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Which should you choose? Based on the study findings: spinach. Out of the five options, spinach beat out the others against breast cancer, brain tumors, kidney cancer, lung cancer, pediatric brain tumors, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and stomach cancer. The runner up? Radicchio.
beans, berries, and nuts.
If one of your choices was brussels sprouts, cabbage, curly cabbage, or kale, and the other choice was garlic, green onions, or leek, you get a gold star!
cruciferous vegetables and the allium veggie family,
For example, steamed broccoli may have about 10 percent less vitamin C than raw broccoli.
For example, you end up with more than six times the vitamin A in your bloodstream from cooked carrots compared to raw ones.
There is no evidence to suggest, however, that eating raw foods largely or exclusively is healthier than eating a combination of cooked and raw whole plant foods.
A 10 percent saltwater rinse has been found to work as well as full-strength vinegar.86 To make your own pesticide-reducing bath, add one part salt to nine parts water. Just make sure to rinse off all the salt before eating.
Mix 200 grams of ground flaxseeds with 250 ml of water, add whatever herbs and spices you want, and then spread the dough thinly on a parchment- or silicone-lined baking sheet. Score the dough into thirty-two crackers and bake at 200°C for about twenty minutes. To flavor mine, I use half a teaspoon each of smoked paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder, but you should play around until you find a (salt-free) spice profile you prefer. When cut into thirty-two pieces, each cracker meets your Daily Dozen serving requirement.
Whether in a cashew Alfredo, a ginger-peanut sauce, or a tahini-based green goddess dressing, nuts and seeds can maximize nutrient acquisition by both improving absorption and increasing your total intake of vegetables by adding some creamy cachet.
They found that women at high risk for heart disease who ate nuts or a tablespoon of peanut butter five or more days a week appeared to nearly halve their risk of suffering a heart attack compared to women who ate a serving or less per week.
At this point, it looks as if 70 percent of nut calories are lost through dietary compensation and 10 percent are flushed as fat in your feces.26 But what about the last 20 percent?
of nuts to boost metabolism. When you eat nuts, you burn more of your own fat.
The bottom line? Yes, nuts are high in calories, but through a combination of dietary compensation mechanisms, your body’s failure to absorb some of the fat, and increased fat-burning metabolism, nuts can be a lifeline without expanding your waistline.
can
also may be effective in treating osteoarthritis8 and other inflammatory conditions, such as lupus9 and inflammatory bowel disease.
of curcumin but add a quarter teaspoon of black pepper, the level of curcumin in your blood shoots up by 2,000 percent.18 Even just the littlest pinch of pepper, just one-twentieth of a teaspoon, can significantly boost curcumin blood levels.
If you suffer from gallstones, turmeric may trigger pain. Turmeric is a cholecystokinetic agent, meaning it facilitates the pumping action of the gallbladder
Too much turmeric, however, may increase the risk of certain kidney stones. Turmeric is high in soluble oxalates, which can bind to calcium and develop into the most common form of kidney stone—insoluble calcium oxalate, which is responsible for about 75 percent of all cases.
months reduced inflammation levels in arthritis sufferers and cut uric-acid levels in half, suggesting that lots of coriander may be useful for people suffering from gout.47
Unlike the drug, ginger can also reduce the amount of menstrual bleeding, from around 125 ml per period down to 60 ml.68 What’s more, ginger intake of one-eighth of a teaspoon twice daily started a week before your period can yield a significant drop in premenstrual mood, physical, and behavioral symptoms.
like sprinkling powdered ginger on sweet potatoes or using it fresh to make lemon-ginger apple chews as an antinausea remedy.
Ginger is now considered a nontoxic, broad-spectrum antiemetic (anti-vomiting agent) effective in countering nausea during motion sickness, pregnancy, chemotherapy, and radiation, and after surgery.71
Try making my lemon-ginger apple chews: In a blender, liquefy one peeled lemon with a palm-sized “hand” of fresh gingerroot.
For me, a few pieces eaten about twenty minutes before travel works wonders.
Ginger is generally considered safe during pregnancy, but the maximum recommended daily dose of fresh ginger while pregnant is 20 grams (about four teaspoons of freshly grated gingerroot).
The most antioxidant-packed herb is dried Norwegian bearberry leaf. (Good luck finding that!) The most antioxidant-packed common herb is peppermint.
The treatment can be very effective, but all that radiation exposure appears to increase the risk of developing new cancers later on.
oregano to protect chromosomes of human blood cells in vitro from exposure to radioactive iodine.
115 different foods tested for anti-inflammatory properties in vitro, oregano made it into the top five, along with oyster mushrooms, onions, cinnamon, and tea leaves.78
Marjoram is a closely related herb and also shows promise in laboratory studies.
I’m aware of is a study of marjoram tea for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). The tea was purportedly used in traditional herbal medicine to “restore hormonal balance,” so researchers decided to put it to the test. They instructed women with PCOS to drink two cups of marjoram tea on an empty stomach every day for a month.
“Amla . . . a Wonder Berry in the Treatment and Prevention of Cancer.” Amla is arguably the most important plant in Ayurvedic medicine, used traditionally as everything from a neutralizer of snake venom to a hair tonic.
The most important finding from this body of work is that antioxidant levels can plummet within two hours of an oxidatively stressful event. When you’re stuck in traffic breathing diesel fumes, deprived of sleep, or suffering from a cold, for example, your body starts using up some of its antioxidant stores. What may only take two hours to lose can take up to three days to build back up.85
And, when I add the final ingredient, a single teaspoon of amla, I get an additional 753 antioxidant units. That’s about 2–3 pence worth of amla, and it just doubled the antioxidant content of my entire smoothie.
Ayurvedic herbal supplements are typically something you’d want to stay away from, as they have been found to be heavily contaminated with heavy metals,90 some of which are actually added intentionally.
The study reminds me of those that show eating greens is particularly protective against cancer among smokers.
Some of my favorite spice mixes are pumpkin pie spice, curry powder, chili powder, Chinese five-spice powder, a savory Indian spice blend called garam masala, an Ethiopian blend called berbere, Italian seasoning, poultry seasoning, and a Middle Eastern blend called za’atar.
Another popular and powerful spice is cinnamon, which has been prized for its ability to lower blood sugar levels.108 It works so well that you can even “cheat” on a diabetes test by consuming two teaspoons of cinnamon the night before.
In the United States, anything simply labeled “cinnamon” is probably cassia, since it’s cheaper. This is unfortunate, because cassia contains a compound called coumarin, which may be toxic to the liver at high doses.
teaspoon of cinnamon even a few times a week may be too much for small children, and a daily teaspoon would exceed the tolerable upper safety limit for adults.
Can’t you just switch to Ceylon cinnamon and get the benefits without the risks? Without the risks, yes, but we’re no ...
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I still encourage Ceylon cinnamon consumption, given that it is one of the cheapest common food sources of antioxidants, second only to purple cabbage. But what’s a type 2 diabetic to do? Even the cassia cinnamon only brought down blood sugars modestly—in other words, it was only as good as the leading diabetes drug in the world, metformin, sold as Glucophage.
A 2015 analysis found that people who eat more whole grains tend to live significantly longer lives independent of other dietary and lifestyle factors.3 No surprise, given that whole grains appear to reduce the risk of heart disease,4 type 2 diabetes,5 obesity, and stroke.
Take C-reactive protein (CRP), for instance. CRP levels rise within the body in response to inflammatory insults and are therefore used as a screening test for systemic inflammation. Each daily serving of whole grains is estimated to reduce CRP concentrations by approximately 7 percent.
there’s a whole alphabet soup of inflammation markers that appear to be improved by whole grains: ALT, GGT,9 IL-6,10 IL-8,11 IL-10,12 IL-18,13 PAI-1,14 TNF-α,15 TNF-R2,16 whole blood viscosity, and erythrocyte filtration.
“Whole-grain intake cools down inflammation.”18 Even excluding heart disease and cancer, habitual whole-grain intake is linked to a significantly lower risk of dying from inflammatory diseases.19
In 1980, researchers in England reported a series of women suffering from chronic diarrhea who were cured by a gluten-free diet, yet none of the women had evidence of celiac disease.
So the researchers concluded that non-celiac gluten intolerance may indeed exist.28
But for those who passed, there was a clear benefit to staying on the wheat-free diet, confirming the “existence of non-celiac WS [wheat sensitivity].”29 Note that they said wheat sensitivity, though, not gluten sensitivity.
