Okay, this is what you have been waiting for. Now that you know the science behind the Plant Paradox Program and what it has done for countless others, it’s time to jump in and take control of your health by finding out what it can do for you. But before you get started, I want you to commit to memory the four rules that govern the program, along with the following statement, which is the most important thing I have to say in all of Part II: Every time you waver, every time you rationalize something about what you plan to eat, every time you hear a little voice in your head saying, “But this is healthy food,” stop and return immediately to Rule Number 1 (below).
Let me tell you what I have learned from every patient I have cared for over the past sixteen years as director of the Center for Restorative Medicine, which informs Rule Number 1: what you stop eating is more important than what you start eating. My patient Tony, whose vitiligo was cured after he started the program, is a perfect example. When the pigment in his skin returned, I could have said that his skin miraculously normalized because my dietary program was extremely anti-inflammatory, high in antioxidants, low in simple carbs, high in olive oil, and blah, blah, blah. The creators of all diets make these kinds of proclamations. But quite frankly, most of this rationale about why a dietary program works is wrong. Why? Because it wasn’t what I told Tony to eat that made the big difference in his health; rather, it was what I told him not to eat that cured him.
Follow the Rules
THESE FOUR SIMPLE rules will enable you to experience success on the Plant Paradox Program.
RULE NUMBER 1: What You Stop Eating Has Far More Impact on Your Health Than What You Start Eating
As far as I know, Professor John Soothill of Great Ormond Street in London, my old hospital, was the first person to state this rule. If you get no further than this rule, and if you actually follow the Plant Paradox food lists, I can virtually guarantee that you will achieve remarkably good and sustainable health. Now, I’m not suggesting that you simply stop eating, although the ability of a simple water fast to cure any number of diseases is staggering.1 But this rule does confirm Hippocrates’s dictum that “all disease begins in the gut.” If you stop damaging your gut, you’ll be healthier overall. Your gut holobiome accounts for 90 percent of the cells that make you “you” and contains 99 percent of all the genetic material that makes you “you”—so what goes on in your gut, unlike Las Vegas, doesn’t stay in your gut. Which brings us to my second rule.
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.
Another way of expressing this rule is: Give your gut bugs what they want, and nobody gets hurt. That sounds pretty easy, except for one thing. Part I should have convinced you by now that most of us have a virtual wasteland inside our gut. Years of using antibiotics, antacids, and NSAIDs, plus the high-fat, high-sugar Western diet, have decimated the once-dense “rain forest” of our gut. A “food desert” is an area where quality food is unavailable, even if people want to eat it. Imagine your gut as a vast, almost uninhabitable food desert, where only the bad bugs can survive and actually thrive on the stuff you throw down to them. Remember Audrey II, the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors, who was always screaming, “Feed me, Seymour. Feed me!”? Similarly, the bad bugs are demanding more sugar, refined carbs, and saturated fat—in other words, junk food. That’s exactly what the bad bugs love to dine on, which takes us back to Rule Number 1. Stop feeding the gang members what they thrive on, and they will leave town. It is as simple as that.
SUCCESS STORY
Every Little Bit Counts
Twenty-three-year-old Lydia B. had a persistent cough and sore throat, which her well-meaning doctor was treating with round after round of broad-spectrum antibiotics. She developed a rash, which her doctor called an “antibiotic drug rash.” When it failed to clear up, he sent her to a rheumatologist, who diagnosed her with lupus and started her on high doses of steroids. The rash resolved, but by then acne, weight gain, and mood swings—all the result of steroid use—had made this formerly vivacious young woman obese and miserable. Her story was classic: her gut buddies had been carpet-bombed, the gang members had moved in, and her own immune system had begun to mistakenly attack her.
When I came on board, our job was to initiate an all-out effort to stop the incoming attacks from lectins, restore the gut wall, and rebuild the gut buddies. We started to rapidly taper her off steroids and instituted the Plant Paradox Program. Within three months, Lydia was completely off steroids, the acne had cleared, the rashes on her face and arms had disappeared, and the excess weight was falling off. Her depression has also lifted. All was well.
Then, one morning a few months later, Lydia came running into the office in a panic. By chance, I was sitting at the front desk, filling out a form, and looked up to see this lovely woman covered from head to toe with huge red blotches, the classic erythema multiforme, a symptom of an autoimmune reaction in lupus. She sheepishly admitted that she had had a piece of sourdough bread the night before, and woke up with this gift. Luckily, a little Benadryl and quercetin tided her over, but it was a lesson she’ll never forget.
RULE NUMBER 3: Fruit Might as Well Be Candy
Forget any idea that fruit is a health food. As you’ve learned, eating fruit in season allowed our ancestors to fatten up for the winter, but now fruit is ubiquitous 365 days a year. The next time you ask for a fruit salad as a “healthy” breakfast, I suggest that instead you order a bowl of Skittles candy. Go ahead—it’s the same poisonous stuff. The corollary to Rule Number 3 is this: If it has seeds, it’s a fruit! That means that a zucchini, a tomato, a bell pepper, an eggplant, and a pickle are all fruits! And when you eat them, they deliver the same chemical message to your genes and your brain as a more obvious fruit, such as an apple, does: Store fat for the winter. Moreover (and this will surprise most of you), eating the fructose in fruit causes your kidneys to swell and suffer injury, which can destroy them.2
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.
I covered the next concept several times in Part I, but it is so important that it deserves to be my fourth and final rule.
RULE NUMBER 4: You Are What the Thing You Are Eating, Ate
If you prefer, think of this as a piece of parental advice: When you sleep with someone, you are sleeping with everyone that person ever slept with! If you eat meat, poultry, farm-raised fish, eggs, and dairy products, you are largely an ear of corn and a pile of soybeans, because that is what almost all industrially raised food animals are regularly fed.
The Elephant Not in the Room
WHY HAVE I not mentioned how many calories you can consume a day? The old rule, that a calorie in equals a calorie out, assumes that you are absorbing all those calories. It doesn’t factor in the fact that on the Plant Paradox Program, your gut buddies have an amazing ability to consume a lot of the calories that you ingest. They use those calories to grow lots of little clones, either making the calories unavailable to you or changing them into life-promoting special fats that power you. On this program, you will make sure that your gut buddies get their fair share, which means you can actually eat far more food than you used to eat and still lose weight. I kid you not. In fact, as my friend Dr. Terry Wahls likes to say, you’ll see evidence of this with the large bowel movement “snakes” coiled in your toilet!
We’ll get into specifics about what you will and will not be eating below and then again in greater detail in the following chapters. Your food choices will expand as you heal your gut and your tolerance for certain lectin-containing foods grows as you advance through the three phases of the Plant Paradox Program. But unlike most “diet plans,” there will be no calorie counting or carb counting. All you have to watch is your intake of animal protein.
Feasting on Corn
CORN IS OMNIPRESENT in the standard American diet, especially in processed foods. Fast food restaurants rely on corn oil, cornstarch, cornmeal, corn syrup, and a host of other ingredients extracted from corn. When scientists examined approximately 480 burgers from a gamut of fast food restaurants, they found that almost all of them, a whopping 93 percent, contained a “signature” C-4 carbon that indicates that the meat that comprised the burger came from corn (meaning the animal’s diet was corn-heavy).3 If that drives you to order a chicken sandwich next time you grab a bite at a fast food restaurant, hear this: The meat in chicken sandwiches were similarly made from corn. In fact, all the chicken served in the fast food places in the study originated from one source, Tyson, which feeds chickens corn—and only corn. There is no escaping corn in such chain restaurants.
If 93 percent of the ground beef in a burger originated with corn, the next logical question may be “How much of me originated with corn?” Do you want to hear the good news first? It’s less than 93 percent. Now for the bad news: Scientists at the University of California–Berkeley carbon-tested strands of hair from typical Americans and found that 69 percent was from corn.4 (Even health guru Sanjay Gupta’s hair analysis found the exact same percentage of carbon from corn.5) And here’s the shocker: When the same carbon test was performed on strands of hair from typical Europeans, the corn content was a mere 5 percent.
Unfortunately, there’s even worse news. Most field corn (the type fed to livestock) grown in the United States is a genetically modified version called Bt corn. A gene for a potent lectin from the snowdrop plant is inserted into this corn to improve its insect resistance. And once that lectin makes it into corn and is fed to cows, chickens, and pigs, and then you eat those animals or drink cow’s milk, it makes its way into you! This is a lectin to which everyone reacts, and it’s even found in the breast milk of American mothers.
Another sobering point: Genetically modified corn produces osteopenia and osteoporosis in chickens.6 (And you thought only postmenopausal women developed these two bone-deterioration diseases.) One reason chickens are crammed together in their pens is that their leg bones are so brittle from their diet that they fracture when the birds try to walk. So, ladies, the next time you take your osteoporosis medication in the morning and have a boneless chicken breast for lunch or dinner, ask yourself a variation of that age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the osteoporosis? Actually, the correct answer is corn. Again, you are eating the stuff that these animals ate.7
Because our livestock have been routinely given antibiotics, they have become hosts to multiple forms of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Almost weekly, we hear another report of a meat or chicken recall because of an outbreak of deadly diarrhea.
Wait—I’m not done yet. It turns out that chicken (eggs and flesh), pork, beef, and cow’s milk are contaminated with aflatoxins, toxic by-products of molds and fungi that grow on corn, wheat, and soybeans. These compounds are toxic to animals and humans, and their consumption has been linked to genetic changes and cancer.8 Cereal grains and soybeans (the type fed to poultry) are particularly subject to aflatoxin contamination.9 While the U.S. Department of Agriculture sets standards for the amount of fungal toxins that are allowed in corn, grains, and soybeans fed to our chickens, turkeys, cows, and pigs, there is no control over or requirement about the maximum amount of these toxins that are allowed in the finished products—the meats that we eat and the milk that we drink. And, quite frankly, it’s a staggeringly high amount. It seems the USDA is more concerned about food animals consuming these toxins than humans eating those same toxins in animals. Think about that the next time you order a serving of Chicken McNuggets. You might be getting a double whammy of aflatoxins from the chicken as well as the breading. Add a glass of milk and you up your chances of toxification.
SUCCESS STORY
She’d Rather Switch than Fight Multiple Sclerosis
Marcia D., a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old, was referred to me with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis (MS), despite taking heavy immunosuppressant meds and following a gluten-free, mostly vegetarian diet. Persistent brain fog and progressive numbness of her left hand made getting to and from work difficult, so she had to work from home. She had noted some improvement after going gluten-free, but some of her favorite gluten-free foods—like corn chips, potatoes, and tomatoes—seemed to worsen her symptoms. As usual, her blood work showed the typical pattern of lectin sensitivity and exposure to foods that contain them. Out those foods went, and within three months, Marcia was back at work and off the immuno-suppressant drugs, and the brain fog and numbness were gone.
That was five years ago. Her recent blood work reflects the banishment of lectins from her diet, although I do get the occasional phone call for help. I remember one panicked call well. She had awakened one morning with her left fingers going numb and her brain foggy. “What were you doing last night?” I asked. “I was with some friends and had a slice of gluten-free pizza,” she replied. Now, gluten-free pizza is a fabulous lectin bomb, usually with a crust made of oat, corn, or rice flour, plus tomato sauce and cheese made from cows with the casein A-1 mutation. You get the idea. I asked Marcia what she expected by eating that pizza? Her answer was that she was thirty-three years old and had to have a life! “Fine,” I replied. “Do that and enjoy your life from a wheelchair. It’s always your choice.” She has never wavered since that morning.
The Buddy System
BACK TO RULE Number 2, which applies to the good bugs, your gut buddies. Friendly bacteria are like neighbors who are invested in the neighborhood (your body). Your objective is to protect and encourage their growth, but typically their needs and wants have been pushed aside in favor of the bad bugs. As a result, the good bugs are hiding in their homes, afraid to come out. But if you starve the bad guys and throw the good guys a lifeline, the good guys will reemerge to support the neighborhood. What’s more, those good bacteria will start asking you for more of what they need to succeed. I’ve been amused and pleased through the years when dyed-in-the-wool “meat and potatoes” people come back to see me after a couple months on the program and tell me that they now crave salads full of green things. In fact, when they go a couple of days without one, they are ready to kill to get to the salad bar! They are completely shocked by their own behavior, which is now controlled by a new set of microbes, their true gut buddies, giving out new sets of instructions. These good bacteria are saying loud and clear to their hosts, “Please help take care of our home.”
The most important gift your gut buddies can give you is to direct your appetite and manage your cravings. This frees you from the constant battle to control your desires, along with the chore of calorie counting and the effort to demonize those wonderful-looking junk foods. Give your gut buddies what they want and they will return the favor.10 Soon, the bad bugs responsible for those cravings will have left the building.
Those unremitting cravings that often torture people on high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets do not occur when the source of protein is fish and there are plenty of resistant carbs from greens and tubers. But the fats in high-protein diets tend to come from the lard in beef and saturated fats in other farm animals. The LPSs in your gut hop on these saturated fats to sneak through the wall of your gut; then they are directly transported to the hunger center in your brain, the hypothalamus. There, the resulting inflammation in your brain sparks your hunger.
This absence of constant hunger is one way in which the Plant Paradox Program differs significantly from Paleo and some ketogenic diets, both of which include plenty of animal fats. The Plant Paradox Program contains only appropriate animal fats—and let me remind you that there are vegetarian and vegan versions of the program for those who eat no meat, fish, or poultry and for those who also don’t touch dairy or eggs. People who insist that we need to eat animal protein will soon learn what any gorilla knows: there is a huge amount of muscle-building protein in leaves. Not convinced? Just look at a horse. He didn’t get those sleek muscles from munching on burgers.
An Overview of the Plant Paradox Program
THE REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH of the Plant Paradox Program will help you achieve both optimal health and the ability to manage your weight by feeding you and your good gut bugs what you both need. We’ll get into the specifics of the three phases that constitute the Plant Paradox Program in the following three chapters. Meanwhile, here are the basics:
• PHASE 1: This three-day cleanse begins the process of repairing your gut, fortifying the good microbes, and banishing most of the bad microbes. At the end of the three days, your gut organisms will have changed, and therefore, your gut has changed. But you must move directly from Phase 1 to Phase 2 to prevent the almost immediate return of the bad guys.
• PHASE 2: Here is where the Plant Paradox Program really kicks in. All I ask is that you give me two weeks, and in return I’ll give you back your life. After two weeks, you will feel and see the change—it is that powerful. And after six weeks, you’ll have engrained these new eating habits. During this time, I’m going to ask you to eliminate or reduce certain foods and eat more of others. Here’s an overview:
• Initially, you’ll eliminate major lectins (grains and legumes, including corn and soybeans, which also contain estrogenlike substances), GMO foods, crops treated with Roundup, and many saturated fats. This includes whole-grain products, which hypersensitize the immune system. But fear not, vegetarians and vegans, I have a solution for you below.
• Eliminate all sugars and artificial sweeteners.
• Minimize intake of most omega-6 fats, which prompt the body’s attack mode, encouraging fat storage and hunger.
• Eliminate industrial farm–raised poultry (including so-called free-range poultry) and livestock (along with their dairy products) and all farm-raised fish, which are fed antibiotics, corn, and beans full of omega-6s and laced with Roundup.
• You may have a small serving of nuts, guacamole, or simply half a Hass avocado as a snack.11 You will find that over time, if you are eating the right foods, you no longer feel the need for snacks. The wrong foods, on the other hand, simply make you hungrier.
• Avoid using all endocrine-disrupting products.
• Instead, you’ll consume the following:
• All leafy greens and certain vegetables, and a substantial amount of tubers and other foods that contain resistant starch. Initially, you will give fruit the boot. Later, you can reintroduce it only in its real season, and only as “candy.”
• Consume more omega-3 fats, particularly those found in fish oil, perilla oil, flaxseed oil, and other approved oils, such as avocado, walnut, olive, or macadamia nut, as well as medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), all of which allow speedy repair of the gut barrier.
• Consume no more than 8 ounces of animal protein a day (remember, fish and shellfish are animals), primarily as wild-caught fish and shellfish, which are high in omega-3 fatty acids and have no artery-destroying Neu5Gc, as well as eggs from pastured or omega-3-fed chickens.
• Only 4 ounces of your daily protein should come from grass-fed or pasture-raised meat, which have more omega-3 and fewer omega-6 oils than animals fed grains and soy, but still do contain lots of Neu5Gc.
• Consume dairy products only from certain breeds of cows or from sheep, goats, and water buffalo, which make casein A-2. However, in general, with the exception of ghee, limit all dairy products, owing to the presence of Neu5Gc.
• PHASE 3 (optional): Reduce intake of all animal protein, including fish, to a total of 2 to 4 ounces a day and fast intermittently.
• The Keto Plant Paradox Intensive Care Program, introduced in chapter 10, is designed for those of you with diabetes, cancer, or kidney failure, or who have been diagnosed with neurologic diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or ALS. If that describes you, do the Three-Day Kick-Start Cleanse, then go directly to chapter 10 and dive in. I’ll provide instructions to determine when, if ever, you may segue to Phase 2.
Glad Tidings for Vegetarians and Vegans
MY PRACTICE INCLUDES a large number of vegetarians and vegans who have asked for my help over the years. Unfortunately, most of them were what I call “pasta-grain-bean-atarians.” Asking them to give up their usual sources of plant protein, regardless of the fact that these foods were making them sick, has been a struggle for them and for me. Fortunately, by working with my vegetarian and vegan “canaries,” I have found ways around the problem. Here’s the first piece of good news: 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. More good news: Most natural foods stores and Whole Foods stock brands of beans and other legumes in cans that are not lined with BPA. Westbrae Natural and Eden Foods are two such brands. (Eden Foods pressure-cooks the beans in the can.) Thus vegetarians and vegans can consume small amounts of properly prepared legumes and certain other lectin-containing foods in Phase 2 of the Plant Paradox Program.
Unfortunately, the lectins in wheat, rye, barley, and oats—yes, the gluten-containing grains—cannot be destroyed, so these foods remain off-limits. But using a pressure cooker does destroy the lectins in other grains and pseudo-grains, making them safe for consumption. (See “Not Grandma’s Pressure Cooker,” below.) In fact, because the lectins are destroyed, their role in weight gain is also reduced. But please do not introduce these foods until Phase 3, if at all. Remember, humans have no need for these grains.
Let me embrace my vegan and vegetarian colleagues and friends once more, along with anyone else who wants to reduce his or her intake of animal protein. All that stands between you and true health are the lectins in beans and certain grains that can be destroyed in a few minutes on your countertop.
Not Grandma’s Pressure Cooker
You may be disinclined to purchase a pressure cooker, fearing that it could be dangerous. Almost everyone who grew up in the 1950s has heard about a pressure cooker exploding and creating a terrible mess, and perhaps even burning the cook. Pressure cookers from that era had just one mechanical regulator, which could allow pressure to build up with disastrous effects. Today’s appliances are a whole different story, thanks to a metal interlocking lid designed to withstand enormous pressure, an airtight gasket, and a relief valve to allow the device to maintain a constant pressure. They are also surprisingly affordable. Look for an automatic one, such as the Cuisinart or Instant Pot brands, which shut off when the cooking cycle is complete. For a hassle-free, lectin-free lifestyle, a good pressure cooker can’t be beat.
What Is the Right Amount of Protein?
Consuming sufficient protein is essential to power your body and build muscle. And the protein you consume must provide the essential amino acids that supply the building blocks of protein you cannot make yourself. However, most Americans consume far more protein, particularly animal protein, than they need. Government subsidies of corn, other grains, and soybeans that are fed to industrial-farmed animals, poultry, and even fish mean that animal protein has become ridiculously inexpensive. No matter how cheap, no one needs to eat a pound of sirloin at a sitting. As we’ve discussed, overconsuming and then having to metabolize large amounts of protein into sugar is associated with higher blood sugar levels, obesity, and a shorter life span.12 Moreover, certain amino acids in animal protein—methionine, leucine, and isoleucine—seem to be real culprits for promoting rapid aging and cancer growth.13
So how much protein do you actually need? Most protein recommendations are based not on your weight but on your lean body mass, which requires a number of complex calculations to ascertain. But to make it really easy, both Dr. Valter Longo of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California and I agree that people require only 0.37 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.14 Since 1 kilogram equals 2.2 pounds, a 150-pound man needs about 25 grams of protein daily and a 125-pound woman about 21 grams. You can calculate this for yourself by dividing your weight in pounds by 2.2 to get your weight in kilograms, and then multiplying that number by 0.37 to get your required daily grams of protein. To give you a general sense, you’ll get 20 grams of protein from one scoop of protein powder, about two and a half whole eggs, a Quest bar, 2 to 3 ounces of fish or chicken, a 3-ounce can of tuna, a 3.75-ounce can of sardines, or 4 ounces of canned crabmeat. To best judge your intake of animal protein, just remember the rule “Eat one and you’re done,” meaning a single 3-ounce serving a day.
And please, do not fall into the “protein-combining” trap, which means that you must eat all essential amino acids at every meal. This is total nonsense from an evolutionary standpoint. Your ancestors didn’t examine their food choices each meal to make sure that they were getting the right combination of proteins. Your body recycles essential amino acids; you don’t need a fresh batch of each and every essential amino acid from protein on a daily basis.
To complicate matters, the calculations above do not take into account that every day we recycle about 20 grams of our own protein that has sloughed from our intestines and mucus. In other words, both mucus and your gut lining cells contain protein, and when mucus is produced or your gut lining cells die and are replaced, we digest these proteins in our gut. Your digestive system is very economical! If you want to be a real protein-calculating purist, you could eliminate another half of the already low protein recommendation because you are recycling your own protein daily. As you can see, our protein needs are shockingly small.
In actual practice, this means that if you had two medium eggs at breakfast (about 15 grams of protein), a big salad topped with an ounce of soft goat cheese (about 5 grams) for lunch, a couple of tablespoons of pistachios (about 3 grams) for a snack, and 3 ounces of salmon with dinner (22 grams), you’d be far exceeding your protein needs—and I am not even counting the protein in the vegetables you are eating. Yes, there is protein in vegetables. Half a cup of steamed cauliflower supplies 1 gram of protein; a medium baked sweet potato, 2 grams; and an artichoke, about 4 grams. Protein adds up quickly, and as you’ll see, I’m going to be lenient about the amount of protein you can have initially on the Plant Paradox Program. But by Phase 3, for very good reasons, you are going to try to significantly restrict both your overall protein intake and the amount of animal protein.
Forget Your Excuses and Get Inspired
IN PART I, I talked about supposedly healthy foods that do not live up to their name. As a plant paradox newbie, you may have still some lingering doubts about the wisdom of cutting out whole grains, organic chicken, cow’s milk yogurt, edamame, tofu, and other foods that are marketed as “healthy.” You’ll need to get over that hurdle to succeed on the Plant Paradox Program. On the one hand, the program is very simple—what other diet has only four rules?—but, admittedly, it does require some mental and physical realignment if you have been eating the typical overproteinized American diet, or even if you have been dutifully consuming what you think is healthy food. Ditto if you have been eating a variety of vegetables without understanding the significant differences between, say, a potato and a yam. Below are some of the most common excuses, as exemplified by the experiences of some of my patients who have become plant paradox advocates after changing their way of eating and experiencing dramatic changes in their health—and often their weight. When you read of their dramatic recoveries, you will probably decide that you, too, are willing to make some relatively small changes in order to have major changes in your health, weight, and overall sense of well-being.
Don’t let any of these excuses keep you from moving forward with the program.
EXCUSE #1: You Are Already Slim, Fit, and Active
If so, you may feel there is no need to change your way of eating. What follows is the story of an outwardly fit man who did not know that he had a serious health problem, with increased risk for even more serious problems. Fortunately, when he found out, he decided to do something about it. Resigning himself to accept the inevitable was never an option.
EXCUSE #1 SUCCESS STORY
An Extreme Athlete Betters All His Numbers
Simon V. came to see me on the advice of a friend. He was forty years old, cycled 150 to 200 miles a week, was slim and muscular, and from all appearances was in great shape. Initially, he was interested in improving his athletic performance, but a test revealed that he was not going to enjoy a healthy life span. His oxidized LDL (“bad”) cholesterol level, an indicator of how sticky your cholesterol is, was extremely high, and he had low HDL (“good”) cholesterol. He also carried what’s commonly called the Alzheimer’s gene, known as ApoE4 (30 percent of us carry that gene). Fortunately, I am the world’s expert on the dietary approach for people with ApoE4. After adopting the Plant Paradox Program, Simon reduced his body fat to a remarkably low 8 percent and lost eight pounds. His oxidized LDL went from 107 to 47, which is within the normal range, and his HDL is now up to 62, also in the normal range. Not only did Simon improve his chances for living a long, healthy life, he also bettered his athletic performance. He can now sustain a heart rate of 180 beats per minute for thirty minutes, and his resting heart rate dropped an additional eight points.
EXCUSE #2: You Are Worried That the Program Requires a Deep Understanding of Human Metabolism and Nutritional Concepts
The good news is that I have several patients who have Down syndrome or are otherwise intellectually challenged, who have had great results. I also have a number of patients who don’t speak English who have seen positive outcomes. Although it is important to read this entire book to understand why the Plant Paradox Program works, its success often comes down to knowing and abiding by the two lists of food to either eat or avoid.
EXCUSE #2 SUCCESS STORY
Ensuring a Healthy Future
Molly S. has Down syndrome, along with a host of health problems. At forty-seven, she a had fatty liver, high cholesterol, and prediabetes, and was in kidney failure. She was also obese. Her mother was worried about Molly’s long-term future, considering her cluster of medical issues, and they both came to see me. Molly’s mother was particularly concerned that at the special school Molly attended, the students were fed cookies and ice cream and other problematic snacks. Once Molly’s mother understood the Plant Paradox Program herself, she implemented it right along with Molly, explaining to her daughter how to follow it and preparing food for her to take to school. Molly followed the program to the letter, and within six months had lost thirty pounds. Her kidney function has returned to normal, and all her numbers for cholesterol, liver function, and blood pressure also normalized. Molly learned that the foods being pushed on her at her school were making her ill. Now she tries to help her classmates avoid them, too.
EXCUSE #3: You’re Too Old to Make Significant Changes in Your Eating and Other Habits (or You Think Your Loved Ones Are)
A lot of the patients I see in my Palm Springs clinic are retirees. I am constantly inspired by the willingness of elderly or extremely ill people to make changes that will better their lives. Here is just one such inspiring story that drives home the point that I see every day. It is never too late to improve your health. You replace about 90 percent of your old cells with new ones every three months, regardless of your age. Giving those new cells high-quality building materials to work with via the foods you eat and what you feed your bugs will absolutely make a new you!
EXCUSE #3 SUCCESS STORY
It’s Never Too Late to Make Better Choices!
I first met Rebecca L. ten years ago, when she was eighty-five. As the sole caregiver for her mentally disabled sixty-year-old daughter, she told me at our first office visit, “You’ve got to help me. I can’t die.” At that time, Rebecca had severe coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and heartburn. Her arthritis and obesity made it difficult for her to walk. Well, by following the Plant Paradox Program, she lost seventy pounds and has kept it off. All of her health problems are a distant memory, so she is no longer taking any medications. At ninety-five, this striking redhead now has a live-in boyfriend who is only eighty-five!
With this inspiration under your (soon to be smaller) belt, I trust you are champing at the bit to get going. But if you still have some lingering doubts, consider these facts.
• Great apes eat fruit to gain weight for the winter. What makes you different? Nothing.
• Farmers use grains, corn, and beans to fatten livestock for slaughter. What makes you different? Nothing.
• Horses are fed oats to fatten them for the winter when forage is hard to come by. What makes you different? Nothing.
Every time you think the “rules” don’t apply to you, you have to answer the same question: What makes you think that you are any different? I think you know the answer.
Unless you don’t want to slim down and don’t want to improve your overall health, let’s move on to the cleanse phase of the Plant Paradox Program.