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your DNA-repair capabilities.
Within two hours of consuming citrus, your DNA becomes significantly more resistant to damage,29 which may help explain why citrus consumption is associated with lower risk of breast cancer.30 Some of the citrus compounds thought responsible—which concentrate in the breast31 and enhance DNA repair 32—are found in the peel, though. This may be why people who eat at least some citrus peel appear to have lower skin cancer rates than those who don’t.33
This fruit can suppress the enzymes that help clear more than half of commonly prescribed drugs, and less drug clearance means higher drug levels in the body.
“pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock,”40 durian fruits are banned from many public spaces,
When adding as much fruit as possible to your diet, you certainly don’t have to seek out weapons-grade stinky fruit, but you also don’t have to stick with the same old, same old. Treat yourself! Have fun sampling the many varieties of the many different fruits around. How lovely it can be to stroll through your farmers’ market on a weekend and pick up locally grown fruits that you can zest onto your meals, blend into smoothies, chew when dried, incorporate into your favorite dishes, or best of all, bite right into. The opportunities are ripe for the picking!
I’ve mentioned broccoli more than any other food in this book, and for good reason. We’ve seen how cruciferous vegetables like broccoli can potentially prevent DNA damage and metastatic cancer spread in chapter 2, activate defenses against pathogens and pollutants in chapter 5, help to prevent lymphoma in chapter 9, boost your liver detox enzymes and target breast cancer stem cells in chapter 11, and reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression in chapter
sulforaphane a day improves social interaction, abnormal behavior, and verbal communication within a matter of weeks. The researchers, primarily from Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University, suggest that the effect might be due to sulforaphane’s role as a “detoxicant.”7
If you chop the broccoli (or brussels sprouts, kale, collards, cauliflower, or any other cruciferous vegetable) and then wait forty minutes, you can cook it as much as you want.
Given this understanding, can you see how most people prepare broccoli soup incorrectly? Typically, they first cook the broccoli and then blend it. But, when you blend it, you’re merely mixing the precursor with an enzyme that’s been inactivated by cooking. Do it in the opposite order: First blend your veggies and then wait forty minutes before cooking them. This way, you can maximize sulforaphane production.
Sometimes I go minimalist and just sprinkle on lemon juice, zest, capers, and garlic.
“Antioxidant, Antimutagenic, and Antitumor Effects of Pine Needles.”1 Edible leaves, in all their shapes and sizes, it seems, can be healthy foods.
CoQ10 was reborn. However, without the chlorophyll, or without the light, nothing happened. All along, we’ve been thinking that the main benefit of sunlight was only the formation of vitamin D and that the main benefit of greens was the antioxidants they contain. But now we suspect the combination of the two may actually help the body create and maintain its own internal stock of antioxidants.
I would suggest using black kale (also called lacinato, dinosaur, or Tuscan kale), red kale (also found as red Russian kale), or baby kale, since these varieties are all milder and more tender than the more common mature green (curly) kale.
This is why the so-called secret ingredient in many collard greens recipes is a spoonful of sugar. Certainly, if there were ever a food to justify the use of a yellow- or red-light condiment to boost consumption, it would be the single healthiest of all foods: greens.
So, for example, 250 ml of water, a frozen banana, 120 grams of frozen berries,
and 60 grams of packed baby spinach would be a classic green smoothie 101.
greens with something you already love to make the greens more palatable, consider mixing them with a green-light source of fat: nuts, seeds, nut or seed butters, or avocados. Many of the nutrients greens are famous for are fat soluble, including beta-carotene, lutein, vitamin K, and zeaxanthin. So pairing your greens with a green-light source of fat may not only make them taste better but will maximize nutrient absorption.
When researchers tried feeding people a healthy salad of spinach, romaine, carrots, and tomatoes along with a source of fat, there was an impressive spike in carotenoid phytonutrients in their bloodstream over the next eight hours.
The greens and the source of fat just have to end up in your stomach at the same time.
The best sodium-free salt substitute I’ve been able to find is something called Table Tasty.
Use one green (basil) to make the other green (kale) taste better.
So adding vinegar to potato salad or to rice (like the Japanese do to make sushi rice) or dipping bread in balsamic vinegar may blunt the effects of these high-glycemic foods.
Vinegar may also help with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), improve arterial function, and help reduce body fat. A daily tablespoon of apple cider vinegar restored ovarian function within a few months in four out of seven women with PCOS.
tablespoon of rice vinegar was found to acutely improve artery function in postmenopausal women.
Both vinegar groups lost significantly more weight than the control group. Though the effect was modest—about four pounds over a three-month period—CT scans showed the vinegar groups’ subjects lost a significant amount of their “visceral” fat, the abdominal fat that is particularly associated with chronic disease risk.37
My current favorite dressing recipe is a Caesar spin-off shared by Dr. Michael Klaper from the TrueNorth Health Center: 2 tablespoons almond meal 3 cloves crushed garlic 3 tablespoons dijon mustard 3 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes 2 tablespoons white miso 3 tablespoons lemon juice 80 ml water
A nutritional analysis of twenty-five commercially available microgreens found they did have significantly higher nutrient densities.
For example, red cabbage microgreens have a sixfold higher vitamin C concentration than mature red cabbage and nearly seventy times the vitamin
Microgreens are the perfect plants for the impatient gardener—fully grown in just one to two weeks.
Over a dozen years, twenty-eight outbreaks of Salmonella food poisoning linked to sprouts have been documented in the United States, affecting 1,275 people.40 Of course, Salmonella-tainted eggs sicken an estimated 142,000 Americans every year,41 but that doesn’t make it any less tragic for those hospitalized and killed in “sproutbreaks.” Alfalfa sprout seeds have all sorts of microscopic nooks and crannies where bacteria from manure-contaminated irrigation water can hide. So even home-sprouted alfalfa seeds should not be considered safe.
So other than the dreaded alfalfa sprout, greens truly are the healthiest foods on the planet. You simply can’t do better in terms of nutrition per calorie.
Whether you sneak them into a refreshing smoothie, incorporate them into sauces and dressings, use them as a base for main dishes, or eat them straight in a big, vibrant salad—
Your body will thank you with every bite of g...
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Yes, you’re supposed to eat the rainbow, but didn’t we just learn that green leaves have an entire spectrum of colors hidden inside?
White cauliflower, lacking antioxidant pigments, doesn’t appear to have much to offer at first glance, but because it belongs to the cruciferous family, it’s one of your healthiest options. Similarly, white mushrooms may look pretty drab, but they can provide myconutrients not found in the entire plant kingdom.
Even different parts of the same vegetable can have different effects.
One of the reasons certain tomato products appear to be protective against heart attacks6 is because the yellow fluid surrounding the seeds concentrates a compound that suppresses platelet activation.
Different plants may also affect the same part of the body in different
For example, the consumption of some plant foods was associated with better executive function, perceptual speed, and semantic (fact-based) memory, while the consumption of others was more consistently associated with visual-spatial skills and autobiographical memory.
Roots may harbor different nutrients than shoots. For this reason, it may be even more important to get in a variety of vegetables, so you can benefit from all parts of the plant, as one large cancer study of nearly half a million people did indeed find.16 “Because each vegetable contains a unique combination,” a recent review concluded, “a great diversity of vegetables should be eaten . . . to get all the health benefits.”17 Variety is not only the spice of life; it may prolong it as well.
other words, by eating the yellow and red pigments in fruits and vegetables, like beta-carotene in sweet potatoes and lycopene in tomatoes, men and women may be able to naturally acquire more of a golden and rosy glow. Researchers decided to put it to the test.
And a serving of black beans has about eight times more than a serving of the third-leading source, chicken liver.
My favorite way to eat raw veggies is to dip pepper strips, carrots, or snap peas in a hummus or bean dip, and my favorite way to eat them cooked is by roasting them.
One of my favorite springtime dishes is roasted asparagus dipped in guacamole.
When they cooled down, my hand warmers became instant healthy snacks! It’s actually better to boil them, though, to best preserve their nutritional content.
The peel of the sweet potato has nearly ten times the antioxidant power as the inner flesh (on a per-weight basis), giving them an antioxidant capacity approaching that of blueberries.34
Sweet potatoes are healthier than plain potatoes, but if you’re going to choose the latter, seek out those with blue or purple flesh. The consumption of one boiled purple potato a day for six weeks was found to significantly decrease inflammation,
Six vegetables (orange pepper, english cucumber, radicchio, jalapeño, potato, and beetroot) nearly halved cancer growth, but five veggies (cauliflower, brussels sprouts, green onion, leek, and garlic) “abolished” cancer growth completely, stopping breast tumor cells dead in their tracks.59
Radishes, for example, are completely unable to stop pancreatic cancer cell growth.
“a diversified diet, containing several distinct classes of vegetables (and hence of phytochemicals) is essential for effective prevention of cancer.”60
