The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain

by Steven R. Gundry

Again, when fruit is allowed to ripen naturally, the parent plant reduces the amount of lectins surrounding the seeds in the fruit and skin and then communicates this information by changing color. In contrast, gassing artificially changes the color of the fruit, but the lectin protection system remains in effect. Thanks to the high lectin count, eating fruit picked too early is detrimental to your health.

That’s why if you eliminate all gluten from your diet, the gluten-eating bugs die off; then when you do revert to eating gluten or eat something you don’t realize contains gluten, you cannot digest them, causing discomfort.

You’ll also soon learn why the use of drugs that eliminate stomach acid and the adoption of a completely gluten-free diet are ill advised except in that small portion of the population diagnosed with celiac disease.

So how do you avoid WGA? Simply steer clear of whole-grain bread and other whole-grain products.

Many people assume so-called gluten-free foods are grain-free. Not so. Wheat, rye, and barley may be eliminated in gluten-free foods, but a look at the list of ingredients reveals that these grains have been replaced with corn, rice, or teff, each of which contains multiple forms of glutenlike lectins, including zein, oryzenin, panicin, kafirin, and penniseitin. These products also often include soy or other bean flours, which of course also contain lectins.

Would it surprise you then to learn that sourdough bread, made by fermenting wheat with bacteria and yeast, consistently ranks as one of the safest and least injurious breads, in terms of blood sugar spikes? The bacteria and yeast together “eat” the lectins and a good deal of the sugars!

It is important to note that transglutaminase also sensitizes us to glutens even if we’re not gluten-sensitive. Read that last sentence again. This means that if you assume you are sensitive to gluten because you have certain symptoms after eating store-bought bread and other products made with wheat, you may instead actually be reacting to transglutaminase.

Much to my surprise, these thin, supposedly healthy women had a number of health issues in common with one another. A shocking number were hypothyroid, most due to Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease supposedly of unknown cause. (Not so, as you’ll learn.) A great number of them also had arthritis, often with very tender nodules in their finger joints. To relieve the pain, they typically took one or more of the NSAIDs, and most of them had also been using a stomach-acid reducer such as Prilosec, Prevacid, or Nexium for years. In addition, a huge number of them relied on antidepressants. Many would tell me, “If you were married to my husband, you’d be on them, too!” But that’s not all. Often, they were also taking one or more drugs for osteoporosis and had been told that they had IBD (irritable bowel disease). In fact, my average (supposedly healthy) female patient was on seven medications!

This subset of starches behaves differently in your GI tract than do corn, rice, wheat, and other typical starches or simple sugars. Instead of being quickly converted to glucose (blood sugar), which is burned for energy or stored as fat, yams, taro, plantains, and other resistant starches simply pass through your small intestine intact.

RULE NUMBER 1: What You Stop Eating Has Far More Impact on Your Health Than What You Start Eating

Now, I’m not suggesting that you simply stop eating, although the ability of a simple water fast to cure any number of diseases is staggering.1 But this rule does confirm Hippocrates’s dictum that “all disease begins in the gut.”

RULE NUMBER 2: Pay Attention to the Care and Feeding of Your Gut Bugs, and They Will Handle the Care and Feeding of You. After All, You Are Their Home.

RULE NUMBER 3: Fruit Might as Well Be Candy

Just to be clear, there are three fruits that you can have, so long as you eat them when they are still green: bananas, mangoes, and papayas. Unripe tropical fruit has not yet increased its sugar (fructose) content. Instead, it is made up of resistant starches, the things your good gut bugs love to dine on, but we mere humans don’t have the enzymes to digest. Green papaya and mango are great sliced in a salad. Green banana flour comes in handy for making grain-free pancakes and baked goods. Our dear friend the avocado is the only acceptable ripe fruit because it contains nary a trace of sugar and is composed of good fat and soluble fiber, which help you lose weight and absorb fat-soluble vitamins and antioxidants.

RULE NUMBER 4: You Are What the Thing You Are Eating, Ate

A pressure cooker will destroy the lectins in beans and other legumes, which are a fantastic source of nonvegetable protein, as well as in vegetables in the nightshade and squash families (actually fruits). Better yet, pressure-cooked beans, shorn of their offending lectins, serve as a smorgasbord for your gut buddies, and can improve longevity and enhance memory.

Westbrae Natural and Eden Foods are two such brands. (Eden Foods pressure-cooks the beans in the can.)

According to my friend and colleague Loren Cordain, Ph.D., author of The Paleo Diet, the first book on the subject, studies that were conducted to see whether humans could absorb the omega-3 fats in chia seeds proved that indeed they could. There was only one hitch: The researchers had hoped to prove that these omega-3 fats would reduce inflammation. But in fact, inflammation markers in the subjects who ate chia seeds went up slightly, rather than decreased, as had been expected.7 You may be getting some omega-3 fatty acids from chia seeds but their lectin content outweighs any benefit.

TWO OF THE worst lectin additions to our diet are the American grain known as corn (maize) and the pseudo-grain quinoa. We have talked at length about the dangers of corn, but did you know that the French banned corn as unfit for human consumption in 1900 and allowed its use only to fatten pigs? This was prompted by an outbreak of congenital mental retardation (cretinism) in northern Italians, who had adopted corn as their main grain. As you now know, corn is not a natural food for cows either.12 The American pseudo-grain quinoa is just as troubling. The Incas had three detoxification processes to remove the lectins in quinoa. First, they soaked it, then they let it rot (fermented it), and finally they cooked it. If you’ve used quinoa, you’ll know that the first two of those instructions are not on the package directions.

I have been shocked by how much supplementation some of my autoimmune patients need to get their vitamin D blood levels up to what I consider normal, which is 70 to 105 ng/ml for serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the active form of vitamin D in your body. Because I measure vitamin D levels every three months, I can be aggressive with replacement, but if you are just beginning this program, please add just 5000 IUs of vitamin D3 daily. For autoimmune disease, start with 10,000 a day. In the last seventeen years, I have yet to see a case of vitamin D toxicity. In fact, I doubt that it exists.

The good news is that by swallowing a methylfolate 1000 mcg tablet each day and putting a 1000 to 5000 mcg methyl B12 under your tongue, you can bypass the genetic mutation. Since you have about a 50 percent chance of carrying one or more of these single or double mutations, I think it is worth taking the active forms of methylfolate and methyl B12 just in case.