **Not...

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 3: Protect Your Holobiome and It Will Protect You

You have about five pounds’ worth of bacteria, protozoa, fungi, molds, viruses, and worms in your intestines, on your skin, and in the air around you. Collectively all these critters—called microbes—make up your holobiome.

Microbes live and feed on you, but your well-being is also dependent on them. Most of your microbes live in your gastrointestinal (GI) tract—your gut; these make up your microbiome. These microbes have several critical jobs:

• Break down and digest food, extracting the energy and distributing it to you in the form of fats
• Act as a first response team for your immune system, detecting harmless or harmful proteins and bacteria
• Absorb materials through food
• Protect you from outside objects passing through your intestines
• Communicate with your brain and control certain body functions

To understand why the microbes’ functions are so important, you must understand how the GI tract is designed to work.

What’s Inside Your GI Tract Shouldn’t Escape to the Rest of Your Body

Think of your GI tract as a tunnel under a...

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 4: The Seven Disruptors

There are Seven Deadly Disruptors that disrupt your body’s ability to heal itself and maintain its natural equilibrium; disruptors alter your holobiome, throw off your body’s internal clock, and make you more susceptible to lectins and LPSs.

In response, your immune system attacks the lectins and LPSs that have broken through your intestinal wall and goes into heavy fat-storing mode to hold onto as many calories as it can to fuel the fight. You may not know the war that’s being waged inside your body—all you know is the numbers on the scale are rising, or you’re not at 100 percent health.

As we’ll see, these disruptors are all around us, but if you know what they are and what they do, there are ways to avoid them.

We’ve talked about two disruptors already—whole germ agglutinin (WGA) and transglutaminase—which both contribute to LPSs breaching your intestinal wall. Here are seven more common disruptors to avoid.

Disruptor 1: Broad-Spectrum Antibiotics

Broad-spectrum antibiotics kill your microbiome along with the illness-causing bacteria. Your microbiome is a complex ecosystem, and when it gets altered or destroyed it affects how everything functions; it can...

Shortform Exercise: Get Disruptors Out of Your Life

It may seem like disruptors are everywhere, but with a few tweaks of your lifestyle and changes to your habits, you can eliminate or drastically reduce these health harms.

Think of the last time you took some form of medical disruptor, such as antibiotics, NSAIDs, or acid reducers. What could you have done to avoid it, either by prevention (not eating food that causes heartburn) or an alternative form of treatment?

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 5: How Foods Affect Your Body

Whether you came to the Plant Paradox because you’re struggling with weight or with health issues, the two go hand in hand: Being overweight or underweight is a sign that a battle is going on inside your body.

Lectins and LPSs make your immune system wage war against foreign invaders; 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 it as fat (fuel) for your white blood cells. Additionally, your body makes you hungrier so you’ll ingest more calories to fuel the battle.

The fat must be stored near the battlefront to make it easily accessible to the white blood cells, so if you store fat around your belly it’s a sign that the battle is happening in your gut, where lectins and LPSs are breaching your intestinal walls.

Lectins can also destroy the absorptive layer of your intestine, which is designed to take in sugars, fats, and proteins. If this layer gets too damaged, your body can’t absorb nutrients no matter how much you eat, making you skinny and undernourished.

In this chapter, we’ll look at:

• How the grain-and-dairy diet helped our ancestors...

Shortform Exercise: How Your Diet Affects You

Think about what you put into your body and how that might be affecting how your body feels and functions.

What are the largest components of your diet—carbs, fats, proteins, sugars?

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

We’ve learned about how lectins harm your gut and send your immune system into attack mode and how disruptors damage your holobiome. The Plant Paradox Program is designed to counteract all this by eliminating lectins and disruptors and focusing on foods that nourish your good microbes to keep you at a healthy weight and keep diseases at bay.

The PPP is based on four rules.

1. What you don’t eat makes a bigger impact than what you do eat. Of course, what you do eat is still important, but the biggest results will come from eliminating lectin-heavy foods and allowing your gut to heal.
2. Take care of your gut microbes and they’ll take care of you. Your microbes are key to keeping you healthy; they help you digest and get nutrients from food, they assist your immune system, they help control hormones and appetite, and they keep bad microbes at bay. To allow them to do their jobs, you need to eliminate the antibiotics, antacids, NSAIDs, and processed foods that kill off your ecosystem of microbes.
3. Your body processes fruit like candy. Remember that any time your body detects sweetness (even if it’s fruit or sugar-free artificial sweeteners), it reacts the...

Shortform Exercise: Trying the PPP

The PPP requires some lifestyle changes that may be challenging at first, but will soon become habits.

What doubts or worries do you have about following through with the PPP?

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 7: PPP Phase 1, The Cleanse

Phase 1 is a three-day cleanse, or modified fast, 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.

Phase 1 is optional—you can skip straight to eliminating and adding the right foods in Phase 2—but it will take a little longer to see results if you don’t start with the cleanse because a damaged gut doesn’t reap all the benefits possible from good foods. If you choose to do Phase 1, be sure to begin Phase 2 immediately after; otherwise, you’ll lose the positive effects of the cleanse.

By the end of the cleanse, you’ll:

• Have a new balance of good and bad gut microbes (more good than bad)
• Lose a few pounds of mostly water weight
• Reduce inflammation

The cleanse has three components:

1. Foods to eat and avoid
2. Laxative
3. Supplements

Component 1: Foods to Eat and Avoid

During the cleanse, these are the foods that are off-limits:

• Canola
• Corn
• Dairy
• Eggs
• Farm animal meat (e.g. beef)
• Fruit
• Grains or pseudo-grains
• Nightshade plants
• Roots (e.g. beets, carrots, ginger)
• Seeds
• Soy
• Sugar
• ...

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 8: Phase 2, Yes and No Foods

Whether or not you’ve kickstarted your internal clean-up with the three-day cleanse in Phase 1, it’s time to jump in to the full-fledged PPP.

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.

After six weeks, you’ll have cemented your new eating habits. It will take a minimum of six weeks to also make significant progress on repairing your gut; after this point, you can reintroduce certain lectin-containing foods.

Just Say “No” Foods

The off-limits items—the Just Say “No” List—were foreign to the human diet until the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago; that’s not enough time for humans to develop resistance to the lectins contained in these foods.

Let’s take a closer look at the rationale for including some of the items on the “No” list.

Whole grains: Contrary to popular health-food knowledge, white bread, white rice, and other white starches are actually better for you than their brown, whole-grain counterparts...

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 9: Phase 3, Making the PPP Your Lifestyle

Once you’ve restored a healthy holobiome, you can reintroduce some lectin-containing foods in Phase 3. Phase 3 is meant to implement a lifestyle that you can maintain for the rest of your life.

Don’t rush to start Phase 3, and if you’re particularly sensitive to lectins, you may not want to reintroduce them at all. You can safely and happily stay in Phase 2.

In Phase 3, you’ll:

• Continue to eat all PPP-approved foods
• Continue to avoid most off-limits foods (we’ll go into which ones you can reintroduce next)
• 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 intermittent fasting
• Maintain your body’s internal clock by aiming to get an hour of daylight each day
• Avoid blue light in the evenings

One at a time, you can reintroduce the following foods and monitor your tolerance and any adverse reactions.

• Immature vegetables (with tiny or no seeds), such as zucchini, cucumbers, and Japanese eggplant
• Peeled, de-seeded nightshade and squash vegetables, such as peppers and heirloom tomatoes
• Pressure-cooked...

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 10: The Keto Version of PPP

The keto version of PPP is beneficial for people with cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other forms of dementia because these diseases result from metabolic derangement, or your body’s inability to handle all the energy (food) you consume. Let’s explain.

All the cells in your body have mitochondria that are responsible for turning sugars and fats into the energy the cells need to function. Your body’s natural circadian rhythm—between day and night as well as summer and winter—create cycles of busy times (day and summer) and slower times (night and winter) for the mitochondria.

When your mitochondria are on night/winter mode, your body switches to using ketones for fuel instead of sugars; ketones are a special kind of fat that are much easier than sugar to convert to energy, so the mitochondria doesn’t have to work as hard. Think of it like a hybrid car, which runs on electrical energy when the gas is out.

However, if you’re eating too much sugar and protein (which turns into sugar) consistently, your mitochondria are constantly in overdrive. After a while, they can’t keep up and things start to go awry.

When you eat sugar or protein, your pancreas...

The Plant Paradox Summary Chapter 11: Supplements

The fields where our food crops are being farmed and harvested have lost so much of their vitamins and minerals that no matter how much healthy food you’re eating, you can’t get all the nutrients you need from food alone. That’s where supplements come in.

Supplements can’t fix an unhealthy diet, but when paired with healthy, balanced eating—specifically, the PPP—they close nutritional gaps and enhance the positive effects.

These are the most important supplements.

B vitamins: Vitamin B helps reduce levels of a particular amino acid that can damage your blood vessel lining. Your gut bacteria produce many B vitamins, so if your gut bacteria have been compromised by any of the disruptors we discussed earlier (e.g. antibiotics and NSAIDs), you’re probably deficient in methylcobalamin (vitamin B12’s active form) and methylfolate (folic acid’s active form); in addition, more than half the people in the world have a gene mutation that inhibits their production of these two vitamins.

Lectin blockers: Despite your best efforts, there may be times when you have to—or accidentally—eat lectins. In those cases, lectin-blocking...

The Plant Paradox Summary Part Three: Meal Plans

(Shortform note: Part 3 of the book outlines meal plans for the program as well as specific recipes. Rather than include everything, we’ll share the main takeaways. If you feel you’d benefit from dozens of PPP-friendly recipes, consider buying the original book.)

Phase 1: Three-Day Kick-Start Cleanse

The meal plan for the three-day cleanse starts every day with a green smoothie for breakfast.

There are two snacks a day—between breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch and dinner. The author recommends romaine lettuce boats filled with guacamole, half an avocado seasoned with lemon juice, or one-quarter cup of approved nuts.

Lunch each day includes a serving of animal protein, while some dinners are meatless. Vegan and vegetarian alternatives to meat include grain-free tempeh, VeganEggs, cauliflower steaks, hemp tofu, and pressure-cooked legumes.

Phase 2: Six-Week Gut Repair

The format of the meal plan for Phase 2 is the same as Phase 1: three meals with two snacks of either guacamole boats, avocado, or nuts.

While the green smoothie is still a breakfast option, alternatives include other smoothies, various muffins (made without lectin-containing grains or...