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 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.
Lectins have several harmful effects in your body.
Humans have developed a four-pronged protection from plants’ toxins, including lectins.
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.
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.
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:
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.
There are seven major disruptors that alter your holobiome, throw off your body’s internal clock, and make you more susceptible to lectins:
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 PPP is based on four rules:
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 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:
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:
You’ll eat:
You’ll also avoid disruptors like antibiotics and NSAIDs, and enhance your results with certain microbe-nourishing supplements.
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:
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
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 ailments. 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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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:
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.
Our ancestors might have gotten the hint that certain foods made them feel ill or prevented them from thriving, and thus stopped eating it. But in modern times, antacids and other medicines allow people to keep eating food that naturally makes them sick.
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.)
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 survive digestion—when the fruit is ripe. Consequently, unripe fruit is a different color (usually green) to indicate that it’s not ready yet and contains toxins (including lectins) designed to make predators sick. Once the fruit is ripe, and the seeds are ready for their journey, the levels of lectins drop and the fruit develops its rightful color to alert animals that it’s ready to eat.
At peak ripeness, fruit has high levels of sugar, and the type of sugar is designed to maximize the plant’s chance of propagation: Instead of glucose, which raises insulin levels and lets your body know when you’re full, fruits contain fructose, which doesn’t send that message. As a result, predators keep eating more fruit—and more seeds—raising the plant’s chance of spreading more seeds.
Since fruits are naturally in season for only a portion of the year, this benefits animals by giving them a chance to stock up on calories during those windows of time. The same used to be true for people, but now that we have access to fruit year-round, we’re eating more fruit and taking in more calories than we need.
When you buy out-of-season fruit, it’s typically grown in another country, picked unripe, shipped, and then blasted with a gas that changes the fruit’s color to make it look ripe. However, fruit that doesn’t ripen naturally never gets the message from the mother plant to lower lectin levels. As a result, when you eat fruit out of season, you’re ingesting large amounts of lectins.
In contrast to fruit, plants that grow in open fields don’t want their seeds to be eaten. These plants—including grasses and vines—don’t benefit from their seeds being carried far and wide; instead, they want the seeds to drop and grow in place, so that when the mother plant dies during winter, the new plants will replace it in spring.
In order to deter predators from eating and spreading their seeds, these plants use toxins to weaken, paralyze, or sicken predators. In addition to lectins, which disrupt communication among cells (as we’ll explain in upcoming sections), these toxins include:
Plants Can’t Think, But They Can React
Although plants don’t have thought processes the way humans do, these behaviors show that they can react to their environment and act to encourage their offsprings’ survival.
When a bug is eating leaves on one side of a plant, that plant will double the production of lectins on the other side of the plant almost immediately to deter the predator from eating even more. Similarly, one study of thale cress showed that the plant could detect when a caterpillar was eating one of its leaves and reacted by increasing production of mildly toxic oils and sending them to its leaves.
Additionally, researchers have found that plants have a “clock gene” that recognizes the time of day and produces more toxins at times when their predators are more likely to be looking for food.
Just as lectins compound in our bodies when we eat certain plants, they do the same to animals—meaning that grain- and soy-fed chickens, cows, pigs, and seafood contain lectins in their meat, milk, and eggs. You also must be wary of these meat and protein sources, and opt for pastured (or grass-fed) meat; although grass still contains lectins, they contain anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats as opposed to the inflammatory omega-6 fats in corn and soy.
Labels such as organic and free-range don’t mean that the meat or produce is free of lectins.
Farmers actually feed livestock corn- and soy-based feed because they’re so effective at fattening up the animals. The downside is that it does the same to humans, even when we’re getting those grains and soy via meat, milk, and eggs.
Additionally, cows don’t digest corn and soy well (they naturally graze on grass) and suffer such bad heartburn that they stop eating. In response, farmers give cows calcium carbonate (the active ingredient in Tums) to relieve their indigestion and keep them bulking up. So when you’re eating non-pastured meat, lectins aren’t your only concern. We’ll talk more about the dangers lurking in your meat later.
Lectins are large proteins contained in the seeds, grains, skins, rinds, and leaves of most plants (gluten is a type of lectin). Lectins have several harmful effects in your body, which we’ll explore in more detail in the upcoming sections and chapters.
Everyone has different sensitivities to lectins; if your ancestors ate a certain plant, your immune system and microbiome have evolved to better tolerate that lectin.
Humans have developed a four-pronged protection from plants’ toxins, including lectins.
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.
Lectins have a multifaceted approach to attack your system.
First, they work on breaking through the mucosal wall that lines your intestines. Lectins are relatively large proteins (compared to the vitamins, minerals, fats, sugars, and simple proteins that your intestinal cells regularly absorb), and they have to try to squeeze through tight spaces between cells in the mucosal wall.
However, if your natural defenses are worn thin, the lectins can bind with certain cell receptors to create a chemical compound that opens spaces between the cells to allow the lectins (and other bacteria and toxins) to get through, causing leaky gut syndrome. Once lectins get through your intestinal wall, they can access your tissues, lymph nodes, glands, and bloodstream. As a foreign protein, your immune system naturally attacks them—and you’ll feel the effects via inflammation and other symptoms.
Second, lectins are designed to mimic other proteins. This means your immune system can’t tell the difference between the foreign lectins and the body’s own natural proteins and consequently attacks its own proteins. Additionally, different proteins instruct cells to do different actions (e.g. store fat, or attack invading organisms) so mistaking the lectins for another protein can cause your body to follow the wrong instructions.
Finally, lectins can bind to certain cell receptors to mimic a hormone or to block a hormone. Hormones are proteins that attach to docking ports on cell walls to instruct the cell on what to do; for example, insulin is a hormone that instructs cells to allow glucose to enter for fuel and store any extra glucose as fat. Hormones naturally leave the dock when they’re done, but lectins bind to these docks and sometimes never leave, meanwhile giving wrong instructions (e.g. chronically storing fat) or blocking the correct instructions. This is one way lectins disrupt communication in the body.
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.
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.
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 only did the agricultural revolution introduce 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—and humans’ gut bacteria and immune systems still haven’t adapted. Although the Agricultural Revolution was critical for the survival and growth of civilization, it led to health problems such as diabetes, obesity, clogged arteries, and tooth decay.
About 2,000 years ago, a mutation in Northern European cows caused them to produce a different kind of protein in their milk that causes problems for people during digestion. Previously cows had produced a protein called casein A-2, but these cows began producing casein A-1. During digestion, casein A-1 turns into a protein similar to lectin that causes your immune system to attack your pancreas.
Unfortunately, A-1 cows are the most common breed for producing milk. The good news is, A-2 dairy products are becoming increasingly available.
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:
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 pace: Fast food, microwave meals, and other processed foods have become a major part of many people’s diets.
Additionally, humans are being exposed to more chemicals that destroy certain gut bacteria that would’ve otherwise helped us process some of these lectins. As a result, we’re less able to process lectins at the same time we’re consuming them more heavily than ever before.
These chemicals are found in:
Around the 1950s, hybrid produce that could withstand long-distance shipping became more prevalent, giving shoppers year-round access to fruits and vegetables. However, the hybrid plants hadn’t existed long enough to develop natural defenses against cold weather, weeds, and insects, so they had to be manipulated in two ways that are harmful to consumers’ health.
Gluten—a form of lectin that is found in wheat, barley, rye, and oats—has gotten a lot of bad press in recent years. For people with celiac disease, avoiding gluten can be a matter of life and death. Some people who don’t suffer from celiac disease do still have gluten sensitivity, resulting in joint pain, inflammation, and brain fog.
Of the four sources of gluten, wheat is the most prevalent in most people’s diets, and not only does it have addictive qualities, but it also promotes weight gain.
This means, contrary to what you’ve been taught, white bread and white rice are less fattening and easier on your digestive system than wheat bread and brown rice. Skeptical? Consider this: The billions of people in Asia who eat rice as a staple in their diets eat white rice, and on the whole, they don’t suffer from epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes as commonly as Americans do.
Gluten is actually not the most harmful lectin in wheat—wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) is. WGA is found in the bran (that’s what makes whole grain bread brown) and is smaller than most lectins, so it passes more easily through the intestinal wall. WGA tends to bond to joint cartilage, prompting an immune system attack on the joints, which results in inflammation and joint pain.
Furthermore, WGA has these following harmful effects:
When people go gluten-free, they eliminate wheat, barley, rye, and oats from their diets, opting for alternatives like flours made from corn, buckwheat, quinoa, and other grains and pseudo-grains. Although they’re avoiding the lectins gluten and WGA, these gluten-free foods are still full of other lectins, so while people think they’re sparing their guts, they’re still consuming gut-disrupting lectins.
Besides WGA, there are other culprits in your bread that can cause problems that you may be mistakenly blaming on gluten.
Transglutaminase is a binding agent that has replaced yeast in many American commercial baked goods since 1950. Yeast ferments and naturally destroys lectins in wheat, reducing their harm on your gut; without yeast, you’re eating a lot more lectins.
Transglutaminase is also used to bind ground meat and seafood (like fake crab), and in gluten-free bread to make it fluffier. But ironically, transglutaminase can make you sensitive to gluten even if you’re not otherwise gluten-sensitive. Additionally, transglutaminase can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause gluten ataxia, a condition similar to Parkinson’s.
Butyl hydroxytoluene (BHT) is a preservative used in processed foods that have whole grains to prevent them from becoming rancid. However, BHT is an endocrine disruptor that acts like estrogen (we’ll talk more about endocrine disruptors in chapter 4); BHT can stimulate fat storage, contribute to early puberty in girls, and is even used in embalming fluid.
Now that we’ve outlined how harmful lectins can be, you may be surprised to learn that certain lectins, in moderation, actually have health benefits. This can be explained by the concept of hormesis—or “the dose makes the poison”—which says that compounds that are beneficial in moderation can be harmful in excess.
In limited amounts, the toxins in lectins put a mild strain on your immune system and cells, which ultimately strengthens it. (Shortform note: This is similar to the way vaccines work.) A widely varied diet has major health benefits by exposing you to smaller amounts of many different types of nutrients and lectins; our ancestors evolved as a traveling species, and thus ate a huge variety of plants through their travels.
Certain lectins teach your immune system to resist pneumonia and other viruses, while others curb the growth of the HIV virus. Still others can have healing properties, and some lectins may even have the potential to treat cancer (Shortform note: Research for this is ongoing).
It’s only when you have too many of the same lectins in your system that your body’s natural functions start to go awry.
Pattern matching is a computer science term for seeking patterns in sequences; when you start typing search terms into Google, it looks for patterns and makes search suggestions.
Your body uses pattern matching to determine which season it is: When you eat sweet foods, your body thinks it’s summer because that’s when fruit is ripe and in-season fruit used to be the only sweet food available to humans. If your body thinks it’s summer, it knows it needs to store fat for the upcoming winter, and if it thinks it’s winter then it focuses on burning fat to survive. Your food choice and lectin intake can confuse your body and disrupt this pattern.
Additionally, your body uses pattern matching to know when your immune system needs to attack a foreign invader to protect your health, but lectins cause unnecessary immune responses that lead to inflammation and disease.
Your immune system uses two main types of receptors to keep your body in good working order.
The immune system uses TLRs and G-spotters to look for patterns to determine which proteins are friend or foe, and it shares that information with the rest of the body so the defenses can react more quickly and effectively next time a threat enters the body. (Shortform note: This is how vaccines work: The small dose of a virus is enough to teach the body how to respond if it’s exposed again.)
However, since lectins are designed to hurt plant predators, they have barcodes that look similar to harmful barcodes, so the body begins attacking itself.
Additionally, the confusion can compound and cause even bigger problems. This is the chain of events that can lead to an autoimmune disease:
The author has worked with hundreds of patients and credits the Plant Paradox Program with alleviating and even curing dozens of diseases and conditions, including:
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:
To understand why the microbes’ functions are so important, you must understand how the GI tract is designed to work.
Think of your GI tract as a tunnel under a river: When you drive through the tunnel, you’re not in the river, you’re just passing through it. Similarly, food that passes through your intestines is not in your body as much as it’s passing through it.
Recall from chapter 1 that the intestinal wall is formed of tightly locked cells designed to prevent big molecules from passing through to the rest of your body. The microbes in your GI tract break down food into tiny molecules of amino acids, fatty acids, and sugar, which should be the only things that pass through the intestinal wall.
However, lectins and LPSs can breach the intestinal wall, prompting the immune system to attack. Additionally, regular use of Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs, e.g. Advil, Motrin, ibuprofen, Aleve, and aspirin) damages the protective mucus layer that lines the intestinal walls, making you even more susceptible to foreign objects breaking through the barrier and entering your body.
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.
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 microbes so the good ones can regain control.
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.
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 take up to two years for your microbes to grow back, and some may never return.
With your natural microbes wiped out, bad microbes—that your holobiome would normally keep in check—can take over and make you sick. In addition, overuse of antibiotics has made certain bacteria resistant to antibiotics, creating superbugs.
Antibiotics don’t just come through the drugs you take; most chicken and beef are fed antibiotics, and you consume the residue in their meat and milk. This has two harmful effects:
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.
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 digestive system. When acid-blocking drugs reduce your stomach acid, the bad bacteria can overgrow, further disrupting the balance of your microbiome and making you more susceptible to diseases like pneumonia.
Second, stomach acid prevents your microbes from going where they don’t belong; as your stomach contents move down the intestine, fluids from your bile and pancreas dilute the acid and by the time it reaches the colon, the acid is diluted enough for your gut bugs to tolerate. But without stomach acid, the microbes in your colon can crawl back up into your intestine, where they can cause leaky gut syndrome or small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO).
Third, stomach acid is critical to digesting proteins into amino acids so they can be absorbed into your body. Acid-blocking drugs prevent you from being able to digest and absorb protein, which can lead to sarcopenia, or muscle wasting. Furthermore, since lectins are proteins, acid blockers inhibit your body from breaking down the lectins, leaving more lectins intact to wreak havoc.
In addition to altering your stomach acid, most acid-blocking drugs are proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), which inhibit your cells from producing the energy they need to function. Studies have shown that this can increase your risk of dementia and chronic kidney disease.
Instead of acid reducers, try Rolaids (a calcium-based antacid) and DGL wafers (chewable wafers made from licorice root, which promotes mucus production in the stomach and esophagus to protect against excess acid).
Although you may reach for a diet soda to avoid weight gain, the artificial sweeteners it contains actually cause you to gain weight. These sweeteners include
Before supermarkets and mass food distribution made sweet fruit available year-round, humans only ate sweet fruit in the summer. When your tongue detects anything sweet—whether it’s from sugar, fruit, or sweeteners—your brain concludes it must be summer, which cues your body to store fat for the winter. This has several harmful effects on your body.
In addition, sweeteners kill some of the good bacteria in your holobiome, which allows for bad bacteria to run rampant. In fact, a study showed that one Splenda packet destroys half of your natural gut microbes. (Shortform note: The study gave rats high doses of Splenda. In order to have substantial negative effects on a human’s microbiome, she would have to consume hundreds of Splenda packets or over 100 cans of diet soda per day.)
There are several alternatives you can use instead of artificial sweeteners. But beware: While these are better for your holobiome, any sweet taste will prompt your body’s fat-storage response:
Endocrine disruptors—also called hormone disruptors—mimic hormones (mostly estrogen), causing weight gain, early puberty, and a host of other health issues. Endocrine disruptors include:
In addition to the products above, there are endocrine disruptors in:
Disruptors can cause the following problems:
Endocrine disruptors can be hard to avoid because they’re nearly everywhere, but there are alternative options.
The common weed killer Roundup is widely used on crops that we eat and that become animal feed, so we’re constantly exposed to its chemicals and their harmful health effects.
Normally, your gut bacteria produce three important amino acids: tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine. However, chemicals in Roundup prevent your gut bacteria from being able to make those essential amino acids, which help make serotonin (the “feel good” hormone) and contribute to thyroid hormone production.
Additionally, Roundup causes other health issues:
If you use Roundup and other weedkillers in your own garden, instead mix a cup of salt, a gallon of white vinegar, and a tablespoon of liquid dish soap and spray on weeds. You can also substitute Epsom salt for the salt and lemon juice for the white vinegar.
With the rise of Roundup, farmers needed crops that could withstand the powerful weed killer.
Genetically modified (GMO) foods were created by injecting plants with foreign genes to make the plant more resistant to insects (by producing more lectins) and more resistant to Roundup, so that farmers could easily spray a whole field with Roundup and the crops would be unharmed.
However, farmers also commonly spray non-GMO crops with Roundup as a desiccant, in order to dry them out and make them easier to harvest—and the chemicals are never removed from the plants at any point between the field and your dinner table.
The Roundup-sprayed crops either end up in your grocery store or in corn and grain feed for livestock, meaning you’re ingesting Roundup from both GMO and non-GMO crops as well as the milk and meat you consume.
In addition, besides producing higher amounts of lectins to ward off insects, GMO plants produce new proteins that your body isn’t familiar with, so your immune system doesn’t know how to read the barcodes and attacks, causing inflammation.
If non-GMO plants still have Roundup, and organic foods still have lectins, it’s hard to know what food labels really mean. Here’s how to decode some of them.
Biology programmed humans’ hunger cues to respond to daylight—specifically, the blue wavelength spectrum of daylight. Not only are you wired to find and eat food during the day, but longer days also tell your body that it’s summer, which is time to eat as much as possible and store the fat for winter.
Electronics including TVs, cell phones, computers, and tablets emit this blue light, making your body think that it’s constantly summer, putting it in perpetual fat-storing mode.
Furthermore, blue light stimulates the hunger hormone ghrelin and the awake hormone cortisol, while suppressing the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin; sleep deprivation is associated with obesity.
Limit your exposure to blue light—especially during nighttime hours—with these tips:
(Shortform note: For more on building good sleep habits, read our summary of Why We Sleep.)
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?
What are two or three simple changes you can make to reduce your exposure to endocrine disruptors (e.g. packing your lunch in a glass container or buying a different brand of toothpaste)?
What is one way you can commit to reducing your blue light exposure?
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:
When humans were hunter-gatherers, their diets consisted of seasonal fruits, seasonal big game, fish and shellfish, and—after discovering how to use fire to cook food—tubers (e.g. sweet potatoes).
After the agricultural revolution, humans started getting many of their calories from grains, legumes, and dairy. The traditional assumption is that people made this shift because grains, legumes, and cheese could all be stored to eat later, allowing people to build a community in one place rather than roaming in constant pursuit of food.
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.
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 body releases insulin in response. That insulin then fits into the docking port of three types of cells to give them each instructions on what to do with the sugar.
After insulin has given its instructions to each cell, it leaves the docking port, so that the port is available for the next hormone to dock and give its unique instructions. However, lectins like WGA enter the docking ports and never leave, preventing the cells from getting the information they need from other hormones.
This is how WGA behaves when it mimics insulin.
There is a subset of starches called resistant starches—such as yams, taro, and plantains—that don’t have the fattening, disease-inducing effects of corn, rice, wheat, and other starches. Resistant starches don’t get broken down into glucose (blood sugar), but instead pass through the small intestine intact.
Since resistant starches don’t become sugar, your body doesn’t release fat-storing insulin. Furthermore, resistant starches nourish and increase the amount of good gut microbes, which has multiple benefits:
Resistant starches also help control weight gain by:
There are countless diets out there, including Atkins, South Beach, ketogenic, paleo, Mediterranean, raw food, Weight Watchers, and Zone, to name some. But most diets don’t address the root issue, which is that the food that we eat and products we use trigger biological responses in your body that makes 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.
When you know how foods and other products affect your body, you can make choices that keep your body happy, and your weight will naturally stabilize.
Many people also rely on exercise to shed pounds, but several studies show that exercise is not an effective way to lose weight; rather, exercise is more effective at helping you maintain your weight. Of course, exercise also has many other benefits, including improved cardiovascular health, blood pressure, balance, mood, energy, and sleep.
Low carb diets—such as Atkins, South Beach, and Paleo—encourage high protein intake and cut lectin-containing grains and legumes. This often makes them successful in the short term, but when dieters reintroduce the grains and legumes back into their diet in the maintenance phase of these programs, they typically gain the weight back. Even when dieters continue restricting their carbs, their weight loss typically plateaus.
Ketogenic diet is another low-carb diet, but this program also limits proteins and encourages dieters to get most of their calories from fats. A ketogenic diet is often successful for people with diabetes or other insulin resistance, as well as people with cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s, autoimmune diseases, and gut diseases. However, it’s more likely that the results come from eliminating many lectin-containing foods rather than eating fats. (There is a keto version of the PPP that we’ll explain in chapter 10.)
Low-fat, whole-grain diets—such as Ornish, Esselstyn, and T. Colin Campbell—incorporate lectins, so these diets don’t prevent the progression of coronary artery disease. (Shortform note: Read our summary of T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study here.) However, dieters do still tend to lose weight; this is likely attributable to four factors.
Diets that are heavy in animal protein—particularly red meat—contribute to your aging and the development of heart disease and cancer.
To explain, let’s take a step back: Lectins bind with a specific sugar molecule called Neu5Ac, which is on your blood vessel lining and on cells on the intestinal wall. Humans (along with shellfish, mollusks, chickens, and elephants) produce Neu5Ac, making us vulnerable to lectins’ effects; most mammals produce another sugar molecule—Neu5Gc—that lectins don’t bind to, meaning those animals can eat grains and legumes without problems.
Cows, pigs, and sheep have Neu5Gc, so when you eat their meat your body looks at those sugar molecules as foreign and mounts an attack. However, Neu5Gc and Neu5Ac have very similar barcodes, so while your immune system is waging war on the foreign molecules, it accidentally also attacks your own blood vessel lining.
Additionally, cancer cells use Neu5Gc (the ones you get from eating red meat) in two ways: to attract blood vessels to grow toward them, encouraging tumor growth, and to hide from your immune system.
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?
What are your general health and well-being complaints (e.g. weight gain, inflammation)?
Think of the last time your regular diet was altered (e.g. while trying a certain diet). What were the primary changes? How did you feel afterwards?
Based on your experience and the information here, how might you adjust your diet to try to alleviate some of your health complaints?
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.
Unlike other diets, the PPP doesn’t ask you to count calories. Instead, the focus is on the type of food you’re eating; much of the PPP-approved foods have calories that will actually feed your microbes, so you won’t absorb all the calories you consume. That’s why you can eat much more food—as long as it’s the right foods—and lose weight.
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:
Here’s what you’ll eat:
Phase 3: In this optional phase, you’ll reduce your animal protein to just 2 to 4 ounces a day, and begin some form of fasting—either a monthly vegan fast, intermittent fasting, or lengthening time between meals.
Avoiding Ubiquitous Corn
When you start the PPP you’ll realize that corn is everywhere: Fast food and processed food use corn oil, cornstarch, cornmeal, corn syrup, and other corn products—even meat contains corn from the animals’ feed.
What’s worse, most of the corn fed to livestock is a GMO called Bt corn. Bt corn has a gene for a powerful lectin that no one is immune to. This corn also contributes to osteopenia and osteoporosis in chickens; per rule number 4, that means you’re at a higher risk of these diseases, as well, when you eat the meat and eggs from those chickens.
Vegetarians and vegans need alternative sources of protein and often rely heavily on beans and legumes. While these are generally off-limits because of their lectins, preparing them in a pressure cooker actually destroys the lectins and makes beans and legumes PPP-approved; additionally, pressure-cooked beans are great nourishment for good microbes and improve memory and longevity.
The pressure cooker also makes other lectin-containing foods PPP-friendly, including
Although it may seem daunting to limit your protein to 8 (and eventually 4) ounces a day, you don’t need as much protein as you probably think.
You only need .37 grams of protein per kilogram of your body weight (1 kilogram equals 2.2 pounds). In other words, a 150-pound person needs 25 grams of protein a day, and a 125-pound person only 21 grams.
Furthermore, you’re already getting most of that protein from inside your own body: Your mucus and intestinal lining cells contain protein, so each day your body recycles and digests about 20 grams of protein without eating a single egg or piece of meat.
The PPP isn’t just about losing weight, it’s about taking care of your body to live a long, healthy life.
These are some of the most common excuses for not trying the PPP—and the reasons they don’t hold water.
Excuse 1: You’re already fit and active. Although you may exercise regularly, eat foods you believe are healthy, and appear trim and fit, this is no guarantee that your insides are in great health; you can still be at risk for serious diseases down the road if you don’t take care of your gut and internal health.
Excuse 2: You think you have to understand nutrition and metabolism. It helps to understand the rationale behind the PPP, but when it comes down to it, all you need to know is which foods to eat and which to avoid.
Excuse 3: You think you’re too old to make such significant changes in your life. You’re never too old to make positive changes or to reap the benefits of those changes. About 90 percent of your cells renew every three months, and they’ll benefit from high-quality, nourishing food.
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?
What are the three aspects that you think will be most difficult?
What are some strategies you can use to help you deal with these challenges and increase your chances of following through? Take a few minutes to brainstorm.
What aspect of the PPP are you most eager about trying?
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:
The cleanse has three components:
During the cleanse, these are the foods that are off-limits:
Now let’s look at what you can eat.
Vegetables should be organic, in season, and grown locally and sustainably, if possible. They can be fresh or frozen, and you can have as much as you want, either cooked or raw.
(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.
Fats and oils:
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:
You should start each day with a green smoothie; this smoothie combines spinach, romaine lettuce, avocado, mint, fresh lemon juice, and stevia extract, along with some water and ice. Your drink choices for the rest of the day are
You can use stevia extract or Just Like Sugar to sweeten your tea and coffee.
Additionally, be sure to get at least eight hours of sleep and exercise regularly, outdoors if possible.
During the cleanse, you may still crave off-limits foods while the bad microbes are still dying off. If you find you’re still hungry, eat more of the approved vegetables; don’t eat more than the recommended amounts of guacamole, avocado, fish, or chicken. A few glasses of water may also ease your hunger.
Component 2 is to take an herbal laxative called Swiss Kriss, or something comparable, the night before beginning the cleanse. This component is optional, but it serves the same purpose as beginning the PPP with the cleanse: The laxative clears things out and starts with a clean slate to kick-start your results.
The laxative contains anise seed, calendula flower, hibiscus, peach leaves, caraway seeds, peppermint oil, strawberry leaves, and the active ingredient senna, or sennosides. These ingredients get rid of the bad microbes.
Component 3 is to take natural supplements to enhance the effects of your cleanse. This component is also optional, but can help kill harmful gut bacteria, fungi, and molds more quickly; this is strongly recommended if you have leaky gut, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or an autoimmune condition.
Helpful supplements include:
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.
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 because the bran in the whole grains contains lectins. But for this phase, both brown rice and white rice—as well as oats, popcorn, rye, bulgur, and corn—are off-limits.
Quinoa: This pseudo-grain—although widely considered a health food and popular gluten-free alternative—contains lectins, so they’re off-limits unless you pressure cook them, which removes the lectins, so that is an option.
Beans: Beans, peas, soybeans, lentils, and other legumes have some of the highest levels—and most dangerous forms—of lectins. For example, the lectin in castor beans is ricin, the most potent lectin and a deadly poison. Avoid these as well as green beans, chickpeas, edamame, and tofu.
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. eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, and goji berries) and squash (e.g. cucumbers, pumpkins, and zucchini).
Oils: The off-limits oils are made from lectin-containing seeds and beans; these include vegetable, corn, and peanut oil. Additionally, canola oil is off-limits because it almost universally comes from GMO seeds.
Initially, you should also limit certain fats and oils that help LPSs get through your gut wall. These include
Sweeteners: Avoid this deadly disruptor because it harms your microbiome; eliminate Splenda, NutraSweet, Sweet’n Low, and diet drinks.
Vegetables: Eat lots of leafy greens (e.g. spinach, lettuce, mesclun, and mustard greens), cruciferous vegetables (e.g. cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and bok choy), and other vegetables like carrots, raw beets, and asparagus.
Resistant Starches: Go heavy on the resistant starches, which nourish your good microbes and help digestion and nutrient absorption. These include plantains, parsnips, jicama, and turnips.
Fructooligosaccharides (FOS): Eat plenty of FOS, which is a sugar that’s indigestible for you but nourishes your good microbes. FOS helps microbes stimulate the production of mucus near your intestinal wall, which protects against lectins and LPSs breaking through. You’ll get FOS from okra, artichokes, onions, garlic, mushrooms, and figs.
Nuts: Nuts contain polyphenols, which feed your good microbes. These are in walnuts, pecans, macadamias, and pistachios.
Flours: When using flour, avoid those that are derived from grains because of the lectin content. Instead, use coconut, almond, chestnut, or cassava flour.
Dairy: You can have dairy products that don’t have casein A-1, including goat and sheep yogurt, coconut yogurt, goat cheese, buffalo mozzarella from Italy, and French or Italian cheese and butter.
Meat: Make sure wild fish and shellfish are a major part of your protein intake, including Alaskan halibut and salmon, canned tuna, shrimp, scallops, and crab. You can also have pasture-raised poultry (e.g. chicken, duck, and turkey) and grass-fed and grass-finished meat (e.g. bison, beef, and lamb).
Fruits: You can have one avocado a day because it has good fats, and enjoy unripe papayas, unripe mangoes, and unripe bananas because these are resistant starches. Other fruits must be limited, including berries, cherries, apples, peaches, plums, and citrus (not juice).
Oils: Use oils that actually block LPSs from breaking through your intestinal barrier, including perilla oil, walnut oil, and ghee (clarified butter).
Start each meal with a fish oil capsule, or use flavored cod liver oil to toss your salads or vegetables. If taking a fish oil supplement, choose one with a large amount of DHA; aim to take 100 mg of DHA each day. This protects your intestinal lining and also benefits brain health.
In addition to eating the right foods—and avoiding the wrong ones—protect your gut by eliminating endocrine disruptors and
Help fortify your good microbes and ward off the bad ones with:
You can stay in Phase 2 of the PPP for as long as you want—even indefinitely—but many people are able to graduate to Phase 3 after about six weeks. You’re ready for Phase 3 if:
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:
One at a time, you can reintroduce the following foods and monitor your tolerance and any adverse reactions.
Eating lots of animal protein doesn’t help you live a long, healthy life. However, most popular health information encourages protein—some diets even put it center stage.
This phase of the PPP reduces animal protein consumption from 8 to 2 ounces a day. If that sounds like a challenge, consider this: Studies of Seventh-day Adventists (who are notoriously long living) show that vegans live the longest, followed by vegetarians who eat little dairy, then vegetarians with a regular dairy intake, and finally those who eat some chicken and fish.
Here are a few more reasons to cut the meat.
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.
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, Phase 3 encourages trying different forms of fasting to cleanse your gut.
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 releases insulin to transport sugar to the mitochondria to become energy. If your mitochondria can’t keep up with all the sugar, they send it away and, as Plan B, the insulin takes the sugar to fat cells to turn it into fat to store for later.
Additionally, when your mitochondria is overloaded, your energy levels suffer and your brain feels starved of energy. With insufficient energy to function, your immune system is weakened, which allows harmful cells like cancer to move in and feast on the excess sugar.
To promote weight loss, you want your body to stop diverting extra sugar to fat cells and instead start burning that fat for energy. In order for the mitochondria to use the fat for energy, an enzyme called lipase has to turn fat into a ketone—but insulin blocks this enzyme from working, so you can’t start burning fat until your insulin levels drop.
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
Let’s look at how ketones can help your body ward off diseases.
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 sugar, you can starve the cancer cells. (Shortform note: Studies show that ketogenic diets—either alone or in conjunction with a calorie-restricted diet and/or other therapies—help suppress tumor growth in several types of cancer, including colon, lung, prostate, and pancreatic cancer).
By contrast, your brain and heart can thrive on ketones, so you’ll be doing the rest of your body no harm while you’re starving the cancer cells of sugar.
Unlike sugars from carbs and proteins, ketones don’t need insulin to transport them to mitochondria so they can be converted to energy. In other words, people with diabetes should up their fat (ketone) intake while reducing their carbs, sugars, and protein.
The same goes for people with kidney issues.
Kidneys have two main functions:
If you have kidney problems, limit your protein and fruit in particular.
Think of food like fuel in your car: Protein is like diesel and gives off fumes when it burns, so the kidney has to filter out that waste. By contrast, ketones are like natural gas and burn clean, so your kidneys don’t have to work.
Fruit is harmful because most of the fructose goes to the liver, where it turns into triglycerides, which lead to heart disease, and uric acid, which increases blood pressure, damages your kidneys, and causes gout. Remember that humans used to only eat fruit during the few months of summer—for the purpose of fattening up for winter—which gave their bodies the rest of the year to recoup from the negative side effects.
If you have any of the conditions caused by metabolic derangement then you should follow the keto version of the PPP. The main differences are
If you have cancer, memory problems, or neurological issues, stay on the keto version of the PPP for the rest of your life. On the other hand, if you used the keto version because of obesity, kidney issues, or diabetes, once your health improves you can switch to the regular version of PPP and start with Phase 2; however, if your health starts to decline after switching, go back to the keto version.
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 supplements can help tame the negative effects. These include:
Long-Chain Omega-3s: Omega-3s are fatty acids that are essential to memory and brain health. You get omega-3s from fish, but few people eat enough fish to get a sufficient amount, so supplement with fish oil that contains DHA.
Phytochemicals: The phytochemicals in leafy greens nourish your good microbes and ease your cravings for foods that feed bad microbes. Besides eating lots of leafy greens, you can increase your phytochemical intake with:
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:
Prebiotics: Prebiotics feed the probiotics—or microbes—in your holobiome, while starving the bad microbes. Recommended prebiotics include:
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:
Vitamin D3: Vitamin D is vital to helping your body absorb calcium, but the standard American diet leaves most people vitamin D deficient.
If you’re on the keto version of the PPP, your potassium and magnesium levels will quickly drop, leading to muscle cramps. To remedy this, take a potassium magnesium aspartate supplement.
(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.)
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.
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 flours), and plantain pancakes.
Eat no more than 4 ounces of animal protein per meal, totaling no more than 8 ounces per day. Animal protein sources include eggs, pastured chicken, canned and fresh salmon, shrimp, canned sardines, and crab.
Most lunches and dinners include a salad tossed with (homemade) vinaigrette, and they all include some form of raw, grilled, roasted, or stir-fried approved vegetables.
As we talked about, Phase 3 is the final phase, which you should follow indefinitely (or you can choose stay on Phase 2 indefinitely). The main differences from Phase 2 are that you’ll cut your animal protein intake in half and gradually reintroduce certain lectins.
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.
There are a few adjustments to adapt the regular Phase 2 meal plan to the keto version.
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.
To make the recipes in the PPP, it’ll be best to have these appliances: