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Babies delivered via cesarean section appear to be at increased risk for various allergic diseases, including allergic runny nose, asthma, and perhaps even food allergies.44 (Allergy symptoms are caused when your immune system overreacts to normally harmless stimuli, such as tree pollen.)
We don’t know. Given the scandalously ill-regulated supplement market, it’s hard to know what you’re getting when you try to buy “food” in supplement bottles.
nutritional yeast.
On the contrary, it seems mushrooms may have an anti-inflammatory effect. In vitro studies have shown that a variety of mushrooms, including plain white button mushrooms, appear to blunt the inflammatory response, potentially offering a boost in immune and anticancer function without aggravating diseases of inflammation.
because your body becomes resistant to insulin’s effects. The insulin-deficiency disease is called type 1 diabetes, and the insulin-resistance disease is called type 2 diabetes.
Without insulin, blood glucose is stuck out in the bloodstream, banging on your cells’ front door, unable to enter. Blood sugar levels then rise, damaging vital organs in the process.
But with type 2 diabetes, insulin production isn’t the problem. The key is there, but something has gummed up the lock. This is called insulin resistance.
So what’s jamming up the door locks on your muscle cells, preventing insulin from letting glucose enter? Fat—more specifically, intramyocellular lipid, the fat inside your muscle cells.
To prevent childhood diabetes, we need to prevent childhood obesity. How do we do that?
Even U.S. vegetarians tend to be marginally overweight, coming in at 25.7. The only dietary group found to be of ideal weight were the vegans, whose BMI averaged 23.6.29
Who among us wouldn’t go to the ends of the earth to enable our kids to live two decades longer?
Carrying excess body fat is the number-one risk factor for type 2 diabetes; up to 90 percent of those who develop the disease are overweight.33 What’s the connection? In part, a phenomenon known as the spillover effect.
And those who go a step farther and drop eggs and dairy foods too? They may drop their diabetes rates 78 percent compared with people who eat meat on a daily basis.
palmitate, the kind of saturated fat found mostly in meat, dairy, and eggs, causes insulin resistance.
the monounsaturated fat found mostly in nuts, olives, and avocados, may actually protect against the detrimental effects of the saturated fat.38
Reducing belly fat may be the best way to prevent prediabetes from turning into full-blown diabetes.
The group directed to eat more food. Eating legumes was shown to be just as effective at slimming waistlines and improving blood sugar control as calorie cutting.
This is encouraging news for overweight individuals at risk of type 2 diabetes. Instead of just eating smaller portions and reducing the quantity of the food they eat, they can also improve the quality of their food by eating legume-rich meals.
plant-based approach to weight loss is that there may be no need for portion control, skipping meals, or counting calories, because most plant foods are naturally nutrient dense and low in calories.
Those who avoided meat altogether appeared to have significantly
lower risk of both prediabetes and diabetes than those who ate plant-based diets with an occasional serving of meat, including fish.
Where is this toxin found? Apparently, at the supermarkets. In a supermarket survey of a variety of foods, tinned sardines were found to be the most heavily tainted with hexachlorobenzene, though salmon was found to be the most contaminated food overall.
Those who eat plant-based diets may even have an 11 percent higher resting metabolic rate.76 That means vegetarians could be burning more calories even in their sleep. Why? This could be because vegetarians have a higher gene expression of a fat-burning enzyme called carnitine palmitoyltransferase, which effectively shovels fat into the mitochondrial furnaces in your cells.
it appears the person eating more meat would, on average, gain significantly more weight.
Insulin treatments themselves may accelerate aging, worsen diabetic vision loss, and promote cancer, obesity, and atherosclerosis.
Once again, researchers designed a study to uncover the answer.84 They compared diabetics placed on the same postoperative diet before and after they actually had the surgery. Amazingly, they found that the diet alone worked
better than the surgery even in the same group of patients:
The bottom line: Blood sugar levels can normalize within a week of eating six hundred calories daily, because fat is pulled out of the muscles, liver, and pancreas, allowing them to function normally again.86
Surgery or starvation? There’s got to be a better way, and, in fact, there is. Instead of changing the quantity of food you eat, it’s possible to reverse diabetes by changing the quality of that food.
Parisian doctors documented how glucose disappeared from their patients’ urine after people went weeks without food.93 Diabetes specialists have long known that iron-willed patients who are able to lose up to one-fifth of their body weight can reverse their diabetes and bring their metabolic function back to normal.
plant-based diet of all-you-can-eat greens, lots of other vegetables and beans, whole grains, fruits, nuts, and seeds?
told to eat at least one big salad every day, as well as veggie-bean soup, a handful of nuts and seeds, fruit at every meal, a pound of cooked greens, and some whole grains; to restrict their animal product consumption; and to eliminate refined grains, junk food, and oil. Then, the researchers measured their hemoglobin A1c levels, considered the best measure of how poorly blood sugars have been controlled over time.
An A1c level under 5.7 is considered normal, between 5.7 and 6.4 is considered prediabetic, and abov...
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We’ve known diabetes can be reversed with an extremely low-calorie diet.
“Regression of Diabetic Neuropathy with Total Vegetarian (Vegan) Diet.”
were placed on a whole-food, plant-based diet.
After having been diabetic for up to twenty years, they were off all blood sugar drugs in less than a month.104
(This is why it is critically important to work with your doctor when radically improving your diet, because if they don’t reduce or eliminate your medications accordingly, your blood sugar levels or blood pressure may drop too low.)
We’ve long known that plant-based diets can reverse diabetes106 and hypertension,107 but reversing nerve damage pain with diet was new.
“Pain and ill health,” the researchers wrote, “are strong motivating factors.”108 In other words: Because plant-based diets work.
Think about it. Patients walk in with one of the most painful, frustrating, and hard-to-treat conditions in all of medicine, and three-quarters of them were cured in a handful of days using a natural, nontoxic treatment—namely, a diet composed of whole plant foods. This should have been front-page news.
The most interesting speculation was that trans fats naturally found in meat and dairy could be causing an inflammatory response in the patients’ bodies.
whole-food, plant-based diet for nine months or more appeared to have removed all the trans fat from their bodies (or at least from their butts!).
improved in closer to nine days. It’s more likely that this amazing reversal was due to an improvement in blood flow.112
Nerves contain tiny blood vessels that may become clogged, depriving the nerves of oxygen.
However, within days of eating healthier meals, blood flow may improve to the extent that neuropathy disappears.114 Within an average of two years of eating a plant-based diet composed mostly of rice and fruits, even diabetic vision loss
can be reversed in as many as 30 percent of patients.115
So why didn’t I learn about any of this in medical school? There’s little money to be made from prescribing plants instead of pills. The neuropathy pain reversal study was published more than twenty years ago, and the blindness reversal studies more than fifty years ago. As one commentator wrote, “The neglect of this im...
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Having a potbelly may be a strong predictor of premature death.118
Instead of a scale, grab a simple measuring tape. Stand up straight and take a deep breath, exhale, and let it all hang out. The circumference of your belly (halfway between the top of your hip bones and the bottom of your rib cage) should be half your height—ideally, less. If that measurement is more than half your height, it’s time to start eating healthier and exercising more regardless of your weight.121
