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

by Michael Greger

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.

In contrast, individuals on the plant-based diet exercised only half as much, enjoyed the same amount of weight loss after just three months,73 and achieved significant telomere protection.74 In other words, it wasn’t the weight loss and it wasn’t the exercise that reversed cell aging—it was the food.

That one unifying diet found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a whole-food, plant-based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs, and processed foods.

This approach has been compared to mopping up the floor around an overflowing sink instead of simply turning off the faucet.94 Drug companies are more than happy to sell you a new roll of paper towels every day for the rest of your life while the water continues to gush.

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

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.

Let me share with you what has been called the “best kept secret in medicine”:41 Given the right conditions, the body heals itself. If you whack your shin really hard on a coffee table, it can get red, swollen, and painful. But your shin will heal naturally if you just stand back and let your body work its magic. But what if you kept whacking it in the same place three times a day—say, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner? It would never heal.

scientists estimate that your gut would blanket thousands of square feet,4 vastly more expansive than your skin and lungs combined. What you eat may very well be your primary interface with the outside world. This means that regardless of the carcinogens that could be lurking in the environment, your greatest exposure may be through your diet.

Those who eat more high-phytate foods actually tend to have a greater bone mineral density,41 less bone loss, and fewer hip fractures.42 Phytates appear to protect bone in a manner similar to that of antiosteoporosis drugs like Fosamax,43 but without the risk of osteonecrosis (bone rot) of the jaw, a rare, potentially disfiguring side effect associated with that class of drugs.

Phytates do have side effects, but they all appear to be good. High phytate intake has been associated with less heart disease, less diabetes, and fewer kidney stones. In fact, some researchers have suggested that phytates be considered an essential nutrient. Like vitamins, phytates participate in important biochemical reactions in the body. Your levels fluctuate with dietary intake, and insufficient consumption is associated with diseases that can be moderated by eating adequate amounts. Maybe phytates should be considered “Vitamin P.”

Meat consumption was associated with increased risk of dying from cancer, dying from heart disease, and dying prematurely in general.

Again, this was after controlling for other diet and lifestyle factors, effectively excluding the possibility that people who ate meat also smoked more, exercised less, or failed to eat their fruits and veggies.

The researchers expressed surprise that it was the consumption of poultry—not red meat—that was more closely tied to cancer. When a similar result was found for lymphomas and leukemias, the same EPIC research team acknowledged that while the growth-promoting drugs fed to chickens and turkeys could be playing a role, it might also be cancer viruses found in poultry.

Red meat is strongly associated with cancer in the esophagus itself, whereas poultry was more strongly associated with cancer down around the stomach-esophagus border.

The most protective foods for cancer at the esophagus-stomach border appear to be red, orange, and dark-green leafy vegetables, berries, apples, and citrus fruits,116 but all unprocessed plant foods have the advantage of containing fiber.

Only 3 percent of Americans may even reach the recommended minimum daily intake of fiber, making it one of the most widespread nutrient deficiencies in the United States.

Compared with the control group, people eating five or more servings of fruits and vegetables had an 82 percent greater protective antibody response to the vaccine—and this was after only a few months of eating just a few extra servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

In other words, because Salmonella has also been linked to dairy and eggs, it wouldn’t be fair to force only the meat industry to make their products safer. That’s like the tuna industry arguing there’s no need to label cans of tuna with mercury warnings because you could also get exposed by eating a thermometer.

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.

Studies have shown that handling raw chicken can lead to intestinal colonization even if you don’t eat any of it.116

C. diff isn’t like most bugs. For most meat, 71 degrees Celsius is the recommended internal cooking temperature. But C. diff can survive two hours of cooking at that temperature.143 In other words, you could grill chicken at the recommended cooking thermometer temperature for two hours straight and still not kill the bug.

FDA estimates that 80 percent of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the United States every year now go to the meat industry.148

Healthy living may help protect you against both airborne and foodborne illnesses. Eating more fruits and vegetables and exercising more frequently can boost your immune system to help you fight off respiratory infections like the common cold. And sticking to mostly plant foods can help prevent you from becoming another food poisoning statistic by reducing your exposure to some of the deadliest fecal pathogens.

My book certainly couldn’t have caused more injury to Dr. Atkins than his own diet.

If insulin is the key that unlocks the doors to your cells, saturated fat is what appears to gum up the locks. With glucose denied entry into your muscles, the primary consumer of such fuel, sugar levels can rise to damaging levels in your blood. The fat inside these muscle cells can come from the fat you eat or the fat you wear (i.e., your body fat). The prevention, treatment, and reversal of type 2 diabetes therefore depends on diet and lifestyle.

Fat in your bloodstream, either from your own fat stores or from your diet, can build up inside your muscle cells, where it can create toxic breakdown products and free radicals that block the insulin-signaling process.12 No matter how much insulin you produce, your fat-compromised muscle cells can’t effectively use it.

Prediabetics may already have sugar damage to their kidneys, eyes, blood vessels, and nerves even before diabetes is diagnosed.19 Evidence from numerous studies suggests that chronic complications of type 2 diabetes begin occurring during the prediabetic state.20 To prevent diabetic damage, therefore, we need to prevent prediabetes—and the earlier, the better.

Similarly, being obese can be like gorging on bacon and butter all day even if you are actually eating healthfully. That’s because an obese person’s body may be constantly spilling fat into the bloodstream, regardless of what goes into the mouth. No matter the source of fat in your blood, as fat levels rise, your ability to clear sugar from the blood drops due to insulin resistance—the cause of type 2 diabetes.

Even at the same weight as regular omnivores, vegans appear to have less than half the risk of diabetes.37 The explanation may lie in the difference between plant fats and animal fats.

Eating legumes was shown to be just as effective at slimming waistlines and improving blood sugar control as calorie cutting. The legume group also gained additional benefits in the form of improved cholesterol and insulin regulation.

So not only do plant-based diets appear to work better but they may be easier to adopt long term. And with the improvement in mood they seem to bring, there may be benefits for both physical and mental health.

“obesogenic” chemical pollutants released into the environment that may disrupt your metabolism and predispose you to obesity.

nationwide study found that people with the highest levels of pollutants in their bloodstreams had an astounding thirty-eight times the odds of diabetes.

The association between these toxic chemicals and diabetes was much stronger among obese subjects than in lean subjects studied, raising the possibility that your own fat stores are acting as reservoirs for these pollutants.

those eating meat-free diets consumed an average of 364 fewer calories daily.75 That’s about what most people on traditional weight-loss programs strive to cut out, meaning a meatless diet could be considered an all-you-care-to-eat version of a calorie-restricted weight-loss diet, without having to count calories or restrict portion intake.

They compared diabetics placed on the same postoperative diet before and after they actually had the surgery. Amazingly, they found that the diet alone worked better than the surgery even in the same group of patients:

Chicken now contains two to three times more calories from fat than from protein, leading nutrition researchers to ask, “Does eating obesity cause obesity in the consumer?”91 As the beef industry is proud of pointing out, even skinless chicken can have more fat, and more artery-clogging saturated fat, than a dozen different cuts of steak.92

Twenty-one diabetics who had been suffering from painful neuropathy for up to ten years were placed on a whole-food, plant-based diet. After years and years of suffering, seventeen out of the twenty-one patients reported that they felt complete relief from their pain—within days.

Processed meat is blamed for the deaths of more than eight hundred thousand people every year. Worldwide, that’s four times more people than who die from illicit drug use.

Having a “normal” salt intake can lead to a “normal” blood pressure, which can contribute to us dying from all the “normal” causes, like heart attacks and strokes.

In addition to high blood pressure, salty meals can significantly impair artery function,45 even among people whose blood pressure tends to be unresponsive to salt intake.46 In other words, salt itself can injure our arteries independent of its impact on blood pressure. And that harm begins within thirty minutes.

Which has been reported to contain the most sodium: a serving of beef, a serving of baked all-natural chicken, a large McDonald’s french fries, or a serving of salted pretzels? The answer? Chicken.

the more sensitive your tongue becomes, the less butter, meat, dairy, and eggs you eat. On the flip side, if you eat too much of these foods, you may blunt your taste for fat, which can cause you to eat more calories and more fat, dairy, meat, and eggs and ultimately gain weight.67 This can all happen in just a matter of weeks.

Try to buy foods with fewer milligrams of sodium on the label than there are grams in the serving size. For example, if it’s a 100 g serving size, the product should have less than 100 mg of sodium.

This is a recurring theme in official dietary recommendations. Instead of simply telling you what the science shows and then letting you make up your own mind, experts patronize the population by advocating what they think is practical rather than ideal. By making the decision for you, they undermine those willing to make even greater changes for optimal health.

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.

I’ve already touched on whole grains and will go into detail about flaxseeds, hibiscus tea, and nitrate-rich vegetables. Ground flaxseeds alone “induced one of the most potent blood-pressure-lowering effects ever achieved by a dietary intervention.”116 Eating just a few tablespoons a day appears to be two to three times more powerful than adopting an aerobic endurance exercise program117 (not that you shouldn’t do both—incorporate flaxseeds into your diet and exercise).

The flaxseeds managed to drop subjects’ systolic and diastolic blood pressure by up to fifteen and seven points, respectively. Compare that result to the effect of powerful antihypertensive drugs, such as calcium-channel blockers (for example, Norvasc, Cardizem, Procardia), which have been found to reduce blood pressure by only eight and three points, respectively, or to ACE inhibitors (such as Vasotec, Lotensin, Zestril, Altace), which drop patients’ blood pressure by only five and two points, respectively.

But high blood pressure is where hibiscus really shines.134 A double-blind, placebo-controlled study out of Tufts University that compared hibiscus tea with an artificially colored and flavored lookalike showed that three cups of hibiscus tea a day significantly lowered blood pressure in prehypertensive adults better than the placebo beverage.

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