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February 15 - April 17, 2023
Kimchi, a spicy pickled vegetable side dish, is a staple in Korean cuisine and could help explain why that country may have the highest stomach cancer rates in the world.
But Beyond Chicken pales in comparison to the nutrition found in the soybeans, yellow peas, and amaranth grain from which it was made.
Lentils are little lens-shaped legumes. (Lenses were actually named after lentils; lens is lentil in Latin.)
the “lentil effect,” or the ability of lentil consumption to blunt the sugar spike of foods consumed hours later at a subsequent meal.
Chickpeas and other legumes were found to have a similar influence, and so this phenomenon was later renamed the “second-meal effect.”
Lentils are already one of the most nutrient-dense legumes. But when sprouted, their antioxidant power doubles (and even quintuples for chickpeas).
Draining and rinsing your canned beans can remove about half the added salt, but then you’d also be rinsing away some of the nutrition. I recommend purchasing the no-salt-added varieties and cooking with the bean liquid in whatever dish you’re whipping up.
if you’re making pasta and have the time, why not let some lentils boil in the water for twenty minutes before adding in the pasta? Lentils are great in spaghetti sauce.
dehydrated precooked pea soup mixes. (The lowest sodium brand I’ve been able to find is from Dr. John McDougall’s food line.)
(Whole Foods Market sells inexpensive one-pound frozen bags of a prechopped blend of kale, collard, and mustard greens.
(Food for Life, the same company that makes Ezekiel bread, makes a sprouted yellow corn tortilla usually sold in the frozen section.)
buy black beans by the case. (Black beans appear to have more phenolic phytonutrients than other common legumes,45 but the best bean is probably whichever one you’ll eat the most of!)
Flatulence comes from two places: swallowed air and fermentation in the bowel. Factors that might cause you to swallow extra air include chewing gum, wearing ill-fitting dentures, sucking on hard candies, drinking through a straw, eating too fast, talking while you eat, and smoking cigarettes. So, if the fear of lung cancer doesn’t get you to quit smoking, maybe fear of flatulence will. The main source of gas, though, is the normal bacterial fermentation in the colon of undigested sugars. Dairy products are a leading cause of excessive flatulence,52 which is due to poor digestion of the milk
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Even if at first they make you gassy, beans are so health promoting that you should experiment with ways to keep them in your diet at all costs. Lentils, split peas, and canned beans tend to produce less gas, and tofu isn’t usually an offender. Repeated soakings of dried beans in water containing a quarter teaspoon of baking soda per gallon57 and tossing out the cooking water may help if you boil your own beans. Of the spices that have been tested, cloves, cinnamon, and garlic seem to be the most gas reducing, followed by turmeric (but only if uncooked), pepper, and ginger.
Odor is a separate issue. The smell appears to come primarily from the digestion of sulfur-rich foods. So to cut down on the stench, experts have recommended cutting back on such foods as meat and eggs.
There are healthy sulfur-rich foods, such as garlic and cauliflower. If you’re about to embark on a long trip in a confined space after a big meal of aloo gobi, Pepto-Bismol and generic equivalents can act as a windbreaker by binding up the sulfur in your gut to eliminate odors. But this should be used only as a short-term solution due to the potential for bismuth toxicity with chronic use.
The bottom line: Intestinal gas is normal and healthy. No less an expert than Hippocrates himself was attributed as saying, “Passing gas is necessary to well-being.”
Greens are the healthiest vegetables, and berries are the healthiest fruits—in part due to their respective plant pigments.
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. The colors are the antioxidants. That knowledge alone should revolutionize your stroll down the produce aisle.
red onions have 76 percent more antioxidant capacity than white, with yellow onions in between.3) So, given the choice, why buy another white onion ever again?
What about a purple-skinned eggplant or a white-skinned eggplant? Trick question! Remember, the pigment is the antioxidant, so the color of the skin doesn’t matter if you peel it off. As we learned in chapter 11, that’s why you never want to peel apples. It’s for this same reason kumquats may be the healthiest citrus fruit, since you can eat them rind and all.
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.
But none of these fruits are a match for berries. Strawberries weigh in at about 310 units per cup, cranberries at 330, raspberries at 350, blueberries at 380 (though wild blueberries may have twice as much7), and blackberries at a whopping 650 units.
There are a few popular diets out there that urge people to stop eating fruits because their natural sugars (fructose) are thought to contribute to weight gain. The truth is, only fructose from added sugars appears to be associated with declining liver function,9 high blood pressure, and weight gain.
In nature, fructose comes prepackaged with the fiber, antioxidants, and phytonutrients that appear to nullify adverse fructose effects.
if you drink a glass of water with three tablespoons of sugar (similar to what would be in a can of soda), you’ll have a big spike in your blood sugar levels within the first hour. That causes your body to release so much insulin to mop up the excess sugar that you actually overshoot and become hypoglycemic by the second hour, meaning that your blood sugar drops even lower than it would if you were fasting. Your body detects this low blood sugar, thinks you might be in some sort of famine situation, and responds by dumping fat into your bloodstream as an energy source to keep you alive.
Eating berries can blunt the insulin spike from high-glycemic foods like white bread, for example.15 This may be because the fiber in fruit has a gelling effect in your stomach and small intestine that slows the release of sugars16 or because of certain phytonutrients in fruit that appear to block the absorption of sugar through the gut wall and into your bloodstream.17 So eating fructose the way nature intended carries benefits rather than risks.
Gojis also have a specific antioxidant pigment that makes corn yellow—zeaxanthin. When eaten, zeaxanthin is shuttled into your retinas (the back of your eyes) and appears to protect against macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss.
The egg industry boasts about the zeaxanthin content in yolks, but goji berries have about fifty times more than eggs.
a healthier way would be to use green-light sources of fat, such as nuts and seeds—in other words, goji trail mix!
in Asian supermarkets, you can buy them as “Lycium” berries, and they’re even cheaper than raisins.
Anthocyanin pigments are responsible for many of the intense blue, black, purple, and red colors of berries and other fruits and vegetables. The highest concentrations are found in aronia berries and elderberries, followed by black raspberries, blueberries (especially the smaller “wild” varieties), and blackberries. The cheapest source, though, is probably red cabbage.
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.
Health-wise, crab apples (gross!) probably top the charts,7 but taste-wise, my personal favorite is Honeycrisp—or any pick-your-own variety I can find locally.
Barhi dates, for example, are wet and sticky, but when frozen, they acquire the taste and chew of caramel candy. Seriously.
I have tried dates from most of the major online retailers and always go back to ordering from the Date People, a small farm in California. I am averse to commercial endorsements, but I’ve never tasted consistently better dates from any other source (although Black Sphinx dates from Phoenix come close!).
Olives and extra-virgin olive oil are yellow-light foods. Olive consumption should be minimized because they’re soaked in brine—a dozen large olives could take up nearly half your recommended sodium limit for an entire day.
the impairment of artery function that can occur within hours of eating red-light fare like fast food and cheesecake. The same detrimental effect happens after the consumption of olive oil8 and other oils9 (but not after eating green-light sources of fat like nuts).10 Even extra-virgin olive oil may impair your arteries’ ability to relax and dilate normally.11 So, like any yellow-light food, its use should be curtailed.
Cooking without oil is surprisingly easy. To keep foods from sticking, you can sauté in wine, sherry, broth, vinegar, or just plain water.
Seedless or not, 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.
Yellow watermelon has four times more citrulline,14 though, so just about one wedge a day (one-sixteenth of a modest melon) may have the same effect.
Eating a dozen dried apple rings a day may drop LDL cholesterol levels 16 percent within three months and 24 percent within six months.
The sulfur naturally contained in cruciferous vegetables does not appear to elevate colitis risk,19 so feel free to add kale chips to your healthy snacking menu.
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)20 and also to help with constipation-type irritable bowel syndrome (two kiwifruit a day seem to significantly improve bowel function).
Kiwifruit also appear to benefit immune function. Preschoolers randomized to eat gold kiwifruits every day appeared to cut their risk of contracting a cold or flu-like illness nearly in half compared to those randomly selected to eat bananas instead.22 A similar experiment was tried on elderly individuals, another high-risk group. Those in the banana control group who got an upper-respiratory-tract infection suffered for about five days with a sore throat and congestion, compared to the kiwifruit eaters, who felt better after just a day or two.
My only whole-citrus caveat: 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.36 This may actually be good if you want a better caffeine buzz from your morning coffee37
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. (You can also buy bags of fresh greens and other crucifers that are prechopped or shredded, which can presumably be cooked immediately.)
What about frozen broccoli and other crucifers? Commercially produced frozen broccoli lacks the ability to form sulforaphane because the vegetables are blanched (flash-cooked) before they’re frozen for the very purpose of deactivating enzymes.11 This process prolongs shelf life, but when you take the veggies out of your freezer, the enzyme is inert. At that point, it doesn’t matter how much you chop or how long you wait—no sulforaphane is going to be made. This may be why fresh kale has been shown to suppress cancer cell growth in vitro up to ten times better than frozen kale.
Mustard greens are also cruciferous vegetables. They grow from mustard seeds, which you can buy ground up in the spice aisle as mustard powder. If you sprinkled some mustard powder on frozen broccoli that’s been cooked, would it start churning out sulforaphane? Yes!
So, if you don’t have forty minutes to spare between chopping and cooking, or if you’re using frozen greens, just sprinkle the crucifers with some mustard powder before you eat them, and you’ll be all set. Daikon radishes, regular radishes, horseradish, and wasabi are all cruciferous vegetables and may have the same effect. All it appears to take is a pinch to revitalize sulforaphane production.
