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

by Michael Greger

In general, the dividing line between health-promoting and disease-promoting foods may be less plant- versus animal-sourced foods and more whole plant foods versus most everything else.

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 a half hour of exercise a day, and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat. Those four factors alone were found to account for 78 percent of chronic disease risk.

Unlike with medications, there isn’t one kind of diet for optimal liver function and a different diet to improve our kidneys. A heart-healthy diet is a brain-healthy diet is a lung-healthy diet.

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

We’ve known for nearly two decades that a single fast-food meal—Sausage and Egg McMuffins were used in the original study—can stiffen your arteries within hours, cutting in half their ability to relax normally.43 And just as this inflammatory state starts to calm down five or six hours later—lunchtime!

In more recent years, it was uncovered that many members of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee had financial ties to everything from candy bar companies to entities like McDonald’s Council on Healthy Lifestyles and Coca-Cola’s Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness. One committee member even served as “brand girl” for cake-mix maker Duncan Hines and then as the official Crisco “brand girl” before going on to help write the official Dietary Guidelines for Americans.55

privations

Today, Dr. Barnard says, “Plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking.”

Whether or not eating broccoli will help prolong survival in cancer patients has yet to be tested in clinical trials, but the nice thing about healthy dietary interventions is that since they have no downsides, they can be added to whatever other treatments one chooses.

On the other hand, a twin pair of studies from Columbia and Harvard Universities found that consumption of cured meat—like bacon, bologna, ham, hot dogs, sausage, and salami—may increase the risk of COPD.38,39 It’s thought to be due to the nitrite preservatives in meat, which may mimic the lung-damaging properties of the nitrite by-products of cigarette smoke.40

Again, it did not appear to take much. One more apple, an extra quarter cup of broccoli, or just two tablespoons of beans a day during childhood could translate into a meaningful effect on artery health later in life.

You’d have to eat a dozen bananas a day just to get the bare minimum recommended amount of potassium.

A recent study of 150,000 Americans was able to examine the issue more thoroughly. Higher stroke rates were found among individuals sleeping six hours or less, or nine hours or more. Those at lowest risk got around seven or eight hours of sleep a night.

You can slow down this oxidant process by eating foods containing lots of antioxidants. You can tell whether a food is rich in antioxidants by slicing it open, exposing it to air (oxygen), and then seeing what happens. If it turns brown, it’s oxidizing.

Sadly, beer represents Americans’ fourth-largest source of dietary antioxidants.47

list to see where your favorite foods and beverages rank at this link: http://bit.ly/antioxidantfoods.

In Japan, the prevalence of Alzheimer’s has shot up over the past few decades, thought to be due to the shift from a traditional rice-and-vegetable-based diet to one featuring triple the dairy and six times the meat.

Your skin covers about twenty square feet. Your lungs, if you were to flatten out all the tiny air pockets, could cover hundreds of square feet.3 And your intestines? Counting all the little folds, some scientists estimate that your gut would blanket thousands of square feet,4 vastly more expansive than your skin and lungs combined.

Nearly three-quarters of all emerging and reemerging human diseases arise from the animal kingdom.

“The American consumer is not going to pay that much. It’s as simple as that.” If the industry had to pay to make it safer, the price would go up. “The fact,” he said, “is that it’s too expensive not to sell salmonella-positive chicken.”

According to the latest national FDA retail-meat survey, about 90 percent of retail chicken showed evidence of contamination with fecal matter.103 Using the presence of bugs like E. faecalis and E. faecium as markers of fecal contamination, 90 percent of chicken parts, 91 percent of ground turkey, 88 percent of ground beef, and 80 percent of pork chops are tainted on the retail level nationally.

Another fifteen years passed before scientists tracked down the ultimate culprit, the original source of some of the UTI-associated bacteria in the rectum: chicken. McGill University researchers were able to capture UTI-causing E. coli at the slaughter plants, tracing them to the meat supply and, eventually, to urinary specimens obtained from infected women.112 As a result, we now have direct proof that bladder infections can be a zoonosis—an animal-to-human disease.113 This is a critical discovery, since UTIs affect more than ten million women each year in the United States at the cost of more than $1 billion.114 Even worse, it turns out that many of the strains of E. coli in chicken that cause UTIs are now resistant to some of our most powerful antibiotics.115

The advantage of a whole-food, 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.

That’s why whole-food, plant-based diets are great for people who like to eat, since you can basically eat as much as you want without worrying about counting calories.

The two most prominent dietary risks for death and disability in the world may be not eating enough fruit and eating too much salt.

Not surprisingly, the endurance runners on a standard American diet had a better blood pressure average than their sedentary, meat-eating counterparts: 122/72 compared with 132/79, which fits the definition of prehypertensive. But the sedentary vegans? They averaged an extraordinary 104/62.115 Apparently, eating standard American fare even when running two thousand miles a year may not bring down your blood pressure as low as a being a couch-potato vegan.

Here’s a simple recipe for a whole-food version of a tasty cranberry beverage, what I call my Pink Juice: 1 handful fresh or frozen cranberries 2 cups water 8 teaspoons erythritol (a naturally derived low-calorie sweetener; read more about erythritol and other sweeteners in part 2) Place all the ingredients in a blender and blend at high speed. Pour over ice and serve. At just twelve calories, this recipe has twenty-five times fewer calories and at least eight times more phytonutrients than typical cranberry juice drinks.80 For an extra boost, blend in some fresh mint leaves. You’ll get a weird-looking green foam on top, but not only will it taste good, you’ll be happy to know that you’re chugging down berries and dark, leafy greens, two of the healthiest foods on the planet. Bottoms up!

1 handful fresh or frozen cranberries 2 cups water 8 teaspoons erythritol (a naturally derived low-calorie sweetener; read more about erythritol and other sweeteners in part 2) Place all the ingredients in a blender and blend at high speed. Pour over ice and serve. At just twelve calories, this recipe has twenty-five times fewer calories and at least eight times more phytonutrients than typical cranberry juice drinks.80 For an extra boost, blend in some fresh mint leaves. You’ll get a weird-looking green foam on top, but not only will it taste good, you’ll be happy to know that you’re chugging down berries and dark, leafy greens, two of the healthiest foods on the planet. Bottoms up!

Don’t inject drugs, do get vaccinated, and do practice safe sex. Liver fat can also be prevented by common sense measures: Avoid excess consumption of alcohol, calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, and sugar.

This can be accomplished either of two ways: by adding drugs or by subtracting meat.

Bottom line: When urine is more alkaline, stones are less likely to form. This helps explain why less meat and more fruits and vegetables appear so protective. The standard American diet yields acidic urine. When people are placed on a plant-based diet, however, their urine can be alkalinized up to a near neutral pH in less than a week.63

Boil some purple cabbage until the water turns deep purple, or blend raw cabbage with some water and then strain out the solids. Pee into your toilet then take your purple-cabbage cocktail and pour it into the toilet bowl. (Low-flow toilets work best, because there’s less water in the bowl.) If the liquid in the toilet bowl remains purple or, even worse, turns pink, your urine is too acidic. Blue is the target. If your pee and cabbage water turns blue, your urine is not acidic but neutral or even basic.

This prevalence has led researchers to assert that aspartame “is impossible to completely eradicate from daily encounters.”58 But, of course, that’s only true for people who eat processed foods. This is yet another reason to spend most of your time at the grocery store in the produce aisle. Discriminating shoppers make it a priority to read ingredients lists, but the healthiest foods in the supermarket don’t even have them.

The blood of those eating the standard American diet does fight cancer—if it didn’t, many of us would be dead!—but the blood of people eating plant-based diets was shown to fight cancer about eight times better.46

So when it comes to many of the fat-soluble pesticides and pollutants, every time you eat a burger, you are, in effect, eating everything that burger ate. The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet.

Tobacco is part of the nightshade family, the group of plants that includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers.

For the hundreds of millions of people on these drugs who don’t benefit, it’s not simply a matter of all the money spent and all the side effects endured. To me, the true tragedy is all the lost opportunities to address the root causes of patients’ conditions. When people dramatically overestimate how much their prescription pills protect them, they may be less likely to make the dietary changes necessary to dramatically lower their risk.

Premedicating with eight drops’ worth of peppermint essential oil four hours before a colonoscopy was found to significantly reduce colon spasms, patient pain, and make the scope easier to insert and withdraw compared with a placebo.107

What about white potatoes? They’re vegetables, so they must be healthy, right? Someone asked me this a few years ago after a group of Harvard University researchers raised concerns about baked and mashed potatoes.1 So are they healthy? Compared to french fries, yes. Compared to a baked or mashed sweet potato? No, they’re not.

Less healthy foods only beat out healthier foods on a cost-per-calorie basis, which is a way we measured food cost back in the nineteenth century. Back then, the emphasis was on cheap calories, no matter how you got them. So while beans and sugar both cost the same at that time (five cents a pound), the U.S. Department of Agriculture promoted sugar as more cost effective for pure “fuel value.”

roughly four times more than the average serving of junk food, but those veggies have been calculated to average twenty-four times more nutrition. So on a cost-per-nutrition basis, vegetables offer six times more nutrition per dollar compared to highly processed foods.

green means go, yellow means caution, and red means stop. (In this case, stop and think before you put it into your mouth.) Ideally, green-light foods should be maximized, yellow-light ones minimized, and red-light foods avoided.

thanks to politics. In other words, the guidelines are clear when there is eat-more messaging (“Eat more fresh produce”), but eat-less messaging is obscured into biochemical components (“Eat less saturated and trans fatty acids”). National health authorities rarely just say to “eat less meat and dairy.”

So if trans fats are found in meat and dairy and the only safe intake of trans fats is zero, that means the Institute of Medicine went on to encourage everyone to start eating a plant-based diet, right? No, they did not. The director of Harvard’s Cardiovascular Epidemiology Program famously explained why: “We can’t tell people to stop eating all meat and all dairy products,” he said. “Well, we could tell people to become vegetarians,” he added. “If we were truly basing this only on science, we would, but it is a bit extreme.”24 We certainly wouldn’t want scientists to base anything on science!

So for the purposes of the Traffic Light model, I like to think of “unprocessed” as nothing bad added, nothing good taken away.

From a nutrition standpoint, the reason I don’t like the terms vegetarian and vegan is that they are only defined by what you don’t eat. When I used to speak on college campuses, I would meet vegans who appeared to be living off french fries and beer. Vegan, technically, but not exactly health promoting. That’s why I prefer the term whole-food, plant-based nutrition. As far as I can discern, the best available balance of evidence suggests that the healthiest diet is one centered on unprocessed plant foods. On a day-to-day basis, the more whole plant foods and the fewer processed and animal products, the better.44

ForksOverKnives.com: This site of the wildly popular documentary and book of the same name offers hundreds of recipes. • StraightUpFood.com: Cooking instructor Cathy Fisher shares more than one hundred recipes on this site. • HappyHealthyLongLife.com: This site’s tagline reads: “A [Cleveland Clinic] medical librarian’s adventures in evidence-based living.” She used the e word—I think I’m in love!

If you hate to cook and just want the cheapest, easiest way to make healthy meals, I highly recommend dietitian Jeff Novick’s Fast Food DVD series. Using common staples like canned beans, frozen vegetables, quick-cook whole grains, and spice mixes, Jeff shows you how you can feed your family healthfully in no time for about four dollars a day per person. The

don’t usually eat tempeh for breakfast, but I do like to slice it thin, dip it into a thick flax “egg” mixture (see here for my recipe), dredge it through some rosemary-seasoned whole-grain bread crumbs or coarse blue cornmeal, and bake it in my toaster oven at about 400°F until golden brown. Then I dip it in buffalo hot sauce

It’s for this same reason kumquats may be the healthiest citrus fruit, since you can eat them rind and all. Shop for the reddest of strawberries, the blackest of blackberries, the most scarlet tomato, the darkest green broccoli you can find. The colors are the antiaging, anticancer antioxidants.