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The U.S. health care system runs on a fee-for-service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and
procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality.
We don’t get reimbursed for time spent counseling our patients about the benefits of healthy eating. If doctors were instead paid for performance, there would be a financial inc...
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The same reason you’ll probably never see a commercial for sweet potatoes is the same reason breakthroughs on the power of foods to affect your health and longevity may never make it to the public: There’s little profit motive.
In medical school, even with our paltry twenty-one hours of nutrition training, there was no mention of using diet to treat chronic disease, let alone reverse
Back in 1903, Thomas Edison predicted that the “doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of [the] human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of diseases.”
Are Americans living longer now compared to about a generation ago? Yes, technically. But are those extra years necessarily healthy ones? No. And it’s worse than that: We’re actually living fewer healthy years now than we once did.20
“the steady rise in life expectancy observed in the modern era may soon come to an end and the youth of today may, on average, live less healthy and possibly even shorter lives than their parents.”
primary prevention, as in trying to prevent people at risk for heart disease from suffering their first heart attack. An example of this level of preventive medicine would
Secondary prevention
“quaternary” prevention
primordial prevention,
This means not just preventing chronic disease but preventing the risk factors that lead to chronic disease.
With this in mind, the American Heart Association came up with “The Simple 7” factors that can lead to a healthier life: not smoking, not being overweight, being “very active” (defined as the equivalent of walking at least twenty-two minutes a day), eating healthier (for example, lots of fruits and vegetables), having below-average cholesterol, having normal blood pressure, and having normal blood sugar levels.
the top-three killers were infectious diseases: pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrheal disease.34
People who once ate vegetarian diets but then started to eat meat at least once a week experienced a 146 percent increase in odds of heart disease, a 152 percent increase in stroke, a 166 percent increase in diabetes, and a 231 percent increase in odds for weight gain.
The truth is that adhering to just four simple healthy lifestyle factors can have a strong impact on the prevention of chronic diseases: not smoking, not being obese, getting half an hour of exercise a day, and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat.
The level of vitamin C in the blood was considered a “good biomarker of plant food intake” and hence was used as a proxy for a healthy diet.
bristlecone pine tree growing in the White Mountains of California, which, at the time, happened to be the oldest recorded living being and is now nearing its 4,800th birthday. It was already hundreds of years old before construction of the pyramids in Egypt began. There’s an enzyme in the roots of bristlecone pines that appears to peak a few thousand years into their life span, and it actually rebuilds telomeres.68 Scientists named it telomerase.
In a study funded in part by the U.S. Department of Defense, they found that three months of whole-food, plant-based nutrition and other
healthy changes could significantly boost telomerase activity, the only intervention ever shown to do
Five years later, their telomeres were even longer on average than when they started, suggesting a healthy lifestyle can boost telomerase
enzyme activity and reverse cellular aging.71
In other words, it wasn’t the weight loss and it wasn’t the exercise that reversed cell aging—it was the food.
That one unifying diet found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a whole-food, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs, and processed
I advocate for an evidence-based diet, and the best available balance of science suggests that the more whole plant foods we eat, the better—both to reap their nutritional benefits and to displace less healthful options.
The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families.
It found that diet and lifestyle factors clearly trumped genes.
But even among identical twins who have the exact same genes, one could die early of a heart attack and the other could live a long, healthy life with clean arteries depending on what she ate and how she lived.
Three hours after eating 50 grams of broccoli sprouts, the enzyme that cancers use to help silence our defenses is suppressed in your bloodstream110 to an extent equal to or greater than the chemotherapy agent specifically designed for that purpose,111 without the toxic side effects.112
1 why beans and greens are among the healthiest foods on earth.
This particular biological weapon may not be a germ released by terrorists, but it kills more Americans annually than have all our past wars combined.
This buildup of plaque, known as atherosclerosis, from the Greek words athere (gruel) and sklerosis (hardening), is the hardening of the arteries by pockets of cholesterol-rich gunk that builds up within the inner linings of the blood vessels. This process occurs over decades, slowly bulging into the space inside the arteries, narrowing the path for blood to flow.
Though Chinese and African diets are very different, they share commonalities: They are both centered on plant-derived foods, such as grains and vegetables. By eating so much fibre and so little animal fat, their total cholesterol levels averaged under 150 mg/dL,6,7 similar
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.
The optimal LDL cholesterol level is probably 50 or 70 mg/dL, and apparently, the lower, the better.
To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL. Dr. Roberts noted that there are only two ways to achieve this for our population: to put more than a hundred million Americans on a lifetime of medications or to recommend they all eat a diet centered around whole plant foods.31
That’s what happens when people take nitroglycerin for chest pain. Medicine can offer tremendous relief, but it’s not doing anything to treat the underlying cause.
They are then thought to be ferried by saturated fat across the gut wall into your bloodstream, where they can trigger the inflammatory reaction in your arteries.
Brazil nuts are so high in the mineral selenium that eating four every day may actually bump you up against the tolerable daily limit for selenium.
broccoli eaters showed significantly less damage, suggesting that eating vegetables like broccoli may make you more resilient at a subcellular level.7
It appears to have the ability to reprogram the self-destruct mechanism back into cancer cells. All cells contain so-called death receptors that trigger the self-destruction sequence, but cancer cells can disable their own death receptors. Curcumin, however, appears able to reactivate them.17 Curcumin can also kill cancer cells directly by activating “execution enzymes” called caspases inside cancer cells that destroy them from within by chopping up their proteins.18 Unlike most chemotherapy drugs, against which cancer cells can develop resistance over time, curcumin affects several mechanisms
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When meat is grilled, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are also produced, one of the probable carcinogens in cigarette smoke.
mothers merely exposed to the fumes tended to give birth to babies with a birth weight deficit.
Air pollution studies suggest prenatal exposure to
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons may then translate into adverse effects on children’s future cognitive development (as manifested by a significantly lower IQ).
This is thought to be due to the amount of fish being cooked,28 as the fumes from pan-fried fish have been found to contain high levels of PAHs capable of damaging the DNA of human lung cells.
bacon fumes cause about four times more DNA mutations than the fumes from beef burgers fried at similar temperatures.32
Data going back fifty years show that a high intake of fruits and vegetables is positively associated with good lung function.
the most significant associations were not with what was going into their lungs but what was going into their stomachs.
