Jennifer's Reviews > The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain

This is one of the worst diet/WOE (way of eating) books I have ever read. Food and eating DO NOT need to be as complicated as Gundry makes them out to be.

As far as the writing goes, I hated it. The author starts off in his preface by telling readers that we are not at fault for our health problems. 😒 How validating. It's just what every reader wants to hear. The blame rests with someone else, not him/herself.

The author then goes on to qualify his medical authority by listing many of his accomplishments, most of which are not related to treating patients through food intake. He spends the rest of the book blaming our ignorance for not understanding food at a microscopic level, and explaining a very complicated WOE and system. He endorses intermittent fasting (which is great) as well as keto (too new, not solid, not enough research to back up claims, just a fad diet at this point). (I prefer Dr Jason Fung's book, The Obesity Code, to The Plant Paradox, although Dr Fung also endorses keto, if not directly in his book, through some of his online resources.)

All that aside, Gundry does make a few good points, such as explaining why people who jumped on the bandwagon with gluten free diets like paleo have such a hard time with gluten when they try to eat it, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy that they have a gluten sensitivity. When one removes gluten from the diet, the gluten digesting bacteria die off as a result of no food for them. When you later eat gluten containing products, you no longer have the flora and fauna to digest them, thus creating intestinal havoc. This makes sense. He blames people's original digestive and health issues on other causes.

In dietary studies, it is so hard to pinpoint one thing, one culprit. Yet Gundry does so. With his Plant Paradox, his one culprit is lectin. However, we all live so differently from each other, we all have different bodies, different genetic makeup. Because of this, there is no one culprit, and each individual has to find what works for him/her. Perhaps this WOE works for some individuals, but it does not jive with me.

Common sense tells us that eating doesn't have to be (this) complicated. The rules should be simple. It is mankind who has made eating complicated, not nature. As a culture, we are addicted to processed convenience foods. The standard American diet (SAD) influence is spreading to other parts of the world as Western culture is spread. It's no wonder serious health problems such as diabetes type 2, heart disease, and allergies are such an epidemic.

I would prefer to espouse a mostly whole food plant-based (WFPB) eating culture furthered by doctors and writers such as Dr Joel Fuhrman (Eat to Live), Dr Caldwell Esselstyn (Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease), Dr McDougall (The Starch Solution), Michael Pollan (Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma), Mark Bittman (Food Matters, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00), Dr Andrew Weil (dietary and longevity doctor behind the menu for True Food Kitchen, and author of several books), Dr T. Colin Campbell (The China Study), Jane Birch (Discovering the Word of Wisdom), and others. Documentaries such as Food, Inc., and Forks Over Knives have brought to attention many of the problems with the SAD and our food supply. The other doctors I mentioned have based their books on long-term experience and studies treating patients with diet, and the people who have followed their WOE have had success for years and years. There is plenty of documentation, as well as testimonials, bearing witness of this. (Gundry's book hasn't even been around for a year, although he claims to have been presenting his findings for 15 years, and therefore his presentations and medical journal publications have made him an acknowledged expert on the human biome.)

A mostly WFPB diet doesn't have to be rocket science. Just eat foods in their mostly natural state, with minimal processing. As Michael Pollan writes, "Eat food; mostly plants; not too much." It's that easy.