How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

by Michael Greger

When people move from low- to high-risk areas, their disease risk nearly always shoots up to match the new setting.

Epigenetics is the hot new field of study that deals with this control of gene activity. Skin cells look and function a lot differently from bone cells, brain cells, or heart cells, but each of our cells has the same complement of DNA. What makes them act differently is that they each have different genes turned on or off. That’s the power of epigenetics. Same DNA, but different results.

Queen bees and worker bees are genetically identical, yet queen bees lay up to two thousand eggs a day, while worker bees are functionally sterile. Queens live up to three years; workers may live only three weeks.105 The difference between the two is diet. When the hive’s queen is dying, a larva is picked by nurse bees to be fed a secreted substance called royal jelly. When the larva eats this jelly, the enzyme that had been silencing the expression of royal genes is turned off, and a new queen is born.

Though Chinese and African diets are very different, they share commonalities: They are both centered on plant-derived foods, such as grains and vegetables.

The reason people get cavities now is that the pleasure they derive from sugary treats may outweigh the cost and discomfort of the dentist’s chair. I certainly enjoy the occasional indulgence

“Given this and other negative meta-analyses, our job [as doctors] should be to stop highly marketed fish oil supplementation to all our patients .

To drastically reduce LDL cholesterol levels, you need to drastically reduce your intake of three things: trans fat, which comes from processed foods and naturally from meat and dairy; saturated fat, found mainly in animal products and junk foods; and to a lesser extent dietary cholesterol, found exclusively in animal-derived foods, especially eggs.26

Let me share with you what has been called the “best kept secret in medicine”:41 Given the right conditions, the body heals itself.

Why hasn’t this news translated into public policy yet? In 1977, the U.S. Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs tried to do just that. Known as the McGovern Committee, they released Dietary Goals for the United States, a report advising Americans to cut down on animal-based foods and increase their consumption of plant-based foods. As a founding member of Harvard University’s nutrition department recalls, “The meat, milk and egg producers were very upset.”53 That’s an understatement. Under industry pressure, not only was the goal to “decrease meat consumption” removed from the report but the entire Senate nutrition committee was disbanded. Several prominent senators reputedly lost their election bids as a result of supporting the report.54

the history of medicine holds many examples of the medical establishment rejecting sound science when it goes against the prevailing conventional wisdom. There’s even a name for it: the “Tomato Effect.” The term was coined in the Journal of the American Medical Association in reference to the fact that tomatoes were once considered poisonous and were shunned for centuries in North America, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The American Dietetic Association (ADA), which produces a series of nutrition fact sheets with guidelines on maintaining a healthy diet, also has its own corporate ties. Who writes these fact sheets? Food industry sources pay the ADA $20,000 per fact sheet to explicitly take part in the drafting process.

Those warning labels on cigarette packs are everywhere now, but for a long time, the link between smoking and lung cancer was suppressed by powerful interest groups—much as the relationship between certain foods and other leading killers is suppressed today. For example, in the 1980s, Philip Morris, the nation’s leading cigarette manufacturer, launched the notorious Whitecoat Project. The corporation hired doctors to publish ghostwritten studies purporting to negate links between secondhand smoke and lung disease. These papers cherry-picked various scientific reports to conceal and distort the damning evidence of the dangers of secondhand smoke. This whitewashing, coupled with the tobacco industry’s clever marketing campaigns, including cartoonlike ads, helped hook generations of Americans onto their products.

The benefits of quitting are immediate. According to the American Cancer Society, just twenty minutes after quitting, your heart rate and blood pressure drop. Within a few weeks, your blood circulation and lung function improve. Within a few months, the sweeper cells that help clean the lungs, remove mucus, and reduce the risk of infection start to regrow. And within a year of quitting, your smoking-related risk of coronary heart disease becomes half that of current smokers.

Though the majority of lung cancer is attributed to smoking, approximately a quarter of all cases occur in people who’ve never smoked.21 Although some of these cases are due to secondhand smoke, another contributing cause may be another potentially carcinogenic plume: fumes from frying.

Nevertheless, it’s still not a good idea to eat fried foods. Though no DNA changes were detected after exposure to tempeh smoke, the fried tempeh itself did cause some DNA mutations

A study of more than one hundred thousand adults in India found that those who consumed meat daily, or even occasionally, were significantly more likely to suffer from asthma than those who excluded meat and eggs from their diets altogether.

Researchers in Sweden decided to test out a strictly plant-based diet on a group of severe asthmatics who weren’t getting better despite the best medical therapies—thirty-five patients with long-established, physician-verified asthma, twenty of whom had been admitted to hospitals for acute attacks during the previous two years. One patient had received emergency intravenous infusions a total of twenty-three times, another reported he’d been hospitalized more than a hundred times, and one subject had even suffered a cardiac arrest after an attack and had to be revived and placed on a ventilator.60 These were some pretty serious cases. Of the twenty-four patients who stuck with the plant-based diet, 70 percent improved after four months, and 90 percent improved within one year. And these were all people who had experienced no improvement in their conditions at all in the year prior to switching to a plant-based diet.61 Within just one year of eating healthier, all but two patients were able to drop their dose of asthma medication or get off their steroids and other drugs altogether. Objective measures like lung function and physical working capacity improved; meanwhile, subjectively, some patients said their improvement was so considerable that they felt like “they had a new life.”62 There was no control group, so the placebo effect may have accounted for some of the improvement, but the nice thing about a healthier diet is that there are only good side effects. In addition ...