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March 2 - May 5, 2022
One way soy may decrease cancer risk and improve survival is by helping to reactivate BRCA genes.140 BRCA1 and BRCA2 are so-called caretaker genes, cancer-suppressing genes responsible for DNA repair.
the World Health Organization defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
About one in three of the negative-emotion individuals failed to successfully fight off the virus and came down with a cold. But only one in five of the happy individuals became sick, even after the researchers took into account such factors as subjects’ sleep patterns, exercise habits, and stress levels.
There are also components in certain foods that may increase the risk of depression, such as arachidonic acid, an inflammation-promoting compound found mostly in chicken and eggs in the diet that is blamed for potentially impairing mood by inflaming the brain.
your body already makes all the arachidonic acid you need, so you don’t need to take in any more via your diet.
In this particular case, the researchers suspected arachidonic acid intake might impair the body’s emotional state. There are data suggesting that people with higher levels of arachidonic acid in their blood may end up at significantly higher risk of suicide and episodes of major depression.
The top-five sources of arachidonic acid in the American diet are chicken, eggs, beef, pork, and fish,
Within just two weeks, the study subjects experienced a significant improvement in measures of their mood states.20 The researchers concluded: “Perhaps eating less meat can help protect mood in omnivores, particularly important in those susceptible to affective disorders [such as depression].”
If only there were a way to tamp down the monoamine oxidase enzyme safely. Well, it turns out that many plant foods, including apples, berries, grapes, onions, and green tea, contain phytonutrients that appear to naturally inhibit the MAO, as do such spices as cloves, oregano, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
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.
A Prozac-equivalent dose of saffron may cost more than twice as much as the drug, but a subsequent study found that even just smelling saffron appeared to have psychological benefits.
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,
The controversy surrounding the neurological effects of aspartame began in the 1980s.
researchers concluded that “individuals with mood disorders are particularly sensitive to this artificial sweetener and its use in this population should be discouraged.”
Avoiding diet soda and those pastel paper packets seems easy enough, but artificial sweeteners are also present in more than six thousand products,56 including breath mints, cereals, chewing gums, jams and jellies, juice drinks, puddings, and even nutritional bars and yogurts.
people who exercised regularly had 25 percent lower odds of a major depression diagnosis.
lycopene (the red pigment in tomatoes) has the highest antioxidant activity.
Folate is a B vitamin concentrated in beans and greens.
What if drug companies decided to publish only those studies that showed a positive effect but quietly shelved and concealed any studies showing the drugs didn’t work? To find out if this was the case, researchers applied to the Food and Drug Administration under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get access to the published and unpublished studies submitted by pharmaceutical companies. What they found was shocking.
If doctors are willing to give patients placebo-equivalent treatments, some argue that it would be better for them to just lie to patients and give them actual sugar pills.79 Unlike the drugs, sugar pills do not cause side effects.
But, you may be wondering, if you don’t drink milk, what will happen to your bones? Doesn’t milk help prevent osteoporosis?
A meta-analysis of cow’s milk intake and hip fracture studies shows no significant protection.20 Even if you were to start drinking milk during adolescence in an attempt to bolster peak bone mass, it probably wouldn’t reduce your chances of fracture later in life.
researchers investigated the connection between milk intake and mortality, as well as fracture risk in large populations of milk drinkers.27 In addition to significantly more bone and hip fractures, researchers found higher rates of premature death, more heart disease, and significantly more cancer for each daily glass of milk women drank.
Compared with men who rarely ate eggs, men who ate even less than a single egg a day appeared to have twice the risk of prostate cancer progression, such as metastasizing into the bones.
The only thing potentially worse for prostate cancer than eggs was poultry: Men with more aggressive cancer who regularly ate chicken and turkey had up to four times the risk of prostate cancer progression.
The answer may be choline, a compound found concentrated in eggs.
Fantastic results, but the blood of those in the plant-based diet-and-exercise group wiped out an astounding 4,000 percent more cancer cells than that of the first group. Clearly exercise alone had a dramatic effect, but at the end of the day, thousands of hours in the gym appeared to be no match for a plant-based diet.
flaxseeds may indeed thwart the progression of prostate cancer. Two of the men saw their PSA levels drop to normal and didn’t even need a second biopsy.
Vegetarians who include eggs and dairy in their diets don’t seem to achieve a significant reduction in IGF-1. Only men93 and women94 who limit their intake of all animal proteins appear able to significantly drop their levels of the cancer-promoting hormone and raise their levels of the protective binding proteins.
It appears that blood levels of some pollutants in women may drop by nearly half during pregnancy,8 in part because their bodies pass them off through the placenta.9 That may be why breast milk concentrations of pollutants appear higher after the first pregnancy than in subsequent ones.10 This could explain why birth order was found to be a significant predictor of pollutant levels in young people. Basically, firstborn kids may get first dibs on mom’s store of toxic waste, leaving less for their baby brothers and sisters.
Which foods contributed the most heavy metals? The number-one food source of arsenic was poultry among preschoolers and, for their parents, tuna.15 The top source for lead? Dairy. For mercury? Seafood.
You should strive to minimize mercury exposure, but the benefits of vaccination far exceed the risks. The same cannot be said for tuna.
By measuring how fast the subjects’ mercury levels dropped, the scientists were able to calculate the half-life of mercury in the body.25 The subjects appeared to be able to clear about half the mercury from their bodies within two months. This result suggests that within a year of stopping fish consumption, the body can detox nearly 99 percent of it.
The chemicals in the plants can get stored in her fat and build up in her body. So when it comes to many of the fat-soluble pesticides and pollutants, every time you eat a burger, you are, in effect, eating everything that burger ate. 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.
The highest levels of flame retardants in the U.S. food supply have been found in fish, though the primary source of intake for most Americans is poultry,
certain phytonutrients called flavonoids—which are found in fruits and vegetables—may have protective effects. Researchers tested forty-eight different plant compounds able to cross the blood-brain barrier to see if any were able to stop alpha synuclein proteins from clumping together. To their surprise, not only did a variety of flavonoids inhibit these proteins from accumulating but they could also break up existing deposits.
preincubating nerve cells with a blueberry extract allowed them to better withstand the debilitating effects of a common pesticide.
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.
another scathing reminder was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggesting the iatrogenic death toll may be “the equivalent of three jumbo-jet crashes every 2 days.”
Only people on medications are killed by medication errors or the drugs’ side effects,
did you know that getting a chest CT scan is estimated to inflict the same cancer risk as smoking seven hundred cigarettes?
just one round-trip, cross-country flight may subject you to about the same level of radiation as a chest x-ray.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who ate vegetable- or fruit-rich diets appeared to cut their cancer risk by about 36 percent.
Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine, where consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables apparently protected children’s immune systems, while egg and fish consumption was associated with a significantly increased risk of DNA damage.
When surveyed, people tend to wildly overestimate the ability of mammograms and colonoscopies to prevent cancer deaths, or the power of drugs like Fosamax to prevent hip fractures, or drugs like Lipitor to prevent fatal heart attacks.49 Patients believe cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are about twenty times more effective than they actually are in preventing heart attacks.
When people dramatically overestimate how much their prescription pills protect them, they may be less likely to make the dietary changes necessary to dramatically lower their risk.
So should everyone take a “baby”-strength aspirin a day? (Note that aspirin should never actually be given to infants or children.)61 No. The problem is that aspirin can cause side effects. The same blood-thinning benefit that can prevent a heart attack can also cause a hemorrhagic stroke, in which you bleed into your brain.
The more fruits and vegetables you eat, the higher your level of salicylic acid may rise.68 In fact, the levels of people eating plant-based diets actually overlap with those of some people taking low-dose aspirin.
in plants, the salicylic acid may come naturally prepackaged with gut-protective nutrients. For example, nitric oxide from dietary nitrates exerts stomach-protective effects by boosting blood flow and protective mucus production in the lining of the stomach, effects which demonstrably oppose the pro-ulcerative impact of aspirin.
