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April 3, 2015 - September 8, 2018
The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible (“whole” foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein. That’s it, in 66 words. In this book I call it the whole food, plant-based (WFPB) diet,
♦ Gets you to your ideal weight in a healthy and sustainable fashion
energy
Oxidation is the process by which atoms and molecules lose electrons as they come into contact with other atoms and molecules; it’s one of the most basic chemical reactions in the universe.
practice. I was interested in describing the remarkable health effects of this diet in reference to the scientific evidence, rather than in reference to personal and philosophical ideologies—however noble they may be.
When you hear a health claim, ask yourself three questions: Is it true? Is it the whole truth, or just a part of it? Does it matter?
Peer review is a process in which research findings are reviewed and critiqued by qualified professionals before publication.
The “king” of these Chinese herbs, the one most prescribed and consumed, is ginseng.
The reason the Chinese were willing to pay so much for ginseng, and why the Native Americans knew exactly where to harvest it, is because the plant works to promote health in so many different ways. The Cherokee used ginseng to ease colic, convulsions, dysentery, and headaches. Other Native American tribes found the roots helpful in treating indigestion, weak appetite, exhaustion, croup, menstrual cramps, and shock.3 Now that’s breadth!
we could switch early cancer growth on and off in rats simply by changing the amount of protein they consumed.
We received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for twenty-seven years in a row, money that allowed us to learn an incredible amount about the nature of animal protein and its biochemical effects within the body.
That’s the scientific method at its best: all of us competing not for personal glory and wealth, but to serve the highest truth and the highest good.
We’ve found that cancer growth is controlled far more by nutrition than by genes, which is outside of the scientific paradigm.
We’ve shown that the nutrient composition of foods is more a determinant of cancer occurrence than chemical carcinogens,
We’ve found that saturated fat (and, for that matter, total fat and cholesterol) is not the chief cause of heart disease (there’s animal-based proteins as well),
Even today, it is so heretical that no one wants to say the obvious—that casein is the most relevant chemical carcinogen ever identified.
Six blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each feels a different body part: leg, tusk, trunk, tail, ear, and belly. Predictably, each offers a vastly different assessment: pillar, pipe, tree branch, rope, fan, and wall. They argue vigorously, each sure that their experience alone is the correct one.
In its broadest sense, a paradigm is a mental filter that restricts what you are able to see at any one time. Mental filters are essential; without your brain’s reticular activating system, you would be overwhelmed by stimuli and therefore unable to respond to the important ones.
Wholism does not oppose reductionism; rather, wholism encompasses reductionism, just as each whole encompasses its parts.
I think it’s great that we’ve got six blind men working on the elephant problem. I just wish someone would clue them in about the whole elephant.
world. In rejecting religious control of science, we also are rejecting the useful perspectives theology offers: a way of looking at the world as a fundamentally connected whole. A willingness to accept that there are things
we may not ever be able to fully understand, and instead can only observe.
Da Vinci is even credited with being the first in the modern world to introduce the idea of controlled experimentation—the core concept of science—and, for this, he has been considered by some writers to be the Father of Science. Probably more than any other scholastic luminary of that time, he recognized the relationship between the whole and its parts.
He understood that wholism needed reductionism to advance, and reductionism needed wholism to remain relevant.
Chinese medicine, by contrast, sees the body as an energetic network. It might diagnose a patient with a Western label of “liver cancer” as suffering from “too much yang in the triple burner meridian”—a description of an energetic imbalance affecting the so-called burning regions of the body, centered around the head, the chest, and the pelvis.
But the documented efficacy of acupuncture, which moves energy along meridians to treat many ailments, testifies to the usefulness of the Chinese paradigm.
But instead of turning their attention to nutrition and acknowledging the futility of efforts to manipulate enzymatic activity in a way that does more good than harm, reductionist researchers have focused upstream, on the template that is used to manufacture those amazing enzymes: deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
Genetic medicine is the ultimate reductionist fantasy.
After all, our collective faith in the Big Promise has funded the War on Cancer, among many others. And popular culture has enshrined the image of the selfless, heroic researcher hot on the trail of the “cure” for cancer.
Yet we still look for the next medical knight on a white horse to ride to our rescue: the pill, the vaccine, the technology, the intervention that will disease-proof us and save us, not just from the diseases themselves, but from the pervasive fear of diseases that seem to strike randomly in our midst.
What we really want from science is an end to randomness. We want to know why diseases strike some people and not others. We want to know how to protect ourselves against the scourges that have our names on them. We want, in short, to banish unpredictability.
These genetic crusaders view themselves as pioneers in a new age of enlightenment—specifically, reductionist enlightenment. Genes, in the genetic crusaders’ view, are simply human software. Just as a good programmer can read code and predict exactly what the program will do, eventually we’ll be able to look at genes and predict exactly what diseases we’ll develop, perhaps even what emotions we’ll experience from moment to moment. The problem is, we can’t. Genes tell us what may happen, but not if or how. The increasing fascination with and funding of genetic technology is simply another
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The bases on the twenty-three chromosome pairs (about three billion bases, in total) are grouped into aggregates (around 25,000 of them) called genes. And each of these genes, which may contain as few as 100 bases and up to as many as several million, ultimately directs the formation of a unique protein. However, these genes do not translate into a protein directly. Instead, they do so through the intermediate formation of ribonucleic acid (RNA) (Figure 8-2), a similar strand of bases that mirrors a DNA strand.
The RNA base sequence serves in turn as a code for the selection of amino acids (about twenty amino acids are used in human protein production, each possessing a unique chemical structure) which, when combined into a long strand, form proteins. The bases on the RNA chains don’t code for these amino acids on a one-to-one basis, however. Instead, triplet sets of bases are used, each specifying one or more amino acids. With four bases, it is possible to create sixty-four different triplet combinations or codons (some amino acids can be specified by more than one triplet codon).
more than one gene can share in the making of a single protein, because some proteins are made up of more than one strand of amino acids, and each of those amino acid strands is produced by a separate gene. The number of possible proteins and their combinations is impossible to estimate. The complexity at this point is far beyond comprehension by the human mind.
recap: relatively short segments of the DNA base sequence, called genes, are transcribed into comparable RNA sequences, which translate, in turn, into sequences of amino acids that are used to make proteins.
And there’s no doubt that genetic interventions will help the 0.01 percent of the population who suffer from rare conditions brought about by faulty genes. What they won’t do, however, is solve the basic problem: our society’s failing health. What I object to is our focus on genetics to the near exclusion of everything else. Currently, hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on genetic testing and sequencing every year in the United States, without getting us any closer to solving our health-care crisis. Our society’s multibillion-dollar investment in genetics will help only a very
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in the health sciences called genetic determinism. According to this theory, we can draw a more or less straight causal line between genes and their final health- or disease-related outcomes. In other words, genes operate fairly independently, continuing to “do their thing” with little impact from the environment and one’s lifestyle.
In contrast, there is an alternative belief system to genetic determinism that I call nutritional determinism, wherein nutrition controls the expression of genes to cause health
Even nutrition is not a cure-all; there’s no diet that can regrow an amputated limb, as far as we know. However, I am suggesting that nutritional inputs are the primary factor in gene expression, and that in the vast majority of cases, the vast majority of the time, good nutrition has a much greater impact than anything else—including the most complicated and expensive genetic intervention. Genes are the starting point for health and disease events; they are the “nature” part of the equation. But it is nutrition and other lifestyle factors, the “nurture” part, that control whether and how
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All disease starts with genes and gene combinations; what we call diseases are the end stages of interactions between our genes and elements from our environment, through the medium of our bodies. We get the flu, for example, because our genes produce certain symptoms in response to a particular
Our health-producing genes come from our parents. Where do our disease genes come from? There are two main sources. Some come from our parents and their ancestors before them; they are present in our initial germ or embryo. Other disease-causing genes may begin as health-giving genes that become damaged by mutation during our lifetimes.
Population studies begun forty to fifty years ago show that when people migrate from one country to another, they acquire the cancer rate of the country to which they move, despite the fact their genes remain the same.
In short, proper nutrition doesn’t just prevent damage; it affects the way our bodies respond to already damaged genes, often mitigating disease symptoms as they arise or even preventing them completely, sometimes with no additional medication or other treatments needed.
The CBP distracts us from the significant and easily addressed causes of cancer, and directs us to secondary factors over which we have almost no control, thus accomplishing little and diverting resources from initiatives that could make a significant difference.
The high dose of the nonnutritive sweetener saccharin that caused a very small increase in bladder cancer in laboratory rats was equivalent to the human consumption of 1,200 cans of diet soda in a day. Silly? I think so. And it should be added, as already discussed, that the body is capable of repairing much of the damage that low levels of natural chemicals cause. Second, this method assumes that a response in one species (e.g., rat) is equivalent to the same kind of response in a second species (e.g., human). This is called “species-to-species extrapolation.” And it’s a huge leap of faith.
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Also, because the CBP focuses exclusively on the human-made chemicals, it ignores a significant source of environmental carcinogenicity: naturally occurring chemicals like AF. Such chemicals are not something we decide whether or not to add to our environment; they are already there. Since they cannot simply be legislated out of our food supply by ordering companies to stop using them, the CBP is forced to pretend that they do not exist.
