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March 2 - May 5, 2022
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), the official prevention guidelines body, considers colonoscopies just one of three acceptable colon-cancer screening strategies.
Why do doctors push colonoscopies in the United States when most of the rest of the world appears to prefer noninvasive alternatives?97 It may be because most doctors in the rest of the world don’t get paid by procedure.98 As one U.S. gastroenterologist put it, “Colonoscopy … is the goose that has laid the golden egg.”
The GAO estimated that doctors make nearly a million more referrals every year than they would have if they were not personally profiting.
When you choose to eat one thing, you are generally choosing not to eat another. Sure, you could just go hungry, but eventually your body tends to balance things out by eating more later. So anything we choose to eat has an opportunity cost.
To this day, the nutrition and dietetic professions remain focused on what nutrients we may be lacking, but most of our chronic diseases may have more to do with what we’re getting too much of.
“Have It Your Way,” you can’t go up to the counter and ask for a burger, hold the saturated fat and cholesterol. Food is, indeed, a package deal.
Guidelines sometimes favor the interests of the food and drug industries over the public’s interest in accurate and impartial dietary advice.”
When I used to speak on college campuses, I would meet vegans who appeared to be living off french fries and beer. Vegan, technically, but not exactly health promoting. That’s why I prefer the term whole-food, plant-based nutrition.
sometimes people improve too much. After a few weeks on a plant-based diet, sometimes people feel so much better that they refuse to go back on their baseline diet49—even though it’s required by the study protocol. Since they didn’t complete the study as planned, their data have to be effectively thrown out and may never make it into the final paper. Ironically, healthy eating can be so effective that it undermines its own studies of effectiveness!
What a person chooses to do with information is highly personalized and often depends on such factors as his or her current life situation and how risk averse he or she is. Given the same information, two people can make two entirely different but legitimate decisions.
Colorful foods are often healthier because they contain antioxidant pigments, whether it’s the beta-carotene that makes carrots and sweet potatoes orange, the lycopene antioxidant pigment that makes tomatoes red, or the anthocyanin pigments that make blueberries blue.
Shop for the reddest of strawberries, the blackest of blackberries, the most scarlet tomato, the darkest green broccoli you can find. The colors are the antiaging, anticancer antioxidants.
In nature, fructose comes prepackaged with the fiber, antioxidants, and phytonutrients that appear to nullify adverse fructose effects.12
Consuming sugar in fruit form is not only harmless but actually helpful. Eating berries can blunt the insulin spike from high-glycemic foods like white bread, for example.
nearly all wild “aggregate” berries (meaning berries that look like clusters of little balls, like blackberries, raspberries, and mulberries) in North America are edible,
If you like drinking your fruit, blending is better than juicing to preserve nutrition. Juicing removes more than just fiber. Most of the polyphenol phytonutrients (see chapter 3) in fruits and vegetables appear to be bound to the fiber and are only liberated for absorption by the friendly flora in your gut. When you merely drink the juice, you lose out on the fiber and all the nutrition that was attached to it.
watermelon contains a compound called citrulline that can boost the activity of the enzyme responsible for dilating the blood vessels in the penis that result in erections.
Sulfur-containing preservatives, such as sulfur dioxide in dried fruit and sulfites in wine, can form hydrogen sulfide in your gut—this is the rotten egg gas implicated in the development of the inflammatory bowel disease ulcerative colitis.
Kiwi is one of the fruits I’ve prescribed to my patients with insomnia (two an hour before bedtime appears to significantly improve sleep onset, duration, and efficiency)
Citrus zest lives up to its name in terms of enlivening dishes, and it may do the same to your DNA-repair capabilities.
Within two hours of consuming citrus, your DNA becomes significantly more resistant to damage,29 which may help explain why citrus consumption is associated with lower risk of breast cancer.
Inform your physician if you eat grapefruit. This fruit can suppress the enzymes that help clear more than half of commonly prescribed drugs, and less drug clearance means higher drug levels in the body.
Beyond being a promising anticancer agent,1 sulforaphane may also help protect your brain2 and your eyesight,3 reduce nasal allergy inflammation,4 manage type 2 diabetes,5 and was recently found to successfully help treat autism.
This may explain why we see dramatic suppression of test-tube cancer-cell growth by raw broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts, but hardly any reaction when they’re cooked.
If you chop the broccoli (or brussels sprouts, kale, collards, cauliflower, or any other cruciferous vegetable) and then wait forty minutes, you can cook it as much as you want. At that point, the sulforaphane has already been made, so the enzyme is no longer needed to achieve maximum benefit. It’s already done its job.
Do it in the opposite order: First blend your veggies and then wait forty minutes before cooking them. This way, you can maximize sulforaphane production.
If you sprinkled some mustard powder on frozen broccoli that’s been cooked, would it start churning out sulforaphane? Yes!
purple cabbage may have nearly three times the antioxidant power per dollar that blueberries do.18 In terms of eating healthfully on a budget, purple cabbage can’t be beat. Or can it?
Dark-green, leafy vegetables are the healthiest foods on the planet. As whole foods go, they offer the most nutrition per calorie.
Eating greens nearly every day may be one of the most powerful steps you can take to prolong your life.5 Of all the food groups analyzed by a team of Harvard University researchers, greens turned out to be associated with the strongest protection against major chronic diseases,
In a petri dish, certain DNA damage in human cells exposed to a carcinogen could be “totally abolished” by chlorophyll.
All along, we’ve been thinking that the main benefit of sunlight was only the formation of vitamin D and that the main benefit of greens was the antioxidants they contain. But now we suspect the combination of the two may actually help the body create and maintain its own internal stock of antioxidants. Eating
three types: green, black, and red. Nutritionally, the differences among them appear to be insignificant compared to how much of each you may be willing to eat.18,19 The healthiest kale is the one you’ll eat the most of.
So pairing your greens with a green-light source of fat may not only make them taste better but will maximize nutrient absorption. This can mean enjoying a creamy tahini-based dressing on your salad, putting walnuts in your pesto, or sprinkling some toasted sesame seeds on your sautéed kale.
adding some avocado to your salsa may triple the amount of fat-soluble nutrients that make it into your bloodstream
Randomized, controlled trials involving both diabetic and nondiabetic individuals suggest that adding two teaspoons of vinegar to a meal may improve blood sugar control,
what about real baby spinach—so-called microgreens, the seedlings of vegetables and herbs? A nutritional analysis of twenty-five commercially available microgreens found they did have significantly higher nutrient densities. For example, red cabbage microgreens have a sixfold higher vitamin C concentration than mature red cabbage
Microgreens are the perfect plants for the impatient gardener—fully grown in just one to two weeks.
there’s one green I caution against eating: alfalfa sprouts.
Alfalfa sprout seeds have all sorts of microscopic nooks and crannies where bacteria from manure-contaminated irrigation water can hide.
One of the reasons studies may underestimate the protective effects of plant foods is that they tend to measure quantity of fruit and vegetable consumption rather than quality of fruit and vegetable consumption.
Roots may harbor different nutrients than shoots. For this reason, it may be even more important to get in a variety of vegetables, so you can benefit from all parts of the plant,
Based on a six-week study of college students, the complexion achieved by eating my Daily Dozen recommendation of nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day was found to be significantly healthier and more attractive looking than that achieved by eating three daily servings.
Ergothioneine concentrates in parts of your body where there is a lot of oxidative stress—your liver and the lenses of your eyes, for example, as well as such sensitive tissues as bone marrow and semen.
Depriving human cells of this amino acid leads to accelerated DNA damage and cell death. Unfortunately, the human body cannot make ergothioneine; you can only get it through food.
highest levels by far have been reported in mushrooms.
Mushrooms can be stuffed, enjoyed in soups like mushroom barley,
Regardless of your cooking method, be sure to keep on the skin. The peel of the sweet potato has nearly ten times the antioxidant power as the inner flesh (on a per-weight basis), giving them an antioxidant capacity approaching that of blueberries.
remember that a sweet potato’s nutritional content is tied directly to the intensity of its color. The more yellow or orange its flesh, the healthier it may be.
The findings do seem to sync with other studies, though, both among human populations and in other laboratories, that corroborate the cancer-fighting benefits of cruciferous vegetables,64 garlic, and onions.
