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

by Michael Greger

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.

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

Ground flaxseeds may work two to three times better than these medicines, and they have only good side effects. In addition to their anticancer properties, flaxseeds have been demonstrated in clinical studies to help control cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood sugar levels; reduce inflammation, and successfully treat constipation.

In a comparison of the antioxidant content of 280 common beverages, hibiscus ranked number-one, beating out other heavyweights, including the oft-lauded green tea.128 Within an hour of consumption, the antioxidant power of your bloodstream shoots up, demonstrating that the antioxidant phytonutrients in the tea are absorbed into your system.

No side effects were reported for hibiscus tea, though it isn’t called sour tea for nothing. If you drink it, make sure to rinse your mouth with water afterward to keep the natural acids in the tea from softening the enamel on your teeth.

In addition to eating antioxidant-rich foods that can boost your body’s ability to produce NO, you can also eat certain vegetables, such as beets and greens, that are rich in natural nitrates, which your body can convert into nitric oxide.

The optimal dose appears to be one-half cup,147 but beet juice is perishable, processed, and hard to find. A typical fifteen-ounce can of beets would provide the same dose of nitrate, but the most concentrated sources of the compound are dark-green, leafy vegetables.

Arugula comes out on top with a whopping 480 mg of nitrate per hundred-gram serving, which is more than four times the content of beets.

You can make do with only one kidney. You can survive without a spleen or a gallbladder. You can even get by without a stomach. But you can’t live without a liver, the body’s largest internal organ.

Whatever you absorb through your digestive tract isn’t immediately circulated throughout your body. The blood from your intestines first goes straight to the liver, where nutrients are metabolized and toxins are neutralized.

Your best bet for avoiding NAFLD, the most common cause of liver disease, may be to avoid excess calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, and sugar.

While hepatitis A virus is foodborne, hepatitis B virus is bloodborne and is transmitted sexually. As with hepatitis A, an effective vaccine is available against hepatitis B that every child should get. Hepatitis D virus infection can only occur in someone who is already infected with hepatitis B and so can be prevented by preventing hepatitis B.

Unfortunately, there is currently no vaccine for the hepatitis C virus, the most dreaded of liver viruses. Exposure can lead to a chronic infection that, over decades, can lead to cirrhosis and liver failure. Hepatitis C is now the leading cause of liver transplants.

In terms of antioxidant bang for your buck, açai berries get honorable mention, beating out other superstars, such as walnuts, apples, and cranberries. The bronze for best bargain, though, goes to cloves, the silver to cinnamon, and the gold for most antioxidants per dollar—according to a USDA database of common foods—goes to purple cabbage.

The number-one killer of women is heart disease, not breast cancer, so women still need to bring down their cholesterol. You can likely achieve this without drugs by eating a healthy enough plant-based diet.

This prevalence has led researchers to assert that aspartame “is impossible to completely eradicate from daily encounters.”58 But, of course, that’s only true for people who eat processed foods. This is yet another reason to spend most of your time at the grocery store in the produce aisle. Discriminating shoppers make it a priority to read ingredients lists, but the healthiest foods in the supermarket don’t even have them.

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.

If women want to clean up their diets before conception, how long does it take for these pollutants to leave their systems? To find out, researchers asked people to eat one large serving a week of tuna or other high-mercury fish for fourteen weeks to boost their levels of the heavy metal and then stop. 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.

If you do decide to follow my recommendation to eat berries every day, I would advise not serving them with cream. Not only has dairy been shown to block some of the beneficial effects of berries,120 but, as we saw earlier, dairy products may contain compounds that cause the very damage the berries may be trying to undo.

The research team found that green, leafy vegetables like spinach and kale appear to have an edge over other vegetables and fruits when it comes to radiation protection.

While salicylic acid is ubiquitously present in fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices contain the highest concentrations.74 Chili powder, paprika, and turmeric are rich in the compound, but cumin has the most per serving. Indeed, just one teaspoon of ground cumin may be about the equivalent of a baby aspirin. This may help explain why India, with its spice-rich diets, has among the lowest worldwide rates of colorectal cancer75—the cancer that appears most sensitive to the effects of aspirin.

The benefits of salicylic acid are another reason you should strive to choose organic produce. Because the plant uses the compound as a defense hormone, its concentration may be increased when that plant is bitten by bugs. Pesticide-laden plants aren’t nibbled as much and, perhaps as a result, appear to produce less salicylic acid. For example, in one study, soup made from organic vegetables was found to contain nearly six times more salicylic acid than soup prepared from conventional, nonorganically grown ingredients.

When the Guidelines tell you to eat less added sugar, calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, sodium, and trans fat, that’s code for eat less junk food, less meat, less dairy, fewer eggs, and fewer processed foods.

Save the Children used to be a leader in the push for taxes on soda to offset some of the costs of childhood obesity. Then the organization did an abrupt 180-degree turn, withdrawing its support, saying that such campaigns no longer “fit with the way that Save the Children works.” Perhaps it is only a coincidence that it was seeking a grant from Coca-Cola and had already accepted a $5 million grant from Pepsi.

What do I mean by processed? The classic example is the milling of grains from whole wheat to white flour. Isn’t it ironic that these are called “refined” grains, a word meaning improved or made more elegant? The elegance was not felt by the millions who died in the nineteenth century from beriberi, a vitamin B–deficiency disease that resulted from polishing rice from brown to white.36 (White rice is now fortified with vitamins to compensate for the “refinement.”) A Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the cause of beriberi and its cure—rice bran, the brown part of rice that was removed. Beriberi can cause damage to the heart muscle, resulting in death from heart failure.

Sometimes, however, processing can make foods healthier. For example, tomato juice appears to be the one common juice that may actually be healthier than the whole fruit. The processing of tomato products boosts the availability of the antioxidant red pigment lycopene

So for the purposes of the Traffic Light model, I like to think of “unprocessed” as nothing bad added, nothing good taken away. In the above example, tomato juice could be thought of as relatively unprocessed because even much of the fiber is retained—unless salt is added, which would make it a processed food in my book and bump it right out of the green zone.

Similarly, I would consider chocolate—but not cocoa powder—processed because sugar is added.

Using my definition of nothing bad added, nothing good taken away, steel-cut oats, rolled oats, and even (plain) instant oatmea...

but even unsweetened almond milk is a processed food, a food from which nutrition has been stolen.

It’s really the day-to-day stuff that matters most. What you eat on special occasions is insignificant compared to what you eat day in and day out.

Today, Google whole-food, plant-based recipes, and a million hits pop up. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, good places to start include: • ForksOverKnives.com: This site of the wildly popular documentary and book of the same name offers hundreds of recipes. • StraightUpFood.com: Cooking instructor Cathy Fisher shares more than one hundred recipes on this site. • HappyHealthyLongLife.com: This site’s tagline reads: “A [Cleveland Clinic] medical librarian’s adventures in evidence-based living.” She used the e word—I think I’m in love!

If you hate to cook and just want the cheapest, easiest way to make healthy meals, I highly recommend dietitian Jeff Novick’s Fast Food DVD series. Using common staples like canned beans, frozen vegetables, quick-cook whole grains, and spice mixes, Jeff shows you how you can feed your family healthfully in no time for about four dollars a day per person. The DVDs also include grocery store walk-throughs, shopping tips, and information on how to decipher nutrition labels.

While eating a bowl of pea soup or dipping carrots into hummus may not seem like eating beans, it is. You should try to get three servings a day. A serving is defined as a quarter cup of hummus or bean dip; a half cup of cooked beans, split peas, lentils, tofu, or tempeh; or a full cup of fresh peas or sprouted lentils.

A serving of berries is a half cup of fresh or frozen, or a quarter cup of dried.

For other fruits, a serving is a medium-sized fruit, a cup of cut-up fruit, or a quarter cup of dried fruit.

Common cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, cabbage, collards, and kale. I recommend at least one serving a day (typically a half cup) and at least two additional servings of greens a day, cruciferous or otherwise. Serving sizes for other greens and vegetables are a cup for raw leafy vegetables, a half cup for other raw or cooked vegetables, and a quarter cup for dried mushrooms.

Everyone should try to incorporate one tablespoon of ground flaxseeds into his or her daily diet, in addition to a serving of nuts or other seeds. A quarter cup of nuts is considered a serving, or two tablespoons of nut or seed butters, including peanut butter.

also recommend one-quarter teaspoon a day of the spice turmeric, along with any other (salt-free) herbs and spices you may enjoy.

A serving of whole grains can be considered a half cup of hot cereal such as oatmeal, cooked grain such as rice (including the “pseudograins” amaranth, buckwheat, and quinoa), cooked pasta, or corn kernels; a cup of ready-to-eat (cold) cereal; one tortilla or slice of bread; half a bagel or english muffin; or three cups of popped popcorn.

The serving size in the beverage category is one glas...

Finally, I advise one daily “serving” of exercise, which can be split up over the day. I recommend ninety minutes of moderate-intensity activity, such as brisk (four miles per hour) walking or forty minutes of vigorous activity (such as jogging or active sports) each day.

One simple peanut butter and banana sandwich and you just checked off four boxes.

Whenever I was sitting down to a meal, I would ask myself, Could I add greens to this? Could I add beans to that? (I always have an open can of beans in the fridge.) Can I sprinkle on some flax or pumpkin seeds, or maybe some dried fruit? The checklist just got me into the habit of thinking, How can I make this meal even healthier?

Instead of a big bowl of spaghetti with some veggies and lentils on top, I think of a big bowl of vegetables with some pasta and lentils mixed in.

many children in India start their days with idli, a type of steamed lentil cake.

If you do eat tofu, choose varieties made with calcium (you’ll see it in the ingredients list), which can weigh in at a whopping 550 mg of calcium per (3 oz) slice.

Even better than tofu, though, would be a whole soy food like tempeh,

most of the major soy food manufacturers use non-GMO soy. It could also be because the benefits of eating any kind of soy far outweigh the risks. Regardless, why accept any risk at all when you can choose organic soy products, which by law exclude GMOs?

Miso is another fermented whole soy food. This thick paste is commonly mixed with hot water to make a delicious soup that’s a staple in Japanese cuisine. If you want to give it a try, I suggest white miso, which has a mellower flavor than red miso. Making miso soup can be as easy as mixing one tablespoon of miso with two cups of hot water and whatever vegetables you prefer.