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March 2 - May 5, 2022
Nitrates, concentrated in green, leafy vegetables and beets, not only help deliver oxygenated blood to your muscles by helping dilate your arteries but also enable your body to extract more energy from that oxygen
What exactly does the liver do? Up to five hundred different functions have been attributed to this vital organ.1 First and foremost, it plays the role of bouncer, keeping unwanted guests out of your bloodstream. Whatever you absorb through your digestive tract isn’t immediately circulated throughout your body.
Your best bet for avoiding NAFLD, the most common cause of liver disease, may be to avoid excess calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, and sugar.
But in 2013, a group of researchers published the first double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of oatmeal in overweight men and women.62 They found a significant reduction in liver inflammation in the real oatmeal group, but that may have been because they lost so much more weight than the controls (that is, the placebo-oatmeal eaters). Nearly 90 percent of the real-oatmeal-treated subjects had lost weight, compared with no weight loss, on average, among the control group.
When it came to suppressing the growth of human liver cancer cells in a petri dish,67 cranberries beat out the other most common fruits in the United States:
to get the same amount of anthocyanins found in a single cup of fresh or frozen cranberries, you’d have to drink sixteen cups of cranberry juice cocktail, eat seven cups of dried cranberries, or make your way through twenty-six cans of cranberry sauce.
Subjects who drank more than two cups of coffee a day appeared to have less than half the risk of developing chronic liver problems as those who drank less than one cup.
With liver disease, as always, prevention is the key. All the most serious liver conditions—liver cancer, liver failure, and cirrhosis—can start with an inflamed liver. That inflammation can be caused by an infection or the buildup of fatty deposits. Liver viruses can be prevented by common-sense measures. 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.
Supplements contain only a select few antioxidants, whereas your body relies on hundreds of them, all working synergistically to create a network to help the body dispose of free radicals. High doses of a single antioxidant may upset this delicate balance and may actually diminish your body’s ability to fight cancer.16
Animal viruses can infect people who prepare meat with unpleasant skin diseases, such as contagious pustular dermatitis.44 There’s even a well-defined medical condition commonly known as “butchers’ warts” that affects the hands of those who handle fresh meat, including poultry and fish.45 Even the wives of butchers appear to be at higher risk for cervical cancer, a cancer definitively associated with wart-virus exposure.
Worst was growing up on a poultry farm, which was associated with nearly three times the odds of developing blood cancer.53
having pets may have beneficial effects on the immune system.
The good news? The diets that are healthiest for our hearts—those centered around unprocessed plant foods—may be the best way to prevent and treat kidney disease as well.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Rudolf Virchow, the father of modern pathology, first described fatty degeneration of the kidney.10 This concept of lipid nephrotoxicity, or the idea that fat and cholesterol in the bloodstream could be toxic to the kidneys, has since been formalized,11 based in part on studies that found plugs of fat clogging up the works in autopsied kidneys.
Could substituting plant protein for animal protein help slow the deterioration of kidney function? Yes, half a dozen clinical trials have shown that plant protein replacement can reduce hyperfiltration and/or protein leakage,
animal protein tends to have higher levels of sulfur-containing amino acids, such as methionine, which produce sulfuric acid when metabolized in the body. Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, are generally base forming, which helps neutralize acids in our kidneys.
To buffer the excess acid formed by your diet, kidneys produce ammonia, which is a base and can neutralize some of that acid. Counteracting the acid is beneficial in the short term, but over the long run, all the extra ammonia in the kidneys may have a toxic effect.
Unfortunately, this type of Band-Aid approach is all too typical of today’s medical model. Cholesterol too high from eating a diet unnaturally high in saturated fat and cholesterol? Take a statin drug to cripple your cholesterol-making enzyme. Diet unnaturally high in acid-forming foods? Swallow some baking soda pills to balance that right out.
found that gram for gram, fish might be slightly worse than other meat in terms of the risk of certain kidney stones, but they concluded that overall, “[s]tone formers should be counseled to limit the intake of all animal proteins.”
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.
Phosphate additives have been described as “a real and insidious danger” for kidney patients, since they have diminished capacity to excrete it,81 but given what we now know about excess phosphorus, it’s a concern for us all.
Did you know that one hot dog has as many nitrosamines (and nitrosamides, which are similar tobacco carcinogens103) as four cigarettes and that these carcinogens are also found in fresh meat, including beef, chicken, and pork?
researchers suggested, for example, that 20 percent of heart disease deaths among American women could be averted if the highest consumers of processed meat would cut down to the equivalent of less than a half strip of bacon a day.106 No wonder the American Institute for Cancer Research recommends that you simply “avoid processed meat such as ham, bacon, salami, hot dogs and sausages.”
Vegetables do contain nitrates that can be fermented into nitrites, so adding fermented celery juice to bacon is just a sneaky way of adding nitrites.
Nitrites only become harmful when they turn into nitrosamines and nitrosamides.
While nitrite from animal sources—not just processed meats—was associated with an increased risk of kidney cancer, some of the highest nitrate-containing vegetables, such as arugula, kale, and collards, are associated with significantly reduced risk for kidney cancer.
To keep your kidneys strong and your blood clean, you must carefully consider what you eat. The meat-sweet American diet can slowly damage your kidneys one meal at a time, forcing the kidneys into a state of hyperfiltration. Imagine how long your car engine would last if you always revved it near the red line? Thankfully, medical science has proven that you can reduce your kidneys’ workload (and acid load) by moving toward a more plant-based diet.
A woman is considered “healthy” until she shows signs or symptoms of breast cancer. But if she has been harboring a malignancy for two decades, can she truly be considered healthy?
The good news is that no matter what your mom ate or how you lived as a child, by eating and living healthfully, you may be able to slow the growth rate of any hidden cancers. In short, you can die with your tumors rather than from them.
In 2010, the official World Health Organization body that assesses cancer risks formally upgraded its classification of alcohol to a definitive human breast carcinogen.
In other words, the grapes in red wine may help cancel out some of the cancer-causing effects of the alcohol. But you can reap the benefits without the risks associated with imbibing alcoholic beverages by simply drinking grape juice or, even better, eating the purple grapes themselves
Besides helping to regulate your sleep, melatonin is thought to play another role—suppressing cancer growth. Think of melatonin as helping to put cancer cells to sleep at night.
Studies comparing nighttime satellite photos against breast cancer rates have found that people living in brighter neighborhoods tend to have a higher breast cancer risk.
44 Five hours a week of vigorous aerobic exercise can lower estrogen and progesterone exposure by about 20 percent.
The longer meat is cooked, the more HCAs form. This process may explain why eating well-done meat is associated with increased risk of cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, lung, pancreas, prostate, and stomach.
The situation creates what the Harvard Health Letter called a meat preparation “paradox”57: 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.
Your body can rapidly rid itself of these toxins once exposure ceases. In fact, urine levels of PhIP can drop to zero within twenty-four hours of refraining from eating meat.
Cancer appears to feed on cholesterol. LDL cholesterol stimulates the growth of breast cancer cells in a petri dish
Researchers at Yale University and elsewhere found that premenopausal women who ate more than about six grams of soluble fiber a day (the equivalent of about a single cup of black beans) had 62 percent lower odds of breast cancer compared with women who consumed less than around four grams a day.
“On the other hand,” noted the researchers, “an increased consumption of fiber from foods of plant origin … may reflect a reduced consumption of foods of animal origin.…”88 In other words, maybe it’s not what they were eating more of but what they were eating less of.
The cancer protection apples appear to offer is assumed to arise from their antioxidant properties. Apple antioxidants are concentrated in the peel,
104 This finding suggests that not only might a heaping side of broccoli with your steak decrease carcinogen exposure but also that eating your veggies days or even weeks before the big barbecue may help shore up your defenses.
However, as miraculous as stem cells are, their immortality can also work against us. Instead of rebuilding organs, if they turn cancerous, they can build tumors.
Sulforaphane, a dietary component of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, has been shown to suppress the ability of breast cancer stem cells to form tumors.
Sure enough, after dissecting their breast tissue postsurgery, the researchers found evidence of significant sulforaphane buildup.114 In other words, we now know that the cancer-fighting nutrients in broccoli do find their way to the right place when we swallow them.
flaxseeds have around one hundred times more lignans than other foods.
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.
Compared with the women who ate the placebo muffins, women consuming the muffins with flaxseed, on average, witnessed their tumor-cell proliferation decrease, cancer-cell death rates increase, and their c-erB2 scores go down.
Phytoestrogens dock into the same receptors as your own estrogen but have a weaker effect, so they can act to block the effects of your more powerful animal estrogen.
Ideally, you’d like what’s called a “selective estrogen receptor modulator” in your body that would have proestrogenic effects in some tissues and antiestrogenic effects in others. Well, that’s what soy phytoestrogens appear to be.132 Soy seems to lower breast cancer risk,133 an antiestrogenic effect, but can also help reduce menopausal hot-flash symptoms,134 a proestrogenic effect. So, by eating soy, you may be able to enjoy the best of both worlds.
