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

by Michael Greger

But with the democratization of information, doctors no longer hold a monopoly as gatekeepers of knowledge about health.

One study found that people off the street sometimes know more about basic nutrition than their doctors, concluding “physicians should be more knowledgeable about nutrition than their patients, but these results suggest that this is not necessarily true.”9

People who once ate vegetarian diets but then started to eat meat at least once a week experienced a 146 percent increase in odds of heart disease, a 152 percent increase in stroke, a 166 percent increase in diabetes, and a 231 percent increase in odds for weight gain.

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.

In fact, forensic scientists can take DNA from a bloodstain and roughly estimate how old the person was based on how long their telomeres are.58

Weight loss through calorie restriction and an even more vigorous exercise program failed to improve telomere length, so it appears that the active ingredient is the quality, not quantity, of the food eaten.

In his words, Dr. Ornish “realized reimbursement is a much more powerful determinant of medical practice than research.”97

Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed-care organization in the country, published a nutritional update for physicians in their official medical journal, informing their nearly fifteen thousand physicians that healthy eating may be “best achieved with a plant-based diet, which we define as a regimen that encourages whole, plant-based foods and discourages meats, dairy products, and eggs as well as all refined and processed foods.”98

Let me give you an example of how striking this effect can be. Consider the humble honeybee. Queen bees and worker bees are genetically identical, yet queen bees lay up to two thousand eggs a day, while worker bees are functionally sterile. Queens live up to three years; workers may live only three weeks.105 The difference between the two is diet. When the hive’s queen is dying, a larva is picked by nurse bees to be fed a secreted substance called royal jelly. When the larva eats this jelly, the enzyme that had been silencing the expression of royal genes is turned off, and a new queen is born.106 The queen has the exact same genes as any of the workers, but because of what she ate, different genes are expressed, and her life and life span are dramatically altered as a result.

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

The optimal LDL cholesterol level is probably 50 or 70 mg/dL, and apparently, the lower, the better.

To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL.

Brazil Nuts for Cholesterol Control?

It was one of the craziest findings I’d ever seen. Researchers from—where else?—Brazil gave ten men and women a single meal containing between one and eight Brazil nuts. Amazingly, compared to the control group who ate no nuts at all, just a single serving of four Brazil nuts almost immediately improved cholesterol levels. LDL—the “bad”—cholesterol levels were a staggering twenty points lower just nine hours after eating the Brazil nuts.51 Even drugs don’t work nearly that fast.52

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.

No discussion at all of the scientific research on the health consequences of eating meat. If the Committee actually discussed this research, it would be unable to justify its recommendation to eat meat, as the research would show that meat increases the risks of chronic diseases, contrary to the purposes of the Guidelines. Thus, by simply ignoring that research, the Committee is able to reach a conclusion that would otherwise look improper.

What about that enticing aroma of sizzling bacon? The fumes produced by frying bacon contain a class of carcinogens called nitrosamines.31 Although all meat may release potentially carcinogenic fumes, processed meat like bacon may be the worst: A UC-Davis study found that bacon fumes cause about four times more DNA mutations than the fumes from beef patties fried at similar temperatures.32

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

In a supermarket survey of a variety of foods, canned sardines were found to be the most heavily tainted with hexachlorobenzene, though salmon was found to be the most contaminated food overall. Two dozen pesticides were detected in the salmon fillets.70 Farmed salmon may be the worst, containing ten times more of a class of toxic chemicals called PCBs than wild-caught salmon.71

How far behind the times is the medical profession? A report by the Institute of Medicine on medical training concluded that the fundamental approach to medical education has not changed since 1910.127

TOP-TEN FOOD SOURCES OF NITRATES 10. Beets 9. Swiss chard 8. Oak leaf lettuce 7. Beet greens 6. Basil 5. Mesclun greens 4. Butter leaf lettuce 3. Cilantro 2. Rhubarb 1. Arugula

Of all the animal products studied (including unusual categories, such as offal, or entrails and organs), poultry tended to be associated with the greatest increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, all grades of follicular lymphoma, and B-cell lymphomas, such as B-cell chronic lymphatic leukemia (including small lymphocytic leukemia and prolymphocytic lymphocytic leukemia).34 The EPIC study found that risk increased between 56 percent and 280 percent for every 50 grams of poultry consumed daily. For comparison, a cooked, boneless chicken breast may weigh as much as 384 grams.35

In a study in which more than a thousand Americans over age sixty-four with CKD were followed for a decade, only one in twenty developed end-stage kidney failure. Most of the others had already died, with cardiovascular disease killing more than all other causes combined.6

Growing evidence indicates that positive psychological well-being is associated with reduced risk of physical illness, but which came first? Are people healthier because they’re happy, or are people just happier because they’re healthy?

According to the published literature, the results of nearly all antidepressant trials were positive. In contrast, FDA analysis of trial data—including the unpublished studies—demonstrated that roughly half of the trials showed the drugs didn’t work after all. When all the data—published and unpublished—were combined, antidepressants failed to show a clinically significant advantage over placebo sugar pills.73 This finding suggests that the placebo effect explains the apparent clinical effectiveness of antidepressants. In other words, improvements in mood may be a result of the patient’s belief in the power of the drug—not the drug itself.

Millions of tons of slaughterhouse by-products continue to be fed to farm animals in the United States every year.121 Not only have we turned these animals into meat eaters but virtual cannibals as well. When we feed farm animals millions of tons of meat and bonemeal, we’re also feeding them any pollutants this feed may contain. Then, after those animals are slaughtered, their trimmings go to feed the next generation of farm animals, potentially concentrating the pollutant levels higher and higher.122 So we can end up like polar bears or eagles at the top of the food chain and suffer the biomagnified pollutant consequences. When we eat these farmed animals, it’s almost as if we’re also eating every animal they ate.

Farm animals that have been fed contaminated animal products produce contaminated milk and egg products.”

For example, side effects from medications given in hospitals kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year.2 That statistic alone effectively makes medical care the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States.

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

Researchers found an 8 percent reduction in risk of premature death for every twenty-gram increase in daily legume intake—that’s barely two tablespoons’ worth!47

Kiwi certainly seems like a better option than the leading IBS drug, which was pulled from the market for apparently killing too many people.21

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 1/3 cup water Blend and enjoy! (If you have a high-speed blender, you could probably use whole almonds instead of meal.)

An extraordinary study published in the journal Food Chemistry pitted thirty-four common vegetables in vitro against eight different types of human cancer cells: breast cancer, brain tumors, kidney cancer, lung cancer, childhood brain tumors, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and stomach cancer. Take breast cancer, for example. Seven vegetables (eggplant, bok choy, carrot, tomato, endive, fennel bulb, and romaine lettuce) appeared useless, suppressing breast cancer cell growth no more than the control. Six vegetables (orange bell 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 There were two take-home messages to come out of this remarkable study. The first is that you should eat a portfolio of vegetables. Radishes, for example, are completely unable to stop pancreatic cancer cell growth. However, radishes were 100 percent effective at halting the growth of stomach cancer cells. Orange bell peppers were useless against stomach cancer, but they were able to suppress prostate cancer cell growth by more than 75 percent. In the words of the researchers, “a diversified diet, containing several distinct classes of vegetables (and hence of phytochemicals) is essential for effective prevention of cancer.”60

After tracking the health of more than one hundred thousand Americans for fourteen years, an American Cancer Society study found that men who sit for six hours or more per day have a 20 percent higher overall death rate compared to men who sit for three hours or less, while women who sit for more than six hours have a 40 percent higher death rate.20

The more the individual being studied weighed, the less responsive to dopamine he or she appeared to be.5 We see the same reduction in sensitivity in cocaine addicts and alcoholics.6 The brain gets so overstimulated that it ends up trying to turn down the volume.