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

by Michael Greger

Only a quarter of medical schools appear to offer a single dedicated course on nutrition.

Medical anthropologists have identified several major eras of human disease, starting with the Age of Pestilence and Famine, which largely ended with the Industrial Revolution, or the stage we’re in now, the Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases.

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.

For some cancers, like our number-two cancer killer, colon cancer, up to 71 percent of cases appear to be preventable through a similar portfolio of simple diet and lifestyle changes.

Maybe it’s time we stop blaming genetics and focus on the more than 70 percent that is directly under our control.

And the CDC’s definitions were pretty laid-back: By not smoking, the CDC just meant not currently smoking. A “healthy diet” was defined merely as being in the top 40 percent in terms of complying with the wimpy federal dietary guidelines, and “physically active” meant averaging about twenty-one minutes or more a day of at least moderate exercise.

At the tip of each chromosome, there’s a tiny cap called a telomere, which keeps your DNA from unraveling and fraying.

Every time your cells divide, however, a bit of that cap is lost. And when the telomere is completely gone, your cells can die.

They can start shortening as soon as you’re born, and when they’re gone, you’re gone.

In a study funded in part by the U.S. Department of Defense, they found that three months of whole-food, plant-based nutrition and other healthy changes could significantly boost telomerase activity, the only intervention ever shown to do so.

But for the healthy-living group, not only did their telomeres shrink less, they grew. Five years later, their telomeres were even longer on average than when they started, suggesting a healthy lifestyle can boost telomerase enzyme activity and reverse cellular aging.

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 this book, I don’t advocate for a vegetarian diet or a vegan diet. I advocate for an evidence-based diet, and the best available balance of science suggests that the more whole plant foods we eat, the better—both to reap their nutritional benefits and to displace less healthful options.

The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families.

In Uganda, a country of millions in eastern Africa, coronary heart disease was described as “almost non-existent.”

Later studies of accidental death victims between the ages of three and twenty-six found that fatty streaks—the first stage of atherosclerosis—were found in nearly all American children by age ten.

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.

Human Needs tried to do just that. Known as the McGovern Committee, they released Dietary Goals for the United States, a report advising Americans to cut down on animal-based foods and increase their consumption of plant-based foods. As a founding member of Harvard University’s nutrition department recalls, “The meat, milk and egg producers were very upset.”

Several prominent senators reputedly lost their election bids as a result of supporting the report.

In 2012, the American Dietetic Association changed its name to the Academy of Nutrition

and Dietetics but didn’t appear to change its policies. It continues to take millions of dollars every year from processed junk food, meat, dairy, soda, and candy bar companies. In return, the academy lets them offer official educational seminars to teach dietitians what to say to their clients.

When you hear the title “registered dietitian,” this is the group they are registered through.

“Plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking.

Men who smoke are twenty-three times more likely and women thirteen times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers. And smokers aren’t just harming themselves; thousands of deaths each year have been attributed to secondhand smoke.

carcinogens called heterocyclic amines that are formed when muscle tissue is subjected to high temperatures.

When meat is grilled, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)

are also produced, one of the probable carcinogens in cigarette smoke.

Even just living next to a restaurant may pose a health

hazard.

While exposure to fumes from all three types of restaurants resulted in exposure to unsafe levels of PAHs, the Chinese restaurants proved to be the worst.

Given the excess cancer risk, the researchers concluded that it wouldn’t be safe to live near the exhaust of a Chinese restaurant for more than a day or two a month.

Just one extra serving of fruit each day may translate into a 24 percent lower risk of dying from COPD.

In scientific circles, the phenomenon by which oxygen molecules grab stray electrons and go crazy is called oxidant, or oxidative, stress. According to the theory, the resulting cellular damage is what essentially causes aging.

Knowing this, scientists set out to find the most antioxidant-rich foods. Sixteen researchers spanning the globe published a database of the antioxidant power of more than a whopping three thousand foods, beverages, herbs, spices, and supplements. They tested everything from Cap’n Crunch cereal to the crushed dried leaves of the African baobab tree. They tested dozens of brands of beer to see which has the most antioxidants. (Santa Claus beer from Eggenberg, Austria, tied for first place.)

The bigger and more frequent your bowel movements are, the healthier you may be.

Indeed, those who ate red meat at least once each week had about double the risk of developing colon cancer; that risk appeared to triple, however, for those who ate chicken or fish once or more a week.

Similarly, many plant compounds appear able to help slow down and even stop cancer cell growth,53 but phytates can sometimes also cause cancer cells to apparently revert back to their normal state—in other words, to stop behaving like cancer.

The researchers used a shortcut, giving the berries as suppositories. Don’t try this at home! After they inserted the equivalent of eight pounds of raspberries into patients’ rectums over

those nine months, some of the patients suffered from torn anuses.63

There are diseases unique to the meat industry, such as the newly described “salami brusher’s disease” that only affects people whose full-time job is to wire-brush off the white mold that naturally grows on salami.

Humanity’s dominion over animals has unleashed a veritable Pandora’s ark of infectious diseases. Most modern human infectious diseases were unknown before domestication

led to a mass spillover of animal disease into human populations.6 For example, tuberculosis appears to have been originally acquired through the domestication of goats7 but now infects nearly one-third of humanity.8 Meanwhile, measles9 and smallpox10 may have arisen from mutant cattle viruses. We domesticated pigs and got whooping cough, we domesticated chickens and got typhoid fever, and we domesticated ducks and got influenza.11 Leprosy may have come from water buffalo and the cold virus from horses.

How often did wild horses have the opportunity to sneeze into humans’ faces until they were broken and bridled?

So what’s going on here? How does the simple act of moving decrease the chance of contracting an infection? Approximately 95 percent of all infections start in the mucosal (moist) surfaces, including the

eyes, nostrils, and mouth.54 These surfaces are protected by antibodies called IgA (short for immunoglobulin, type A), which provide an immunological barrier by neutralizing and preventing viruses from penetrating into the body.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture once tried to shut down a company found to be repeatedly violating Salmonella standards. The company sued and won. “Because normal cooking practices for meat and poultry destroy the Salmonella organism,” the judges in the case concluded, “the presence of Salmonella in meat products does not render them ‘injurious to health.’”

Some European countries have gotten Salmonella contamination in poultry down as low as 2 percent. How? Because it’s illegal to sell chicken tainted with Salmonella. What a concept! They don’t allow the sale of fowl fouled with a pathogen that sickens more than a million Americans a year.

In a meat industry trade publication, an Alabama poultry science professor explained why we don’t have such a “heavy-handed”

policy: “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.”99

You’ve probably seen advertisements for those alcohol-based hand sanitizers that advertise they kill 99.99 percent of all germs. Well, C. diff falls into that 0.01 percent.