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May 9 - May 12, 2023
beverages by simply drinking grape juice or, even better, eating the purple grapes themselves—preferably ones with seeds, as they appear to be most effective at suppressing estrogen synthase.27
It’s good (and delicious) to know that strawberries,28 pomegranates,29 and plain white mushrooms30 may also suppress the potentially cancer-promoting enzyme.
Electric lighting has enabled us to remain productive well into the wee hours, but might this unnatural nighttime light exposure have any adverse health effects?
In philosophy, there’s a flawed argument called the appeal-to-nature fallacy, in which someone proposes that something is good merely because it’s natural. In biology, however, this may hold some truth.
Cooking meat thoroughly reduces the risk of contracting foodborne infections (see chapter 5), but cooking meat too thoroughly may increase the risk of foodborne carcinogens.
women who ate their bacon, beefsteak, and burgers “very well done” had nearly five times the odds of getting breast cancer compared with women who preferred these meats served rare or medium.61
Cancer appears to feed on cholesterol.
as eating more broccoli and flaxseeds.
For example, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli boost the activity of detoxifying enzymes in your liver.
Stem cells are essentially the body’s raw materials—the “parents” from which all other cells with specialized functions are generated. As a result, stem cells are a critical component of the body’s repair system, including regrowing skin, bone, and muscle.
eating broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables is something I would recommend for everyone.
Flaxseeds are one of the first items ever considered to be health foods, treasured for their purported healing properties since at least the times of ancient Greece, when the renowned physician Hippocrates wrote about using them to treat patients.116 Better
In terms of breast cancer risk, eating about a daily tablespoonful of ground flaxseeds can extend a woman’s menstrual cycle by about a day.119 This means she’ll have fewer periods over the course of a lifetime and, therefore, presumably less estrogen exposure and reduced breast cancer risk.120
The gut bacteria’s role may help explain why women with frequent urinary tract infections may be at a higher risk of breast cancer:
This finding suggests that sprinkling a few spoonfuls of ground flaxseeds on your oatmeal or whatever you’re eating throughout the day may reduce the risk of breast cancer.
The evidence from studies like these appeared so compelling that scientists performed a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial of flaxseeds for breast cancer patients—one of the few times a food has ever been so rigorously put to the test.
In other words, the flaxseeds appeared to make the subjects’ cancer less aggressive.
Asian populations also eat more mushrooms.149 As noted in the box on red wine here, white mushrooms have also been shown to block the estrogen synthase enzyme, at least in a petri dish.
For example, having a carb-rich breakfast like waffles and orange juice resulted in higher tryptophan levels in those studied than did a protein-rich breakfast of turkey, eggs, and cheese.
By the end of the year, the subjects eating the high-carb diets experienced significantly less depression, hostility, and mood disturbance than those in the low-carb group. This result is consistent with studies finding better moods and less anxiety among populations eating diets higher in carbohydrates and lower in fats and protein.39
hundred thousand American men and women. They found that people who drank two or more cups of coffee daily appeared to have about only half the suicide risk compared to non-coffee drinkers.
People who drank more than six cups a day were 80 percent less likely to commit suicide,
We’ve known for decades that even a single workout can elevate mood59 and that physical activity is associated with decreased symptoms of depression.
The researchers concluded that eating antioxidant-rich plant foods “may dampen the detrimental effects of oxidative stress on mental health.”65
Among the carotenoids, lycopene (the red pigment in tomatoes) has the highest antioxidant activity. Indeed, a study of nearly one thousand elderly men and women found that people who ate tomatoes or tomato products daily had just half the odds of depression compared with those who ate them once a week or less.
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.
Another explanation is that milk consumption lowers blood levels of uric acid, an important brain antioxidant79 shown to protect nerve cells against the oxidative stress caused by pesticides.
pesticides are killing off your brain cells, is there anything you can do to stop the process other than lowering your exposure to them? There are no known drugs that can prevent these misfolded proteins from accumulating, but certain phytonutrients called flavonoids—which are found in fruits and vegetables—may have protective effects.
In a head-to-head battle between pesticides and berries, researchers found that preincubating nerve cells with a blueberry extract allowed them to better withstand the debilitating effects of a common pesticide.
Like the berry phytonutrients, caffeine has been shown to protect human nerve cells in a petri dish from being killed by a pesticide and other neurotoxins.130
The airplane itself, however, is a different story. Because you’re exposed to more cosmic rays from outer space at higher altitudes, just one round-trip, cross-country flight may subject you to about the same level of radiation as a chest x-ray.31
They found that pilots who consumed the most dietary antioxidants suffered the least amount of DNA damage to their bodies.
Other common foods that may be protective against radiation damage include garlic, turmeric, goji berries, and mint leaves,
Ever popped one of those breath mints after a big meal at a restaurant? Peppermint doesn’t just make your breath smell better; it also helps to reduce the gastrocolic reflex—the urge to defecate following a meal.
They concluded that no amount of trans fat is safe “because any incremental increase in trans fatty acid intake increases
Even some unprocessed plants—such as blue-green algae—can be toxic.
to compensate for the “refinement.”) A Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the cause of beriberi and its cure—rice bran, the brown part of rice that was removed.
Sometimes, however, processing can make foods healthier. For example, tomato juice appears to be the one common juice that may actually be healthier than the whole fruit.
The processing of tomato products boosts the availability of the antioxidant red pigment lycopene by as much as fivefold.
cholesterol.38 So for the purposes of the Traffic Light model, I like to think of “unprocessed” as nothing bad added, nothing good taken away.
Almonds are obviously a whole plant food. I would also consider no-salt-added almond butter to be a green-light food, but even unsweetened almond milk is a processed food, a food from which nutrition has been stolen. Am
Similarly, one (well-cooked) hamburger is not going to kill anyone. It’s what you eat day to day that adds up. You have to take stock of your disposition to know if you can overcome the risk of sliding down the slippery slope.
Once you’ve found three new meals you enjoy and can prepare with ease, step three is complete. You now have a nine-meal rotation, and you’re off! After that, moving on to breakfast and lunch is easy.
For example, sulforaphane, the amazing liver-enzyme detox-boosting compound I profiled in chapters 9 and 11, is derived nearly exclusively from cruciferous vegetables. You could eat tons of other kinds of greens and vegetables on a given day and get no appreciable sulforaphane if you didn’t eat something cruciferous. It’s the same with flaxseeds and the anticancer lignan compounds.
“Wait a second. Why does everything seem to have parsley in it all of a sudden?” My
Common cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, cabbage, collards, and kale. I recommend at least one serving a day (typically a half cup) and at least two additional servings of greens a day, cruciferous or otherwise. Serving sizes for other greens and vegetables are a cup for raw leafy vegetables, a half cup for other raw or cooked vegetables, and a quarter cup for dried mushrooms.
A serving of whole grains can be considered a half cup of hot cereal such as oatmeal, cooked grain such as rice (including the “pseudograins” amaranth, buckwheat, and quinoa), cooked pasta, or corn kernels; a cup of ready-to-eat (cold) cereal; one tortilla or slice of bread; half a bagel or english muffin; or three cups of popped popcorn.
This may all sound like a lot of boxes to check, but it’s not difficult to knock off a bunch at one time. One simple peanut butter and banana sandwich and you just checked off four boxes. Or imagine sitting down to a big salad. Two cups of spinach, a handful of arugula, a handful of toasted walnuts, a half cup of chickpeas, a half cup of red bell pepper, and a small tomato.
You just knocked out seven boxes in one dish. Sprinkle on your flax, add a handful of goji berries, and enjoy it with a glass of water and fruit for dessert, and you could wipe out nearly half your daily check boxes in a single meal.
The checklist also helps me picture what a meal might look like. Looking over the checklist, you’ll see there are three servings each of beans, fruits, and whole grains, and about twice as many veggies in total than any other food component. Glancing at my plate, I can imagine one quarter of it filled with grains, one quarter with legumes, and a half plate filled with vegetables, along with maybe a side salad and fruit for dessert.
