Dr. Steven Gundry presented the idea of a lectin-free diet, which is now named Gundry’s diet.
Gundry was a famous heart surgeon who late switched his career to preparing supplements and food-based medicine. He initially created a diet plan for his patients for controlling their cholesterol levels.
When he saw the health benefits of his diet plan on his patient’s health, he wrote down a detailed book on dietary recommendations for prevention from chronic health diseases, it is named “Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution”.
About The Gundry’s Diet
In this book, Dr. Gundry has pointed out the main dangerous element in the American diet i.e. lectin.
He has written in other books about how should we stop eating lectins and choose other nutritious foods instead. His plan to skip lectin and make lectin-free recipes is referred to as Grundy’s Diet.
Grundy’s diet helps by improving health and reducing weight. The diet also includes supplements made by Dr. Gundry and sold in markets as the Gundry MD brand.
How Does Gundry Diet Works
The Gundry diet has a total of three phases that includes minimizing lectin from your food while transitioning to an animal protein and fresh plant diet.
1. Eliminating Lectin:
Lectin is a substance that is found in plant foods like potatoes, tomatoes, or eggplant. It is a natural defense mechanism to help plants defend themselves from animals or insects.
When lectins enter into the human body, they bind in sugar and carbohydrates. Later it disrupts the messaging between the cells which cause toxic reaction and inflammation inside the body, which makes it difficult to lose weight.
Gundry’s diet suggests a diet plan which minimizes the lectin intake of the body and replaces it with other healthy food.
2. Teardown phase:
The first phase which will last for six weeks is called the Teardown phase. It is highly crucial to follow the diet for the first two weeks. In this phase, you just have to eat non-starchy vegetables, proteins, and healthy fats.
During this time, you must eliminate starchy vegetables, grains, sugar, and fruit.
In the third week, you can begin to eat small portions of fruits and grain. This first phase of Gundry’s diet is very helpful in starting a weight loss process.
I look at the first phase as the cleansing phase. This will help you purge your system and make it more efficient to lose those unwanted pounds and help you accomplish your weight loss goals.
3. Restoration phase:
In the second phase a.k.a. Restoration phase, you switch from full-calorie foods to low-calorie foods.
This phase helps your body system in embracing a permanent change in eating habits. The intake of green vegetables increases while animal proteins, grains, cheese, and legumes decrease.
This phase lasts for 6 weeks at minimum, but Gundry suggests staying on this phase until your body weight normalizes.
4. Final Phase:
The last phase of Gundry’s diet is an ongoing process of eating known as the Longevity phase.
In this phase, you follow the diet plan from your ancestors. According to Gundry, humans in early times had no access to animal protein daily so they consumed wild plants instead.
They used to eat wild plants in raw form. So, the final phase of Gundry’s diet was inspired by what our ancestors ate. It promotes the consumption of vegetables and becomes a “vegephile” just like our ancestors were and it saved them from getting chronic diseases.
Diet Plan (Replacing meat proteins with vegetables)
In the start the animal protein’s portion is only the size of your palm. Moving forward towards the diet you decrease the size of these portions.
The animal’s meat which you can eat is only grass-fed lamb or beef, wild fish, fresh cheese and free-range poultry. You can eat abundant green leafy and non-starchy vegetables and soy protein.
White food such as pasta, flour, rice milk and potato are not recommended. And baked foods like chips, cookies, bagels and pastries are totally forbidden.
These foods are forbidden because they have excessive amount of sugar and calories.
Read more on Plant Based Proteins.
What Can You Eat?
According to Gundry’s diet, you can consume following foods during your diet plan:
- A2 milk (found in health food stores, make sure it is marked A2)
- Pasture raised meats
- Sweet potatoes (cooked)
- Green and leafy vegetables
- Cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and Brussels
- Garlic and onion
- Asparagus
- Mushrooms
- Celery
- Avocado
- Olive and extra virgin olive oil
Gundry’s dietary supplements are also added in meals for fulfilling the diet requirements.
Foods You Should Avoid:
To maintain a lectin free diet to live a healthy life, you must limit the intake of these foods according to Gundry’s diet:
- Grains
- Legumes like peas, beans, peanuts or lentils
- Squash
- Canned fruits
- Night shade vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants
- The Gundry diet recommends using white flour instead of wheat flour
Following foods must be avoided completely:
- A1 milk
- Meat from animals who feed corn
- corn
Benefits Of Grundy’s Diet:
1. Prevents inflammation:
It is believed that lectins can cause inflammation in the body which may lead to other autoimmune diseases like diabetes, celiac diseases or rheumatoid arthritis. Long term inflammation leads to cancer, depression and heart diseases.
2. Weight loss:
The basic benefit from Gundry’s diet is to lose weight without any complications. It helps in maintaining the health by consuming the healthy food and you are able to avoid many diseases instead of getting them.
3. Anti-oxidants:
The diet is full of anti-oxidants that help in encouraging the healthy growth of cells and avoiding anti age effects.
Risks From Gundry’s Diet
In the start cutting the diet is very difficult for many people. Many people face weakness because of the cut down from beans, whole grain or certain vegetables.
Legumes provide dietary fibers to body. When the intake of these fibers is decreases then the risk of constipation increases.
The Gundry’s diet includes pasture milk, expensive supplements that can be very expensive.
Final Thoughts
Many researchers have supported Gundry’s diet as it has many health benefits.
There are many plants which are high in lectin but the level of lectin varies from plant to plant. Some plants also have beneficial lectin.
However, some scientists and diet experts still think that more research is needed for a final verdict about lectin.
But so far, the lectin free Gundry diet has been proved very beneficial in losing weight and preventing heart diseases.
Please leave your comments and questions below and thank you for reading.
Dr Gundry’s books are available on Amazon.